170: FULL REVIEW & RATING OF MARTHA'S VINEYARD from a Cruiser's perspective? Was it paradise?

Hey everybody! Good morning everyone. We're glad you're with us today. Thanks for joining in. We're really excited to share our experience in Martha's Vineyard with you all and we just want to say thank you for watching. We want to thank our patrons especially for your generosity and your encouragement. We really appreciate you and we're just thankful to be able to continue cruising on the east coast. And we hope that the path that we've kind of carved out here and that we've been discussing, we hope that this will inspire you as a cruiser if you've never been there. Let's get moving! Similar to the last few videos, we are going to review and rate Martha's Vineyard based on these three categories. Cruiser friendliness, things to do, hang time, and an overall rating. We're going to structure this video in terms of the three anchorages that we actually visited. Why didn't we go to all five? We were under a bit of a time constraint so we only had nine days. The five anchorages are Menemsha, Lake Tashmu, Vineyard Haven, Oak Bluffs, and Edgar Town. We are going to talk about Menemsha, Lake Tashmu, and Edgar Town. Love that Edgar Gap. We could have stayed all summer. Nine days was definitely not enough. We had to get to Nantucket before the end of our time so we really pushed it to be in Martha's Vineyard nine days. Oh my goodness, yeah, until the snow started falling. Maybe not that long though. We actually came upon Menemsha accidentally. We were headed from Cuttyhunk to Lake Tashmu and the winds were right on our head and it was really rough going and we said this is stupid. Tomorrow the winds are going to change. Why don't we just fall off to Menemsha and stay there for the night and then head up to Lake Tashmu the next day. Yeah, it was 10 nautical miles and logically it was the first place to go. Oh, it's going to be a sporty day at sea today. Definitely have a little bit of wind and a lot of swell going on. This is Forbes Island over here and if you look closely you can see a ton of bison up on the hill and we are now coming into the cut here. This is called Quick. It's supposed to be fine to go through this and we are going with the current through the cut. We are pulling into Menemsha. Menemsha ended up being one of our favorite places to stop. It was really amazing. We knew we weren't going to be there very long so we kind of hit the ground running when we arrived. We had done some research and had read up about the Aquinnah Bluffs as well as the Gay Head Lighthouse. We got into our dinghy and took our bikes over and the bike ferry was super cool. We got there barely in time, didn't we? Well, we got there with enough time for him to take us across and barely enough time to cycle all the way up to the Bluffs and see the lighthouse and come back down. We caught the last boat back in otherwise we would have had to like swim. Yeah, I don't know what we would have done. But you know from now on you don't have to pay for the bike ferry although it was a great experience. What was it? Six dollars a piece. Really all you need to do is just go over with your dinghy to the other side and you can top for free. We were going to visit Martha's Vineyard no matter what but we had a huge bonus in being able to go there to see my friend Jeannie who I went to college with. Jeannie, yay! One of my new favorite people. She actually drove down from Oak Bluffs at the end of the day to come see us and she had been collecting Amazon packages for us so she brought all those with her which was amazing and they came out to the boat. Jeannie's really shy. She doesn't. She's... She was forced into communications major just because she's like a big introvert. I think the coolest thing that we experienced that night was... They're cheering! Brown, blow the horn! That's awesome. What a great culture. The whole town comes out to the beach and they sit on the beach. They watch the sun go down. As soon as it goes below the horizon everyone is clapping. Compared to anywhere that we were at on any of these islands, Menamsha Pond was the most down-to-earth place that we went to. The town is very cute and while it had been wiped out many years ago by a hurricane, it looks quite old and it is a fishing-based village with Larson's Fish Market and many places where you can purchase fish. So it was a very fun town with a great vibe. You've got a big advantage of being a boater in your access to this area. Let's go ahead and move on to Lake Tashmu. Unfortunately, after only one night we had to leave Menamsha and move north and so we moved up to Lake Tashmu which ended up being an absolutely beautiful anchorage. And I was crying the whole way. You were crying because we didn't want to leave Menamsha. Within a couple of hours of getting there we heard from the locals there might be a tornado here tonight which could make it a very exciting evening. There are a lot of dinghies tied up here. It's pretty insane. So we thought oh gosh we're already gonna have to hunker down. It was the perfect place to be there if there was going to be a big storm and we were in the perfect location in the lake. So not a problem and we just grabbed our bikes and took a ride up to Vineyard Haven which was really different than I ever expected it to be. It was just seeing the real part of Martha's Vineyard where people live year-round along you know not in a high rent district and I think it was the best way given our limited amount of time to visit Vineyard Haven. And we lucked out because it was the weekend and Jeannie was off and so she actually picked us up one day and took us on a tour of a lot of places but predominantly Oak Bluffs which is one of the famous towns and one of the anchorages we didn't visit. After a big work project day yesterday we are off the boat today to play and it always seems like when we get off the boat we have so many things to carry. Part of that is in huge thanks to Jeannie who's gonna let us do some laundry at her house. There's our laundry bag and we're gonna do some cycling and check out a bit of Martha's Vineyard today. It is a gorgeous day. We are going on something that you can't find on TripAdvisor. But it could be added to She is so talented and we're going on Jeannie's wild adventure tour of Martha's parts of Martha's Vineyard today. We're going to go around and see the gingerbread houses which started as a camp meeting association for the Methodist camp meeting and they would come and have revival meetings and then they built up to little tiny cottages and you own the house and you have a 99 year lease on the land. We had a great day with our boy. We saw so many things and one of the things we learned about was the rich heritage and history of the African-American population in the vineyard and how freed slaves were welcomed to the vineyard if they could afford to vacation there. Something I was totally not expecting at all. It really part of the foundations of the culture of Martha's Vineyard which are very unlike other places that we visited and it was really an eye-opener in such a great way. Very multicultural in comparison to other places we had been for sure. I think one of my favorite places that we saw was the Methodist's campground. The Methodists built a campground in 1830s somewhere in there and the campground just continued to grow in terms of its size and there was actually a competition among those who built. So then they started building walls and bases slowly and then it became a competition to see who could build the most ornate and most colorful gingerbread houses which it's called Victorian Carpenter Gothic. That's the name of the architectural style of these homes. It fits it perfectly. They were so cute and it was a really interesting place to walk around and I believe that their huge meeting tent is the largest meeting space on the vineyard so really interesting history to that particular area. Well worth a visit and a walk around. We also as part of that walking tour visited the Flying Horses which is the oldest platform carousel in the United States originally from Coney Island. What were the rings? Everybody going by would pull one out of this holder and then one of them was different. They could stay on their horse and ride again for free. And I understand from what I read that the horse hair is actually real so it was an attempt to make it feel like the carousel was a real horse that they were riding which I thought was a cool thing that they did. We also walked along the port. Jeannie took us down to Oak Bluffs Harbor where if we wanted to bring our boat in there we could which we never ended up doing but she wanted to introduce us to some of her friends. The harbormaster who was amazing to Skipper. Love meeting Skipper. They have flown in. So we met Skipper who is just an amazing man. If you ever want to be out on a boat and do some fishing he would be the right one to go with and thank you Jeannie for taking us to lunch at Nancy's and encouraging us to try the dirty banana the famous drink that our friend makes down at the base of Nancy's. It was killer. Oh and one of my favorite things was the tennis tournament at the club. It was four pros playing men's doubles to raise money for a cause. Another real treat that we had is Jeannie and Adrian provided this catered lunch on our boat. The boat is super clean and ready for guests. Brown has just gone to pick up our guests at the shore. My name is Lacey. I originally started this business. The name of it is Niamins. The word Niam means to eat in Patois. I'm from Jamaica originally. Niamins itself is like a gathering with all your friends and your family. You guys come together and bond over food. It's never anything luxurious and so we just all come together and eat together and we were Niamins together. Here we have hibiscus sliders and jerk chicken sliders. Hibiscus is a flower. It's more really called sorrel in Jamaica. It tastes kind of like pulled pork like some sort of beef. When we make it in Jamaica we add like cinnamon and cloves and all of that. So I've cooked this down in a barbecue sauce that I make myself using rum. These are filo cups. The filo cups have a herb goat cheese or honey goat cheese with roasted beets on top a little bit of hot honey and dill. And then Adrian also tried to help us with fixing our air conditioning which was so sweet of him. Thank you Adrian. And then we were told by the harbormaster in Tashmu we needed to leave. The next day. No he said immediately and I think we negotiated another day. Jeannie tried to pull all the strings that she had knowing all the harbormasters and he would not budge. It's a beautiful morning in Tashmu but we are on our way because we have been kicked out. You can only stay in the lake for three days. Just hit a sandbar and Brown is backing us off. Hopefully we can get off. We're off. Okay you good? It was a little bit sooner than we had wanted to leave but we also needed to be moving east because we only had a few days left before we headed off to Nantucket. And we ended up dropping anchor in Edgar Town because we looked at the winds and the winds were favorable to the anchorage in Edgar Town. Yes and it's a big area to anchor in also. There are hundreds of yachts and boats in the anchorage. One of the things I've always wanted to do in visiting Martha's Vineyard was to visit the island of Chappaquiddick. Chappie. Chappie. What a history it has. A lot of you are probably thinking about that right now. Yeah where were you when? So we grabbed our bikes and put our dinghy on the shore hoping that our dinghy wouldn't get towed off because it's all private property. And it was really easy. It was like a very short dinghy ride maybe 15 seconds and it was really rural again. I mean you had to take a ferry from Edgar Town. Yeah the little Chappie ferry that goes back and forth and back and forth to get there. And we hardly had any cars at all pass us by and the roads were in great shape until we got to the dirt roads. But even they were in great shape. There were a lot of dirt roads. We were thankful for them. Tell them what we saw there. Well we actually were trying to find the bridge and we got lost and a local stopped and she asked us if she could help us. And she ended up giving us a little history lesson about the whole situation with Teddy Kennedy. You know the book oh it must be four or five years ago now that connected all the dots made so much sense. It was another woman Pio. Marianne Pio or something. Anyway that he was actually going out to the beach with. And poor Mary Jo Kopechny who had had way more to drink than she'd ever probably had in her life couldn't go back to the hotel. So she just went out and climbed in the back seat of a car to sleep. They didn't even know she was there. Got out of the car and swam up and all of his helpers as soon as he got back here they all you know got on it and went into damage control. It makes perfect sense. Did he left the scene of the crime? Of course he left the scene of the crime. But he didn't know it was a crime you see. Right. So he just left and came back probably in tone. Car was in the water and they ought to go do something about it and I don't think they worried where maybe it was morning. I don't know. That's when they found the body. So you were here during the time? Actually I was not. I was in high school. My parents were here. I knew that Kennedy was driving the car before they did. That's how careful they were. Wow. So anyway the only other thing I will tell you is that the bridge that you will see is not the original bridge. Absolutely not. People whittled away so much it had to be replaced. That accident put us on the map and it's been a... When you wanted to be off the map. That's been what? 50 years. More than that yeah yeah. The other thing that we never noticed those of us who lived here is that when you come up to it you know you go straight over the bridge. Actually the bridge goes off to the left which we never realized. Interesting. And then just a couple hundred feet away was the house that they had rented which we never would have known if she didn't point that out to us. So that was kind of cool we got to see the house where everyone was staying. And then we went and found the bridge which is in Cape Hogue Wildlife Refuge and we got to see the actual bridge. Anyway that wildlife refuge was beautiful. It was stunning and most people get there in a four-wheel drive vehicle. It is stunning. I could do that every single day of the summer. Spend time on that beach. One of the benefits too of buying the entrance ticket into the beach was it also gave us free entrance to the Maitue Japanese gardens. So we spent an hour or so walking through a 14 acre garden that was really beautifully manicured and just an interesting really interesting place to visit in the middle of Chappaquiddick. We ended up cycling all the way around Chappaquiddick. Half of the roads are paved and then the other half are all dirt. We rode a lot on the bikes. We decided to go to Edgar Town and explore on foot. So this will be a new one for us. Yay. And then we're gonna walk a mile to the grocery store and walk a mile back. Goodbye Blownaway for a few hours till the rain starts. We'll be back off to discover more of Edgar Town. We cycled it and we walked by foot and we got to see a lot of the history of Edgar Town. The famous whaling industry and the captains houses that are in existence still. Many of them are museums or private homes and just the flowers and the gardens and it really was beautiful. One of the really interesting buildings that we were able to see was the old whaling church built in 1843. That's also in the middle of Edgar Town village. There were a ton of cute shops, all very high-end shops, but the village I think was the most picturesque comparative to the other towns that we had been in. I loved visiting the lighthouse. That was really pretty. It was really cute and it was described to us as the most Nantucket-ish of all the villages because I think the real estate is the highest there and had most of the wealth because of the whaling industry. It was stunning. We are very excited. We cycled all day and now we get to take Jeannie's killer cycle class. Cycle mania. Cycle mania. This is gonna really hurt but we're gonna do it. She used to teach spin. You did. And was I a beast. Yes, she had to push you though. She really pushed you hard. Oh, I was kind of one up in the middle of it. I was a little edgy. She was a little toned down compared to me. The beast was being released. Thank you Jeannie for the class and for the long hot showers that we were able to take at the YMCA. That was a huge gift. It's a beautiful facility. You gotta check it out. Our final day on Martha's Vineyard we went to say goodbye to Jeannie and Adrian. Hello. Hello. What are we doing? We're gonna go to Jeannie's place and we're gonna we just picked the best time with the darkest cloud. We're gonna go bike in and we're gonna go see her have some pizza. We're gonna go over the Jaws Bridge. Jilene's gonna jump in. And we cycled all the way to Oak Bluff from Edgar Town and on the way we actually ran into Secret Service. Hey. See Secret Service? Who is it? Mama. No way. Mama Rama. Really? Can you see him? Oh there we go. That was kind of a neat coincidence to be able to see the president out on the golf course. Yeah. Anyway on the way to meet up with Jeannie we also went past the famous Jaws Bridge where they jump off the bridge into the water. It was too cold and overcast for us to do that. And windy. But we did stop and watch some other people jump off the bridge. Bye guys. Our definitely most interesting and scary event of the night occurred that last night that we were there. The fog came in and a big storm was brewing. We checked everything. Our chain. We checked our anchor. We were set. We were dug in. We were ready for this storm except for our neighbor. I looked up and saw this boat. Have you ever heard of a Hinkley before? Hinkleys are power boats. They're called picnic boats and basically it's a really nice boat. A million dollar. Super expensive. Made out of wood but it's also high tech. I think it has like a jet propulsion in it. And uh one showed up in front of our boat. It just showed up and we didn't see him anchoring otherwise we would have said something. And I looked at this boat and I looked at Eileen and I said that boat's gonna be a problem. Yeah and was it a major problem? So tonight we were woken up to a hanging in the front of our boat and what ended up happening was this boat out here. Freedom train from Newport was right underneath in between our hulls and banging up against the top of our crossbank. They parked their boat with an anchor that's not adequate for this storm and just left. They're sleeping inside somewhere in a nice comfortable place and their boat just drug and ran into our boat. We've got the coast guard calling. I don't know what they're gonna do. Maybe they're gonna move this boat. So Eileen's pulling out some fenders right now. She's putting them all out. There she is. The ghost ship. We're waiting for the harbormaster who has not come yet. Morning sir. Thank you for your help. Yes it dragged. It was farther. Maybe I could probably pull the anchor up. Maybe I'll just tow it and put it off. That would be great if you could do that. I could come help you. Yeah. Thank you so much sir. Thank you so much. That was not a whole lot of fun. It was a signal. It's time to leave. So we went in filled up with water. Free water in Martha's Vineyard. That's unheard of. I would think that they would charge for everything there but no. Boy that floating dock is a little dicey. So this is a water barge. Basically Martha's Vineyard allows us to fill up our tanks with water for free which is a beautiful thing. You just come alongside this dock pick up water fill up your tanks and you're on your way. Unbelievable. Oh my gosh you should have seen them in the water. That's crazy cool. By the way the inner harbor is huge. And in the inner harbor you can only grab a warring ball. If there is a storm they will open it for anchoring until the storm passes. Okay now let's get to the to the best part. What's the best part? We just kind of laid down all the facts and stuff but let's get to the scorecard. First category is cruiser friendliness. There is nothing like Martha's Vineyard. It was incredible truly. We could have stayed for months. We loved it. It has everything you need and could possibly want for your boat. Great provisioning, chandleries. I have to say a 10 out of 10 is not high enough. We had to give it a 12 out of 10. A 12 out of 10 that's crazy. It's really that good. Part of that is the number of places five different areas where you can anchor. Yeah. And five different distinct parts of the island. In terms of things to do we also rated this very high. 11 out of 10. I know y'all are some of y'all are unsubscribing now and all that. Breaking all the rules. And natural things to do as well as restaurants and YMCA and the whole bit. Fishing. Hang time we gave this 11 out of 10. This is a place you want to stay. And our overall rating for Martha's Vineyard is 11 out of 10. Again it's just off the charts. The rating can't be normal because this is not a normal place to visit. Just when you think it can't get better with Newport, well it just did. And we've given you all the reasons why. Y'all we hope that you like this video and we hope that you found it useful. Please hit that subscribe button. Hit the like button and share it to other people who will benefit from watching this also. And we also want to give a huge shout out to Jeannie for her unbelievable hospitality while we were on the island. She is the best. All right so thanks everyone for watching. We'll see you next week. And next week will be Nantucket. Oh my goodness Nantucket. It'll be Tucket time. So stay tuned everybody.