Boat Tours and Harbour Cruises

A sail is the Cape's most characteristic boat trip and the one most worth paying for beyond the wildlife runs.

Provincetown Harbor is the obvious setting. A gaff-rigged schooner working out from MacMillan Pier under canvas gives you the whole curve of the town, the monument above the roofs, Long Point at the end of the spit and the two square lighthouses at the harbour mouth. Trips are typically an hour and a half to two hours, they run several times a day in season, and the evening sailing is the one people book out. Passengers are often invited to help haul on a line, which children enjoy more than they expect to.

On the bay side, the key geographic fact is that Cape Cod Bay faces west. The Atlantic beaches cannot give you a sunset over water because the ocean is in the wrong place, and Herring Cove at the tip is the only ocean beach here that faces the right way. Everywhere else, sunset means the bay, which is why Rock Harbor, Sesuit and Sandy Neck fill up in the evening and why the bay-side sunset sails sell.

On the south side, Vineyard Sound off Falmouth and Woods Hole is the Cape's best sailing water: a reliable southwesterly filling in through the afternoon, Martha's Vineyard three or four miles across, and the ferry traffic to dodge. Charters here are usually smaller boats taking six passengers, and the sailing itself is the point rather than the scenery.

The practical advice is the same on all three coasts. Take a layer you will feel silly carrying. Cape Cod Bay drops noticeably the moment the sun goes, even in August, and the wind on the water is always stronger than the wind in the car park.

Of everything on this page, the cheapest item gives the best return.

Long Point is the hook at the very end of the hook: a spit of sand curling round the bottom of Provincetown Harbor, with a square lighthouse on the tip and nothing else on it. You can walk there, but walking means crossing roughly a mile of granite breakwater from the west end of Commercial Street, stepping block to block, then a long trudge through soft sand. Most people who try it once take the boat the next time.

The shuttle is a small open launch that crosses the harbour in a few minutes and lands you at the point. It runs on a seasonal schedule and the arrangements change, so check on the day. What it buys you is a piece of Cape Cod that feels completely detached: an empty beach, dune grass, the light, and Provincetown sitting across the water looking like a nineteenth-century postcard of itself. The Pilgrim Monument from this angle is the best view of the town there is.

A sensible plan: take the shuttle out in the late afternoon, walk to Wood End Light, and come back across the breakwater on the falling light if the tide allows. Or ride out, sit on the sand for an hour, and ride back. Either way it is a couple of hours and the least expensive way to feel a long way from anything on a peninsula that is very busy in August.

Take water. There is nothing out there. Check when the last boat runs, because being stranded at Long Point means the breakwater in the dark, and that is a genuinely bad idea.

The canal is the reason Cape Cod is technically an island, and it repays a look from a boat rather than from the path.

It runs about seven and a half miles from Buzzards Bay to Cape Cod Bay, roughly 480 feet wide and 32 feet deep at mean low water, and it is frequently described as the widest sea-level canal in the world. It opened in 1914 as a private venture, was bought by the federal government in 1928, and is run today by the Army Corps of Engineers, which charges nothing to transit it and directs the traffic through it. Big ships move under instruction and the channel is effectively one-way for them.

Three bridges cross it, and all three date from 1935. The Bourne and Sagamore highway bridges are the ones every visitor queues on. The third is the railroad bridge at the Buzzards Bay end, a vertical-lift span whose deck is normally held high in the air and dropped only when a train is coming. It is a far better sight from underneath than from the road.

The current is the thing that matters if you are on the water. It reverses with the tide and runs hard, up to several knots, and small craft are expected to transit with it rather than against it. That is why canal sightseeing trips, where they run, tend to leave from the mainland side around Onset and work the schedule around the flow rather than around the afternoon.

If no boat is running, the consolation is genuinely good: the service roads on both banks are flat, paved, car-free and open to walkers and cyclists for the full length, and watching a bulk carrier pass twenty yards away at eye level is an odd and memorable thing.