Day 5 - The Annisquam

For our penultimate day of sailing we decided to take Dave and Sue up one of our favorite local spots, the Annisquam River. The Annisquam meanders from the southern side of Cape Ann in Cape Cod Bay up to the northern side where it connects with Ipswich Bay. It’s a narrow river that hasn’t been dredged for many years so one has to follow the channel marking buoys carefully and one has to wait for a couple of hours after low tide to ensure there is enough water under the boat to make it through. There are three bridges to navigate – the Blynman canal bridge (which has 8ft vertical clearance when closed) the railroad bridge (greater clearance but no enough for our sailboat) and the route 128 road bridge (60+ feet of clearance). We radioed to get the first two bridges to open and after passing the Blynman canal bridge we saw Cape Anne Marina, the home of three of the Wicked Tuna boats.

 Channel 13 - Would you raise the Railroad Bridge please? Roger!

As we meandered up the river we got a couple of depth scares when the depth sounder read 5feet (our boat draws 4.5 feet). After clearing the river we turned east and sailed around Cape Anne and back to Salem where we docked at Pickering wharf marina. We had winds up to 25kts and were bouncing around a bit, but all crew cane through beautifully with nobody looking worse for wear. I guess they got there sea legs.

The character of the river changes as you head north. Here are shots in sequence along the route.

 And as you can see above, even though there is water, its quite shallow. But guess which person on the boat said that those birds have 8 foot long legs? Clue: The other male on board whose name begins with D

 A nice wooden boat - but what a lot of maintenance.

 Beech area in Ipswich Bay

Dave still hasn’t caught any fish. One day left.