by Chris Conway

We decided at the last minute to head up to Gloucester, MA from Marblehead, MA.  We called ahead and secured a mooring in the inner harbor and began heading up there.  I was excited to go to a fishing town after having spent the first few weeks in the decadence of some of the best sailing ports on the east coast.  After navigating through a few islands, we attempted to sail in 5 knots of breeze. The boat was actually moving along quite well given the light winds, but eventually the dying breeze and flies forced us to fire up the iron genny (slang term for engine).  We motored into Gloucester harbor along with a parade of fishing boats.  We navigated to the inner harbor and quickly found our mooring as there were only about 15 moorings (as compared to the thousands that had filled Marblehead’s harbor).  We were greeted by the harbormaster who proceeded to spend about 15 minutes giving us the lowdown on Gloucester and answering the kids’ questions about what a harbormaster does.

The scenery was also quite different from what we were used to.  Instead of million dollar homes lining the harbor, we were surrounded by working docks and large fish packing buildings.  We first headed to Rocky Neck where there was an artist colony.  On the way, we passed the dock of “Hard Merchandise”, which was one of the boats featured in the show “Wicked Tuna” that I had been watching this spring.  We then ventured over to the beach in front of the monument to lost fisherman.  We all walked up to see the monument and the plaques that contain the names of the fisherman lost at sea.  They were listed by year beginning in the 1700s.  I searched through some of the names to see if there were any Conways and found a few from the 1800s, which of course left me wondering if they were somehow related to us.  We were also struck by the multitude of people lost in some years with the same name, most likely all of the males in a family when the family ship was lost at sea.

On our way to dinner we stopped in to a working woodshop that was building dories, which are small wooden boats that were used in the fishing fleets.  We enjoyed a nice dinner down by the docks overlooking the inner harbor and Patronus.  I forced the kids to order the fish since I couldn’t allow them to get chicken fingers in one of the oldest fishing ports in the US.  After a quick stop into Walgreens for some essentials, we headed back to the boat for the night.  I checked the weather for the trip up to Portsmouth and Erica worked on updating the website.