A Boat Trip Cancelled

On July 9th my dad and I woke up at 5am in plans to drive his 29 foot Hunt Harrier boat to Nantucket. For those of you who don't know Nantucket is a island off of Massachusetts. I probably should have mentioned this is previous blogs but I guess I assumed everyone already knew where it was. Anyway, at 5am we eat breakfast together and headed over to the Norwalk Yaht club in Norwalk, Connecticut. When we got to the boat at around 5:45 the clouds were blue and it looked like there were some dark ones in the distance. The harbour was as calm as can be so I expected to get out to Nantucket perfectly. Our plan was to drive up to Newport which would take around 7 hours and where we would have the boat serviced and then drive another three hours to Nantucket. My dad looked at the forecast in Newport and Nantucket and there was a small boat advisory because the ocean was full of big waves. We decided to take our chances anyway and as we set off everything looked to be going perfectly fine. We got about a mile out into the Long Island Sound and things started to look a little different. There were waves about three feet big and a north east wind going about 20 MPH. The wind was right in our face and the waves were absolutely pounding us. Our plan was to go about 25 knots the whole way and we were doing around 12 in this weather. We went for about an hour which brought us to 5 miles and the waves were not getting better, infact they were getting a little worse. They started to crash over our boat and things started to get a little scary. My dad looked at me and said "Coop I dont know if it's worth it." I couldn't agree more and we ended up turning around at about 6 miles into the trip. Im confident the boat could have taken the beating and we could have made it, I just don't think it was worth 12 hours of getting completely pounded. Between the plane ride and now the boat ride my experiences traveling to Nantucket this year have been quite interesting.