Newport to Newport

A 7-night crewed motor yacht charter that starts and ends in Newport, Rhode Island, the home of American yachting: an hour and a half from Boston Logan, 40 minutes from Providence, with a deep-water harbour and the Gilded Age mansions on the hill above it. The route runs out to Block Island, east through the Elizabeth Islands to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, north to Cape Cod and back across Buzzards Bay to Narragansett Bay. The season is short, late June to early September, with long light evenings and warm, calm water in the sounds. Every leg but the last is 25 to 35 nautical miles, two to three hours on a motor yacht, so the days are spent ashore in the harbour towns, on the beaches and at anchor with the water toys out. Nights alternate between marinas (Newport, Edgartown, Nantucket, Hyannis) and anchorages (the Great Salt Pond, Cuttyhunk, Hadley’s Harbor). The crew handle the navigation, the meals, the dockage and the tender, so the week is yours.

Two hours across Rhode Island Sound to Block Island. The island is 7 miles (11 km) long with 17 miles (27 km) of beaches, and the Mohegan Bluffs on its southern shore are clay cliffs about 150 ft (46 m) high with the Southeast Lighthouse on top and a wooden stairway down to the sand. There are two harbours a mile apart: Old Harbor, the Victorian village where the ferries land, with its shops, galleries and seafood restaurants, and the Great Salt Pond, a large sheltered lagoon where the yacht anchors. The afternoon is for bicycles on the island’s lanes, the Clay Head trail and the North Light at Sandy Point, or the toys in the pond. Night at anchor in the Great Salt Pond.

Along the south side of the Vineyard to Edgartown. The morning passage runs under the Gay Head cliffs at Aquinnah, red, white and ochre clay up to 150 ft (46 m) high with the brick lighthouse above them, and past the fishing village of Menemsha, where the markets on the dock sell lobster and the day’s catch. Martha’s Vineyard has three towns within a few miles of each other: Vineyard Haven with its Main Street shops, Oak Bluffs with the painted gingerbread cottages of the Campground, the Tabernacle and the Flying Horses carousel of 1876, and Edgartown with its white Greek Revival captains’ houses, the Old Whaling Church and the harbour. Chappaquiddick is a two-minute ferry from the Edgartown dock. Night in Edgartown harbour.

North across the Sound to the Cape. Hyannis is the main harbour of Cape Cod and the Kennedy family’s summer home: the compound at Hyannis Port, the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum on Main Street and the memorial on Ocean Street overlooking Lewis Bay. The town has a working waterfront, Main Street shops and restaurants, and the beaches of Craigville and Kalmus a short drive away; the harbours of Harwich Port and Chatham and the Cape Cod National Seashore on the outer Cape are an hour by car. Night at the marina in Hyannis.

Breakfast on board and disembarkation in the morning. The crew bring the luggage to the dock and arrange the transfer to Boston or Providence. Newport keeps a day if you have one to spare: the Folk Festival in late July, the Jazz Festival in August, the International Tennis Hall of Fame on Bellevue Avenue, and the harbour itself, where the America’s Cup was sailed for 53 years.