Monday 6/14: Tucks at 11:00

[leong]

Halfway Rock (or shorter distance). Repeated from Saturday's canceled trip:

If, as expected, it’s calm we will head from Manchester Harbor to Halfway Rock Island. Halfway Rock, like its name, is mid-way from Boston to Gloucester, approximately five miles east of Beverly, Massachusetts. This island is a large rock pinnacle, which breaks the surface and stands over 50 feet tall, about five miles east of Beverly. Vertical walls and rock shelves drop to depths of 110 feet. There are a lot of cracks, fissures and small overhangs that make for some nice crashing waves against the rock. As we round Halfway Rock we will pass the Dry Breakers to see if any seals are still hanging around (probably not, it’s late in the year for them) and then head back to Tucks. Total trip distance is about 14 statute miles. A little history that mentions Halfway Rock follows:

Massachusetts yachting begins in 1832 when Benjamin C. Clark, a Boston Mediterranean merchant who passed his summers at Nahant, purchased the pilot schooner Mermaid. John P. Cushing, just returned from China, then had built for him the sixty-foot pilot schooner Sylph and made his young kinsman Robert Bennet Forbes her sailing master. In 1836 came a famous ocean race, from Long Island to Halfway Rock off Marblehead and back, between the New York sloop Osceola and Mr. Clark's new thirty-six-foot schooner Raven, which won.