Ferries from Quonset Point Pier, Quonset Point, RI

Seven departures a day, 08:30 through to 17:30, cover 39.3 nautical miles to Oak Bluffs in 105 minutes — a long way for a fast ferry, and the only approach to Martha's Vineyard that goes nowhere near Cape Cod.

That is the whole proposition. The conventional route to the island runs through Woods Hole, at the end of the Cape, which in summer means the bridges over the Cape Cod Canal and the queue behind them. From Quonset Point a passenger from Providence, Hartford or New York joins the boat on the mainland side of all of it.

The pier sits in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, on the former Naval Air Station whose name went to the Quonset hut — the corrugated steel arch mass-produced here from 1941 and shipped to every theatre of the Second World War. Vineyard Fast Ferry runs the service, and the sheet is a summer one.