We stayed two nights in Newport, Rhode Island anchored in Brenton Cove in front of the Ida Lewis Yacht Club. Newport is an old town; Benedict Arnold sort of old. In fact, while exploring the older area of town, we found Benedict Arnold’s great grandfather’s gravesite. This tiny graveyard was flanked on three sides by clapboard houses and on the fourth side by a wrought iron fence. These cozy little gravesites tucked in amongst the older houses in Newport are always a good find I think. It was well cared for and the writings on the gravestones made for interesting reading, most of them dating back to the 1600’s.

Backyard graveyard

In our ramblings through Newport, we also discovered the International Tennis Hall of Fame, site of the first U.S. National Championships in 1881. This was the first grass court that either of us has been within touching distance of, and found it pretty interesting. It’s hard to believe that grass courts are the fastest courts around; something to do with the hard-packed soil the grass is grown on. These particular courts were distinct in that they are the only competition grass courts that the public can actually play on.

Grass court

We left Newport early Sunday morning and very shortly started seeing more cruiser/racer sorts of sailboats like Strathspey. By mid-day, we were in Fisher Sound, and it was filled with sailboats from Stonington and Mystic. It was beautiful; a stereotypical view of New England sailing on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The sound was filled with sailboats heading in every direction even though the wind was light. This area has enough maritime history to fill a library and we’d hoped to stay the night on the Mystic River but we hesitated to stop at noontime after committing to long days from Portland to get to the Chesapeake by early October. In addition, the marina in Mystic was charging on a per foot basis for mooring balls holding us hostage as Mystic is not an anchor-friendly location. We decided to press on for the Connecticut River on the recommendation of Wendy, Blair’s sister. Off the main river, we wound our way up a narrow cove through a maze of moored boats in 7-8 feet of water until we found an empty mooring ball.

Calves Cove

If we’d had more time, we could have explored a good distance up the river but early the next day, we left the Connecticut River and immediately crossed the narrowest part of Long Island Sound to the north shore of Long Island. I wanted to follow Long Island all the way to New York City because I was quite certain we’d not ever have the time to drive this stretch of country. Long Island is definitely long; Ottawa to Montreal kind of long. At the far east Atlantic end, it’s low lying but as we headed west, the flatlands gave way to huge sand cliffs. Apparently, the Long Island sand is coveted by New York builders for use in concrete. The closer we got to New York City, the bigger the mansions got. Blair said they all had one thing in common though; the grounds were completely empty of people. Are these places perhaps summer homes closed down for the season? The season is still with us though as we’ve had extremely hot and humid weather for the past 4 days. In fact, we’ve had 21 days of sun in September so far.

Super Mansions

We motored all day on flat water in 5 knots of wind on the nose. We took advantage of the calm to clean some of the salt off Strathspey’s decks, portholes and lifelines. We do this on a pretty regular basis because we find that when we get down to nitty gritty cleaning, we find it’s a good activity to check for rusty, loose or missing items. Whenever I do this, I usually have a screwdriver handy to tighten loose screws. We noticed in Lunenburg, the Bluenose crew all had both screwdrivers and hammers hanging from their belts. Being a fiberglass boat, we’d never consider hammering anything down on Strathspey, but it works for the mostly wooden Bluenose.

Wild swans

We arrived in Port Jefferson, New York and immediately found a good anchorage tucked up right behind the last row of mooring balls in the harbour’s huge mooring field. Sometimes we aren’t always so lucky and end up circling the harbour like a dog trying to find a good spot to curl up in. Port Jefferson seemed like all we were looking for in anchorage and shore facilities. The guidebook said two of the marinas had Laundromats and that we could drop anchor anywhere outside the main channel. We were sorely disappointed when we dinghied in and couldn’t find either a dock to tie our dinghy to or a Laundromat. To add insult to injury, at 4 am we were awakened by a loudspeaker broadcasting instructions to a tug crew. The tug, all lit up like a Christmas tree, pulled three barges of sand into the harbour and positioned them about 300 yards behind us. The noise went on for a good hour as the tug made multiple trips into shore with the barges. Another sailboat, anchored only about 100 feet behind the barges, was nowhere near a designated mooring field and probably had the fright of their life; they were long gone when we woke up the next morning. The sunny spot in this less than ideal place were the two swans that visited Strathspey the next morning.

Low Tide

Our next stop down the Long Island shore was Oyster Bay, a wealthy enclave close to New York. It was the summer home of Teddy Roosevelt and where Billy Joel and John McEnroe grew up. Apparently, Typhoid Mary worked here as a cook way back in the early 1900s and infected some of her patrons. We anchored behind a sailing school in a fairly wide open area sans any mooring balls, which was unusual. Upon dinghying into the marina, we were directed to tie up at their dinghy dock. We walked into town with so much laundry that we looked like homeless people carrying our worldly possessions in sacks and tote bags. While the laundry was taking care of itself, we settled ourselves at Canterbury’s Oyster Bar and sampled a few oysters. When we returned to the dock with our clean, folded clothes, we discovered our dinghy high and dry in the thickest, black ooze you can imagine; good for oyster beds but pretty disgusting nonetheless.

Oyster Tonging

Oyster Bay, despite being full of sail and motor boats and some heavy-duty waterfront development, still supports an active oyster fishery. We saw an oyster boat dredging for oysters in the open bays as well as between sailboats on mooring balls. We also saw large numbers of small boats engaged in what we think was oyster tonging; basically hand-raking the seabed for oysters. This is also an active rowing center and early the next morning, I saw a long low shape glide by silently with a green bow light and a bright white stern light.

Good friends

We made a short hop the next day over to Manhasset Bay and started studying tide and current tables for New York City’s East River. We were headed for the 79th Street Boat Basin on the other side of Manhattan Island. Basically, the route from Long Island Sound to NYC harbour is to enter the East River heading towards Manhattan and then join the Harlem River at an ominous-sounding spot called Hell Gate. From that point, we’d follow the river down the east side of Manhattan, round the tip of the island at Battery Park and then head on up the Hudson on the west side of Manhattan Island. It sounds simple but we’d read so many accounts of the dangerous currents and waves that could kick up at Hell Gate, that I spent a fair bit of time looking at the timing of this passage so we would be at Hell Gate at slack time. Surprisingly, the trip through was pretty easy with the only complicating factor being the closure of the west side of the East River (beside Roosevelt Island) due to the sitting of the General Assembly at the United Nations building.

NYC Bridges

We cruised past LaGuardia airport, Riker’s Island (where they actually locked Typhoid Mary up), under the Manhattan bridge, then the Brooklyn bridge, past Pier 21 and the Staten Island ferry terminal. As we rounded the corner of Battery Park, I had a little heart clutch to see our good friends Derek and Wendy on shore, waving and smiling and calling to us. They keep an apartment in NYC as Derek works in the financial district at the tip of Manhattan. Wendy had flown down from Ottawa that morning. What a sight to see them waving from shore, what a thrill to know someone onshore, what good friends! After heading up the other side of the island to the 79th Street Boat Basin and getting settled at a mooring ball, we packed a bag and hobo’d on down to Derek and Wendy’s apartment and moved in.

NYSE

They’ve always been the ultimate hosts and this time was no exception. Blair worked in Manhattan for a good long stretch a few years ago so we’ve both spent considerable time here dining, touring, going to plays and all those other great things New York is so famous for. This time though, Derek and Wendy showed us a side of New York we’d not seen before; the financial district, Soho, Greenwich Village and Battery Park. Derek arranged a tour of the New York Stock Exchange for us the day the prime minister of Vietnam was there to ring the opening bell.

Watching the traders on the floor below, again emphasizes for us NYC’s position as the money and trading capital of America. Relaxing every evening on the terrace of their apartment building, with New York’s harbour spread out below, we caught up on all our news, laughed a lot and planned a lot. As Derek always says, “At the end of the day, it just doesn’t get any better than this”.

Queen Mary II in New York Harbour

Last week I drove home from Portland. It took us three months to sail to Portland, Maine, yet a mere eight hours for Jim, from Madcap, and I to drive home. I reconnected with my children, heard all their news and satisfied my motherly instincts by cooking large quantities of meat and taking them out for dinners. To satisfy my “what I miss most” list, I ran the water in the taps until it was hot, stood in the shower and double shampooed and rinsed my hair at leisure; an unheard of luxury on most sailboats. I used a new towel for every shower and a second towel for my hair. I have to say that I luxuriated in unlimited water for three days and I wasted a fair bit of it I confess. It’s an eye opener to discover what creature comforts you miss most while cruising. Besides the kids, the thing I miss most is long hot baths and I think I got my fill of both this past week. So I’m pleased to say, the home fires are well in hand, all the “best before” dates checked out and I’m back where I belong with Blair on Strathspey.

Back on Strathspey

Back on Strathspey, Blair worked pretty well non-stop while I was gone. He replaced the 12-volt accessory outlet on our bow which had corroded after less than a month in salt water. He cleaned the boat from stem to stern attacking that ever-persistent mildew using a mildew-fighting spray in all the corners of the boat. As well as installing a new reading lamp on the port side and grommets on our new lee cloths, he did a bunch of other little jobs that make a difference in how easy it is to live on Strathspey. The best thing of all, Blair composed a bagpipe tune for me: a Strathspey.

Strathspey tune

He brought along this cool little recording device that allows him to write musical scores and play them back through speakers. It’s so intricate though, that he can’t play it on the bagpipes yet, but by my birthday in November, he says he will have it down pat. He made a good number of friends in the Sunset Marina in Portland and was well taken care of this week with rides into town by his slipmate Scott Whichard and he enjoyed an excellent evening out at Tom and Sandi Dunham’s home on Cape Elizabeth. Tom and Sandi are a cruising couple we met in Pulpit Harbor, where they often sail their 1966 Hinkley Pilot 35.

Portland Head lighthouse

We were happy to move on from Portland though, as this was a busy harbour with constant traffic from lobster boats, the high-speed catamaran from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and cruise ships booked for fall foliage tours. The halyards banging on the masts all night sounded like a marimba band and the constant boat traffic had Strathspey rocking and rolling from side to side; a musical analogy for sure but not one that made for a good night’s sleep.

Heading south from Portland, we saw fewer and fewer seals which north of here were almost as common as seagulls. The water temperature rose to 17 degrees, the lobster pots thinned out in a big way and the sun shone which made for some great cruising days from Portland on. Our first stop past Portland was Rockport, a tight little harbour full of moorings. We tied up to a floating dock next to a fishing shack that apparently is the subject of so many paintings that most artists know it as Motif 1. We celebrated Beth’s birthday with some good food, fine wine and a big chocolate cake (complete with candles but no money!).

Rockport

After Rockport, we cruised past Gloucester (where the boats in “The Perfect Storm” left from), Salem (of witchhunt fame) and Marblehead (home of the biennial Marblehead to Halifax sailing race). Heading towards Boston we had a moderate tail wind and wallowing seas. It made for a long passage as we could see the Boston skyline for hours and hours while heading across Massachusetts Bay. Water traffic has their choice of quite a few passages into the city and we took President’s Road, the north channel. We hugged the red buoys all the way in and were the proverbial country bumpkins with mouths open, assailed from all directions by non-stop high-speed catamaran ferries, a 180-foot barge towed by a tug, water taxis heading every which way and above our heads, jumbo jets hanging low as they slid in to land at Logan airport in the middle of the city.

Boston Harbour

We spent two nights in Boston on a mooring ball at the Boston Harbour Sailing Club; a central location but one that bounced us around a fair bit during morning and evening rush hours on the harbour. Once the commuter traffic calmed down, it was a great place to make our plans to see Boston. As soon as we arrived though, we spent some time troubleshooting the interface box between our navigation system and our laptop computer. This interface box allows us to run the AIS software that locates the big ships in fog, send SSB position reports, and, most importantly, it also provides a backup system for plotting our routes. After spending a good two hours working on this, we determined it was toast and ordered a new one. Gladly leaving that frustration behind, Blair and I went ashore, lunched in Chinatown, walked on Boston Common, spent hours in the New England Aquarium and sat in the sun in Quincy market with a beer and ‘people watched’. We used the launch services of the club to get back and forth to shore but one night rather than rushing back for the last ride home of the day at sunset, we spent the evening ashore. When we finally got back to the club dock, we borrowed one of their little wooden rowboats and Blair rowed us back out to Strathspey. The harbour was calm and beautiful for our evening row in the moonlight and reminded me of our family cottage in Orillia which is where I am sure I’d last been in a rowboat.

We left Boston early the next day amidst all the commuter traffic and hugged the green buoys out through the uninhabited harbour islands. The wind was fickle that day so we had a combination of sailing, motor-sailing and then just plain motoring across Massachusetts Bay towards the Cape Cod Canal. The water temperature had risen to 19 degrees and most of the day we saw lots of fish life right at the surface taking advantage of the late summer warmth of the water. What we’d initially take for floating kelp would eventually show a small fin or two and as we got closer, we could see small sharks; either blue or nurse sharks. They were about two feet long and lazily swimming around on the surface. Further on, off the coast of Plymouth, we diverted course to check out a huge fin flapping from side to side and moving slower than molasses. It was an ocean sunfish about five feet long and easily four feet wide, so almost circular. It just floated on the surface and made no effort to get away from us so we snapped some good photos. Our fish book tells us that these guys can grow up to 13 feet long, have no scales and are covered with thick mucus. Needless to say, they are not fished for food.

Ocean Sunfish

The lobster buoys have thinned out now and we noticed in the Boston area, interestingly enough, the lobster buoy floats looked decidedly down at heel; rather than the usual colourful bullet-shaped floats, we were seeing Javex and Tide bottles covered with thick green slime. Did these ones belong to amateurs; do the professionals consider Boston perhaps too busy an area and not want to lose their expensive floats? Either way, the floats were placed at the edge of all the passages and happily once we were out sailing in wide open Massachusetts Bay, we saw very few of them.

Prior to transiting the Cape Cod Canal, we spent the night in the East Basin of the canal at the Sandwich Marina. The 10-mile canal is operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers and this marina is owned by the Corps as well. In order to time our passage properly, this was the harbour of choice. We didn’t anchor here because the marina’s concrete floating docks and pilings filled the harbour and most of those docks were filled with commercial fishing boats. The Corps maintains 24 slips for transient boaters so we had no problem getting a spot for the night (we had more of a problem with the $2/foot cost although the harbour master maintained that it was the cheapest dockage in the Cape Cod/Martha’s Vineyard area). So, at that point, we were back to studying tide and current tables again, something we hadn’t done since northern Maine.

Hwy 3 over Canal

The Cape Cod Canal has a flow of up to 6 knots which changes direction every six hours. The ebb flow is to the west and that’s the one we had to catch to help us move easily through to the other side of Cape Cod. Blair and I drove over this canal during a trip to Cape Cod for our 30th anniversary in April 2006; the anniversary where the seeds of this trip were actually planted. In fact, our anniversary gift to each other that year was a yellow quarantine flag (the traditional flag boaters hoist up their halyard upon reaching The Bahamas to signify that they wish to clear customs). This canal has been around for awhile. It was completed in 1916 and is the widest canal in the world at 540 feet.

Fishing on Canal

We left the Sandwich Marina at 7:30 am and blasted through the canal in short order with a 3.5 knot current helping us along.
Even at that hour, the shores were busy with joggers, cyclists and fishermen enjoying the hot September morning (it climbed to the mid-80’s that day). The canal itself was teaming with blue herons and gulls and what we think were either young Bluefin Tunas or Atlantic Bonitos stirring up the waters, feeding on smaller fish. It was a fun and fast little jaunt through to Buzzards Bay, a shallow 20-mile long bay with depths of 25-45 feet. It was one of those hazy, hot days that on Lake Ontario we usually get in July. We reveled in the sun and wore our shorts and T’s for the first time in 2-3 weeks. That kind of weather usually means little wind so we motor-sailed over flat seas all morning.

Yellow shafted Flicker

Just after noon, after we rolled in our genoa, an exhausted little hitchhiker landed on it. A common yellow-shafted flicker hugged the sail with his claws and his strong flat tail feathers; flickers are members of the woodpecker family and use their tails to balance when pecking on trees. Our bird book says flickers are woodland birds but this guy was a good two miles from any woodland. He clung to our sail for over two hours and then as we turned the corner into Newport Harbour I think he must have spotted his woodland and, well rested, flew towards shore.

Newport Harbour is a big sailboat racing center. Last weekend, it was the site of the Newport Boat Show, the fifth largest in North America and the streets and wharves still showed signs of it. Amazingly, in this busy harbour, full of moorings and marinas, we actually found a place to anchor in front of the Ida Lewis Yacht Club in Brenton Cove. The yacht club fires a cannon in the morning and at sundown to warn that it’s time to take care of the boat flags; promptly at 8 am this morning when the cannon fired, I put Strathspey’s Canadian flag back in its stern flagmount. It was exciting to sail into Newport on our 100th day of cruising and an auspicious place to anchor to boot as Newport was where we signed on the dotted line to buy Strathspey seven years ago. A good decision, a good boat, good times.

Newport Harbour

We’ll be sailing on Long Island Sound very shortly and that’s pretty close to Big Apple country where we’re looking forward to meeting some good friends and neighbours from Navan, maybe some milling about on Times Square and a photo-op with the Statue of Liberty.

September 1st in Northeast Harbour dawned clear and cold with a northwest wind blowing all the fog back to where it comes from. We arrived in time for Labour Day weekend but everyone told us from this point on, the crowds will shrink AND the number of lobster pots will grow. Bear with me here for a moment while I have a small rant re the lobster pots (just to get it over with). I read somewhere that there are three million lobster pots (and their accompanying buoys) in Maine but you just have to sail through them to believe it. They’re set close to shore, they’re set in the entrances to harbours, they’re set in narrow passages 15 feet wide and they’re even set in wide open 200-foot deep bays. In short, they are everywhere! Unlike the Canadian maritime provinces, here there is no season for lobsters so the pots are set everywhere, ALL the time! Sailing through these waters in coastal Maine requires constant vigilance and generally the boat conversation consists of a running commentary whose sole purpose is to determine whether the helmsperson sees the lobster buoy ahead. To run over one while motoring could result in major damage to your propeller, your transmission and possibly your engine. To run over one while sailing has less severe consequences but could result in a trip overboard to unsnag the lobster pot line from our saildrive or rudder. Maine lobster pots are not to be taken lightly. Okay ‘nuff said!

Lobster buoys

Lobster pots aside, the scenery is spectacular in the Mount Desert, Penobscot Bay areas and as a September bonus for us, there is always an available mooring ball in the harbours we visit. While in Northeast Harbour, we rented two heavy-duty mountain bikes to tour the carriage roads that criss-cross Mount Desert Island which makes up about a third of Acadia National Park. Back in 1913, John D. Rockerfeller, Jr had the foresight to try to preserve this area from over-development and he started quietly buying up and donating much of the land that these 51 miles of one-laner cinder dust roads cover.

Carriage Road

The roads are open to bikers, hikers and horses and it was a great way to get a feel for the park. We biked a 4-hour trail that looped around Mts. Sargent, Parkman and Penobscott that morning and it was pretty obvious that three months of sailing had turned my legs to mush. The sun shone brightly all day with a definite nip in the air and we even saw the occasional leaf showing a bit of fall colour.

Just around the corner from Northeast Harbour is Somes Inlet, a fjord, albeit on a small scale compared to the Saguenay River. We motored up the inlet as tourists to see what the fjord was all about and then had a leisurely sail back down. The tidal range in this area is about 14 feet and the bigger houses all sport massive docks out in front. These docks are not used to swim from; they’re to house huge motor yachts used to ferry their owners out from the mainland or up from “the city”.

Monster docks

Because the tides are so high, the docks are built on top of these massive granite blocks stacked end-to-end out from the shore and are attached to a hinged ramp that is in turn attached to a floating wooden dock.

This coast of Maine is great for sailors with all its islands, bays, big rivers and peninsulas. To give you an idea of how indented and zig zagged a coast it is, the length of the coastline is 228 miles but the coastline proper (if you walked from top to bottom with one foot in the water) is 3000 miles. Estimates vary on the number of islands but there are probably more than three thousand islands that are at least one acre or more. So, lots of neat little anchorages to sail to and to spend the night at.

One of the more remote anchorages that we sailed to was the village of Frenchboro on Long Island. Only 45 people live on the island which, after waiting ‘til 1982 for telephone service to arrive, is now all modcons with cell phone reception, WiFi internet, a well stocked library and volunteer fire department. While there, we bought fresh lobsters from David Lunt who in turn buys them directly from all the lobstermen on the island. According to Mr. Lunt, the best way to cook lobsters is to bring 1/2 an inch of water to a boil and steam the little fellers. He was right. They were wonderful (kudos to Beth who cooked all the lobsters on Madcap). Interestingly enough, here in Maine, when you buy lobsters you’re asked if you prefer the soft-shelled lobsters or the hard-shelled ones; the hard-shelled lobsters being quite a bit more expensive. Our lobsters were soft-shelled and were noticeably easier to open than other lobsters I’ve had.

Frenchboro

On our walk through the town, we noticed an Osprey nest built on top of the ferry dock’s winch motor. David Lunt told us that they keep removing parts of the nest to discourage the Osprey from laying her eggs; they even put a platform on a tall dead tree nearby to tempt her away from the ferry. One of Maine’s laws forbids disturbing Osprey eggs and David said “If the Osprey laid her eggs, why then … the ferry couldn’t run” (No complaining. Never mind that this island would be cut off from the mainland ‘til the eggs hatched.). Frenchboro was a picturesque little harbour and we were lucky to be there on a warm sunny day I think. One author, describing the troubles the island has in keeping a teacher onsite, says “the problem with Frenchboro is the weather; 10 months of winter, punctuated by July and August”.

Leaving Frenchboro, we headed for Merchant Harbour, another more remote anchorage. The winds were high and on the nose though, so after tacking back and forth trying to advance towards the island, we did a 360 and headed instead for Mackerel Cove on Swan’s Island. After all, there’s beating to windward and there’s beating your head against a wall; neither is high on my list. Mackerel Cove was a pleasant surprise and despite it’s only a so-so write up in our guidebook, it was quiet, deserted and reminded us of Georgian Bay with its smooth pink granite rocks, so common in this area. For the rest of the day in Mackerel Cove, we watched a parade of tall-masted Windjammers sail down the passage outside our cove. The annual Windjammer festival in Camden had just ended and the ships were headed back to their home ports. On our way to Mackerel Cove, we started noticing the occasional lobster boat with little stay sails at their sterns. We’ve noticed them all the way down to Portland.

Lobsterboat

Our next stop was Pulpit Harbour, on North Haven Island, a throwback to the ’60s where the “summer people” arrive at the end of June to escape the heat in New York and Boston. North Haven Island is summer home to Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. Indeed, this is an area of “old wealth” as well so we were not surprised to see many classic wooden sailboats with graceful lines and gleaming hardwood resting on private mooring balls around the harbour. The Cabots own a large area of the harbour and their mooring balls take up much of the prime anchoring space. Because it was September and the crowds had left, we were able to anchor Strathspey between two of the Cabot mooring balls that night.

Pulpit’s Osprey

An added bonus, on our way into Pulpit Harbour, was seeing a fairly well-known Osprey nest. Our bird book says that Osprey’s will use a nest over and over and this one had been in existence for 150 years according to our guidebook.

The next morning we sailed over to Camden, the most crowded harbour we’ve been in yet. There was no room for us in the inner harbour (unless we were willing to spring for $3/foot for a floating dock without power or water) so we took a mooring ball in the outer harbour and used the launch service to get back and forth into town. Camden’s a pretty little town with a beautiful park right in the center of the town. To us, it was a yachting mecca with huge sailboats from all over the world, but for star watchers, it’s also the summer home of John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and the Onassis family.

Camden

There have been a few boats that we keep seeing as we continue south. One of them, that’s particularly noticeable is the beautiful Carl Linné, a 125-foot sloop; we’ve seen her in Halifax, Northeast Harbour and then in Camden. Carl Linné was hauled out in Camden for some routine maintenance and to get a new coat of bottom paint before heading offshore to Bermuda and then the Caribbean. Her captain told me that they were making their way through one of the many narrow passages amongst the outer islands of Penobscot Bay and got tangled with a lobster pot. Carl Linné won that battle but came away with a huge chunk missing from her keel.

Lobster pot damage

Because our time in Maine is limited, we depend on the anchorage descriptions in an excellent guide book that We Be Free loaned us, A Cruising guide to the Maine Coast by Hank and Jan Taft and Curtis Rindlaub. Trying to always move southward, we have been making a zig-zag course between the 4 and 5-star anchorages so the next stop was Christmas Cove. It’s a tight little harbour with absolutely no room to anchor because of the number of mooring balls. We’re finding that most of the anchorages in Maine are full of mooring balls and we either anchor off to one side if there is room or sometimes we bite the bullet and pay for a ball; they run about $30-$35 and can include a launch service, shower and Laundromat or sometimes they can include absolutely nothing at all. In Christmas Cove we tied up to dock and plugged into their power so as to top up our battery.

Christmas Cove

To stretch our legs, we took a long walk that looped down the center of the island and back down to the harbour catching glimpses through the trees of cottages, hammocks hanging from front porches and Adirondack chairs set out to sit and enjoy the scenery. The population of Maine is 1.3 million but that triples in the summer when the city people drive north to enjoy the cooler weather at all these out of the way little villages along the coast.

In the face of higher winds and waves the following day, rather than sit in Christmas Cove, we took the back channels to Five Islands. The seas were calm in the little thoroughfares through the islands and the most picturesque of them was Townsend Gut with its swing bridge that’s been tended by the same family for over 50 years. We crossed the Sheepscot River and pulled into Five Islands which is a working fishing village. The Five Islands Yacht Club maintains five free mooring balls in this harbour and we were happy to grab one but had no one to thank as there is no clubhouse here.

Five Islands

It was a hotter than usual September day when we arrived at Five Islands (I think the temperature in Concord had reached 90° F) and as we were finishing lunch in the cockpit, Tom Feeney and best friend, Rob, rowed up and invited us to Tom’s son’s pre-wedding party that night. When asked if I could bring anything they said, “oh no, we’ve got hamburgers, brats and beer, just bring yourselves”. Tom is from New Hampshire and he and his friends and family have sailed in this area for years. He had rented a big beach house in sight of Strathspey’s mooring for his family and friends to stay in and that’s where we headed to for the party. The Feeney family not only invited us to the wedding party, they introduced us to all their guests like we were old friends who just happened to sail down from Canada for the wedding the following day. We instantly felt like we belonged at the party and as a thankyou, Blair played a medley of bagpipe tunes as a toast to the bride and groom, Alyssa and Mitch. The honeymoon was to be a week of sailing in their Cape Dory, Pilgrim, up in the Penobscot Bay area.

Newlyweds

Mitch and Alyssa are experienced sailors, love the outdoors and Maine so it was a natural choice for them to bring their extended family down here for a casual seaside wedding. It was a fun evening with tables overflowing with wonderful food; shrimps, salads (love that asparagus and beet salad and will try to copy it), hamburgers, “Brats”, non-stop deserts and wine and beer to wash it all down. After 86 days on Strathspey, this hospitality was just the ticket and we send our biggest thanks to all the Feeneys and their friends for including us in this very excellent evening!

We spent two days in Five Islands, two days of hot, sunny weather. If someone asked us what we did for two days, I’d be hard-pressed to say because time on a boat is a pretty hard thing to pin down. I know we walked up to the market garden at the top of Five Islands and bought the sweetest fresh corn along with big juicy beefsteak tomatoes. We sat on the wharf and ate seafood while watching the lobstermen unload their catch. Blair tried his hand at knotting an ocean plate and I finished reading one of my books. This is the first lazy time we’ve had since Carter’s Beach in Nova Scotia and it was certainly welcomed.

Ocean Plate braid

Our next stop was Jewel Island, a tight little harbour between Jewel Island and Little Jewel Island. It was a 3 ½ hour trip from Five Islands under grey skies and the occasional shower. Tropical storm Gabrielle is heading north and when it swings past Maine and out towards Nova Scotia today, we will feel the side effects of it for the next two days. There were only three boats in here, one anchored behind the other in the long skinny harbour. We spent the night here and then motored over to Portland in fog to settle in at dock for the next week.