
Red nun “4A” in the Woods Hole Passage. The tides, winds and many ledges there make the area challenging even for experienced sailors. Photo by Mark Barrett
Spring 2024
By Mark Barrett
The picture above is of red nun “4A” in Woods Hole Passage, which connects Buzzards Bay with Vineyard Sound and runs between Nonamesset Island of the Elizabeth Island Chain and the town of Falmouth at the southernmost tip of Cape Cod. RN “4A” is right in the heart of “The Hole,” which is notorious for powerful tidal currents, numerous rock ledges, a confusing buoy system, and heavy boat traffic, including massive car ferries that run back and forth to the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Many vessels have come to grief here. Most people who spend any time on boats in this corner of the New England coast have a story to tell about this unique section of waterway, and here’s one:
Some years ago, I owned a Catalina 350 sailboat that I regularly chartered out. It was moored in Red Brook Harbor at the top of Buzzards Bay near the western end of the Cape Cod Canal. One of the most desirable destinations for charter customers was Martha’s Vineyard, only 15 miles away, but requiring a trip through Woods Hole. That made me nervous, so I always briefed my customers on the best way to proceed.
First and foremost, anyone transiting The Hole on a sailboat needs to respect the considerable current there. For your first time through, it’s best to shoot for slack tide or close to it. That way you can focus on steering the correct course through buoys without worrying about a vicious current sweeping you out of the channel and onto one of the dangerous rock ledges. Until you are really familiar with this passage, you should drop your sails and motor through, or at least roll up your headsail for better visibility and motorsail through.
The other major concern in The Hole is the buoy system, which has several junctions, and can be tricky to follow the first few times you go through. When transiting from Buzzards Bay to Vineyard Sound it seems like you are going into a harbor, where the rule of “red-right-returning” (keeping the red buoys on your starboard side) would apply. However, you are not going into a harbor, you are going out to sea, so the red buoys must be left to port, green to starboard when heading east toward Martha’s Vineyard. It is this situation that causes most accidents in The Hole, so I made sure to emphasize it with every charter customer. One such customer was Skip Bower.
Skip was a retired Wall Street executive from New Jersey who did not have a lot of sailing experience, but did have a great sense of adventure. He was very excited the day he left the dock with his family for their first sailing trip to Martha’s Vineyard. After he left, I waited anxiously for his phone call to let me know they had arrived safely. The call came right on time, about four hours later.
“We made it!” Skip exclaimed. “We’re safe and sound on a mooring in Oak Bluffs.”
“Oh, that’s great!” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. Chartering out your new Catalina 350 is not for the faint of heart, though it sure helped pay off the loan on the boat.
“We had some excitement going through Woods Hole,” Skip said. “We got there at the right time, just a few minutes before slack tide, so that was perfect. We rolled up the sails and started the motor. There were a lot of boats around, coming and going, and we were right behind this beautiful sailboat named Orion. It was either a yawl or a ketch, I don’t know the difference, but it had two masts and the shorter one was in the back. They were from New York – we could read that on the stern. Anyway, we were behind them going in there, coming up to the buoys, and I heard your voice, like you were sitting on my left shoulder and whispering right into my ear, ‘Green buoys on the right, green buoys on the right.’ But the boat from New York started to go the other way, and there was a voice in my other ear saying, ‘They’re on that big, beautiful yacht, they must know what they’re doing. Follow them.’ And then I heard your voice in my other ear going, “Green buoys on the right, green buoys on the right,” and meanwhile I’m watching them in front of us, and then they turned suddenly and went on the other side of the green buoy, and then BOOM! Their stern goes up in the air and I can see everybody in the cockpit go flying! You could hear it. I mean, you could practically feel it! BAM! Right up on the rocks!”
“Oh, that’s terrible!” I said.
“You’re not kidding! It looked awful. We just kept going because I was too worried to stop. We put the sails up again once we were out in Vineyard Sound. It was great sailing the rest of the way, and now we’re sitting here on the mooring in Oak Bluffs, having cocktails, and it’s just fantastic over here, and everybody is relaxed and happy. But every time I think about that boat I just cringe. It was awful!”
“Well, I’m glad you made it over there safely.”
“And I learned a couple things,” Skip said. “I learned how to go through Woods Hole, for one thing. And I learned that, no matter what kind of boat is in front of you, I don’t care what it is, how big, how expensive, how beautiful – don’t ever assume the guy driving it knows what the hell he’s doing!”
Frequent contributor Mark Barrett started at the bottom of the boating industry – literally – scraping, washing and painting the bottoms on all sorts of vessels. He is a yacht broker at Cape Yachts in Dartmouth, Mass., and he lives in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. Mark and his cruising partner Diana sail their 1988 Freedom 30 Scout out of Red Brook Harbor, in Buzzards Bay.