THAT'S ALL FOLKS, for now....

Written lying Pickering Island, Penobscot Bay

Since the Bella Report, we have been busy.  Belfast, Frenchboro, Castine, Buck’s Harbor, Woodenboat School, Sabbathday Harbor, Pickering Island, and others.  The weather has continued to be extraordinarily good.  Yet, it is all ending in the next few days when we will slip into Rockland and Journey's End Marina.  CODA will winter there and we will resume the cruise next spring.

The schooner HERITAGE joins the fleet in Buck's Harbor for the night.

Speaking of the Bella Report there is a correction to be made.  The First Mate denies turning on the running lights.  She explains that she turned on the spreader lights switch and for some reason the running lights came on.

Anyway, Milly recently wrote down what she will miss and not miss and then asked me to do the same.  The details are revealing, but the headlines are that we will miss the peace, the closeness to nature and the fun of discovering the islands, coves and harbors.  The things we will not miss are mostly about life in a small space.

Early evening in Sabbathday Harbor.

Peace comes in the form of silence and a motionless anchorage surrounded by nature. The silence can be profound in some of these places.  I particularly like to rise early and deeply inhale the sweet air.  A bright moon or a star-filled sky are common. And, of course in August we had a "blue moon".  It has been very good.

The trails on Long Island are sponge-like.
Comprised of moss and pine needles they
softly accept your step and the trail leads to
this point on the Atlantic.  Not bad, eh?

Nature is with us as we cruise and anchor.  Birds of course dominate, but the mammals are always nearby as well. We saw porpoises, seals, terns, jumping fish, hawk fish and one eagle.  The porpoises are not as playful as dolphins but they are here in large numbers and do swim close to us.  Seals show up in harbors, out in the open water, and on rocks. 

Get the radar on.....here comes da fog!!!
This time we were already in harbor, thankfully.

We have “discovered” over 40 anchorages and harbors.  In some, we have stayed as many as four nights, but two nights is our norm.  Some have good beaches and others are granite pools.   Still others are fjord-like.  I will not soon forget the intense color of the evergreens on Swans Island.  Of course, the further we go “downeast” the coves are more likely uninhabited and/or very remote and offshore.  Each one of them provides a specialness, and from some we have a stone marked with the date and name to remind us of the really good ones. 

Belfast sidewalks include some 30 chairs and benches
created by local artists. I could have written
a post devoted to Belfast with it's fun,
funky and growing prosperity.

Note to our hometown of Newport: find out how
Belfast lures in new businesses so well.

After weeks of cruising mostly offshore or along the coast we turned inland in late August and visited Castine and Belfast.  Belfast is hard to resist.  The town is doing very well ever since MBNA headquartered its vast credit card processing operation here.  That move has in turn led to other major new economic development.  Moreover, it is a fun and funky place with terrific local shops, galleries, eateries, and even a first-run movie house.  All in all, a very kewl place.  

CODA in the Mud Hole.  This anchorage, near Rocque Island,
 is challenging to enter, but entirely secure on all sides.
We climbed the steep terrain to use the trails and snapped this shot.  

We left our goal of Canada for next year.  We came within 30 miles of the border and decided we needed more time to do it well.  I am especially keen to visit St Andrews and hopefully Nova Scotia.  There is some regret in not making it this year, but we took so many meandering turns that we were pressing for time by the time we reached Rocque Island.  Note to self: goals need more certain plans to be met.

SOME STATS:

92 days aboard

700 nautical miles (less than 50 in fog)

43 anchorages, moorings or slips

No lobster pots snagged!!!

Numerous new acquaintances, some we will see again up here or down south

Five cases of wine

About 300 gallons of fuel

No injuries, but many bruises, physical and egotistical

Two mechanical issues, quickly solved

No groundings

No man or dog overboard

The three of us with Bella stealing the show as usual.

Thanks to all of you for your support and interest.   The blog had almost 1,500 page views from the 30 odd subscribers and lurkers.  Biggest day was 47 hits.  It’s been fun. So long until next year and we look forward to seeing many of you soon.

The Bella Report

Bella here, 2nd mate on the death ship CODA

When I figured out that my owners wanted me to live on this boat I considered running for it.  I should have.  Since I don't have a good handle on elapsed time I have lost track of how long they have been torturing me this way.  Could it be I have always been here?  My existential thoughts always leave me unsatisfied.

My hangout on the foredeck.

The dreaded ThunderShirt in action.
She really looks concerned about me, don't you think?

First, they left my bed back home.  Got that?  They didn't think I would need a bed.  So what is a girl to do?  I took over the new "reading room" as my own.  It's actually a pretty good deal.  The space is large for me and it is private so I can do whatever I please without Milly saying "Bella stop it".  She does that a lot.  Milly is nice, but she has strong ideas about my behavior.  I, of course, feel her behavior  is no better.  She does things like blowing her hair with a noisy fan and insisting I get a rinse down after I swim.  She is really a control freak.  But she feeds me so what can I do?

Second, they expect me to use a piece of astroturf for my daily ablutions.  It is 20"x30".  Are they for real?  I usually need 1/2 an acre to find an honorable spot.  But they are serious and so after a long protest of one day I did yield to this new arrangement.  It is for their convenience as this means the captain does not need to take me to shore in the dinghy.  Oh, we do that, but only once a day so they feel less guilty.

Amusing my owner, but this is boring so I usually do only two "fetchits".
When the third one is thrown I leave it in the water.  Hah!

Then there is the thing about moving the boat with the engines.  I hate it.  Truly hate it.  I get all nervous when the rocking and rolling gets going big time.  So they drug me.  That's ok too because it is actually pretty good stuff.  But why must we move the boat when each place is so nice?  Can't we just get a PO Box and hang around?  They got me this ThunderShirt thing that is supposed to make me feel as though I am in Mom's womb.  Note that first mate Milly is totally into creating some artsy photo while I am sweltering in this thing.  And we aren't even rocking.  What I put up with in the name of loyalty.

We see a lot of other dogs out here.  Most are boring, but occasionally I do meet one that I like, but of course his stupid owners also move their boat so our friendship is short-lived.  I don't get it.  After the engines go off we are in a place that is also full of water, often among other idiots, with little to do but remark on the beauty and talk about the anchor holding.  All I want to do is go ashore and sniff the joint up.

Idiot captain hugging his engines.  Think about that.

The captain is really funny.  I mean, look at this picture.  Do you know ANYONE else who would pose himself in this manner?  He's an idiot.  He actually likes his engine room.

I have taken to hanging out on the foredeck.  There I can nap peacefully without listening to the owners discussing ridiculous things such as how much water is left (sheez we are surrounded by it).  And I can keep an eye on the mate in the galley and know what potential scraps await me today.

Idiot captain embarrassing me with his "look at the camera" stuff.

See what I mean?   He is an idiot.  He thinks he can get me to look at his hand for this photo.  Notice I am laughing.

So I think they are talking about this ordeal being over soon.  As in today, I hope.  It's raining today and last night in the dark and fog another boat came in and was anchoring near us about 10pm.  The captain is deaf so he never heard it.  1st Mate heard it and went into overdrive trying to determine how to respond to the horn they blasted three times.  So we all got up and finally read that we are supposed to ring our bell for five seconds in response.  By this time the other boat had moved away and was not heard from again.  So the first mate turns on our running lights!!!!  We aren't running!!!!!  No wonder the other boat ran away!!!  Idiots!!!!  We dogs would have just barked a bit and settled the matter quickly.  But, no, I am scolded for barking.

Heard them speaking about Belfast as our next destination town.  Can't wait to get there and see if I can make a break for freedom.  Idiots.

Memorial Mooring Balls

August 6

Replaced the generator's fuel pump fairly quickly and did some other maintenance yesterday, filled the water tanks, showered, shaved and gave Bella a new haircut which she barely tolerated.  Had a rare dinner onshore for once which was OK, and not overpriced.  As I have said, the small things mean more out here.

We pulled out of Northeast Harbor this morning and turned left.  12 miles later, as we passed by Schoodic Point we set a new eastern mark for ourselves as we have not been this far east in any of our prior cruises.  And all the pundits say that until you pass this point you are not truly Downeast.  The compass read 97 degrees which is just the heading you want to reach Canada from here.

My girls in Bar Harbor looking for a ride.

We made our first harbor on Trafton Island along with 8 other boats and will spend only one night here.    It is very, very pretty, but privately owned and so we can't explore it.  Most likely tomorrow we will head off to Jonesport and then Rocque Island.

I like both leaving a harbor and entering one.  Making a passage between them is part of the adventure, but discovering then for the first time never seems to grow old.  Many times it is challenging to find the entrance to the harbor and I like that, but I like a lot of silly things out here that most people don't relate to at all.

We have still not found a buddy boat.  The number of cruising boats this year is very small compared to other years; everyone agrees on that.  Now that we have been in many harbors we do see the same boats and I would say that number is less than 30.  So the economy has hit this lifestyle as well.  On shore the merchants are all saying last year was their worst year ever and this year is worse.  Bar Harbor hotels all seemed to have vacancies and this is the height of the season.


August 10

We have gone due east to Trafton and Rocque Islands and now the Mud Hole.  The Rocque archipelago is the crown jewel of the Maine coast with its stunning white beaches.  Did some serious fog for part of these legs.  Did not hit anything and just as important we did not snag a lobster pot line on our props.  That's one folly I hope to never report in these pages.

Milly on the beach at Rocque Island.

Enjoyed a big gam onboard an Oyster 50 with 25 sailors in Trafton.  A gam is a way to not cook for dinner.  Instead you invite over as many people as your boat will handle and proceed to drink and munch.  This one lasted 2.5 hours.  You tell each other innocent lies because these are people you don't know and will never see again so everyone has outrageous stories.  From this I learned there are a few mooring balls in Maine Harbors that are Memorials to the deceased owner whose family maintains it for the free use of any boater.  This seems to me the perfect way to live on as a boater.  I would have my ashes placed inside the mooring ball and my image would be etched with a laser on the outside of the ball.  So when people pick up the mooring they say "Hey, Herk is here".  Note to self: file patent.

Part of the Gam crowd.  Milly is in there somewhere.

Not sure where we are going next.  But we have taken a couple of decisions.  First, we are not returning CODA to Newport this year; she will be in Rockland, Me. for the winter.  We have enjoyed this season a great deal and want to do more without making the trip to this area from Newport.  Second we are saving Canada for next year.  Third, we will rent our Newport home again next year and have our first inquiry for the month of August 2013.

Milly has just finished 50 Shades of Gray.  I have just finished the autobiography of Walter Cronkite.  Her excerpts are a little more interesting, but doubt I will read it.  At my age what would I do with all that new information?  But when Mil's book club discusses this one I sure wish I could be a fly on the wall.  Whooee girls!

I'll leave you with this.  If you live on a remote island and order heating oil this is how you get it.  A lobster boat ties a small barge to his bow so a truck can drive onto it.  Then they go out to the island and drive it off for the delivery.  Now get this.  Heating oil up here is currently $3.20 a gallon.  Our Newport supplier was way over $4 last I checked.

Oil Barge on its way to Great Cranberry Island. 

A taste of Acadia National Park on Mt. Desert Is.

Written lying Northeast Harbor on Mt. Desert Island

Those of you who have been to Acadia already know what a treasure it is.  For those who have not I offer a tiny peek into the park.  It is not a large park compared to the big western parks, but our step-daughter Kara who takes every chance to camp in the western parks came away gushing about Acadia.

And for good reason.  Conservation and preservation have been done here extremely well, if I may say so.  You could spend a week here to take it all in properly.

CODA in Northeast Harbor from 300 feet up in Acadia without FOG.

We are presently in Northeast Harbor and for the third night.  We are in heavy fog today.  Fog is often romanticized as in the fog of war and the fog that follows a binge, but actually....fog sucks.  It is really does.  I don't see anything remotely attractive about fog.  It is wet, slows you down, makes for poor photogography and I could go on.  Fog Sucks.  And so does the generator fuel pump that I need to replace tomorrow.  It has two screws that are metric while the rest of the engine is imperial.  Go Figure and I have no metric wrenches on board.  It is Sunday.  The hardware store here is run by pentacostal numb-nuts and so they are closed.  No buying today heathens.

The Thuye Garden on the Curtis Trust grounds

Acadia can't be seen in fog.  It is not there even though we are maybe 300 yards from it.  So forget about Acadia in fog and plan accordingly.  

Northeast Harbor from 500 feet up in Acadia

We aren't sure where to go next.  Except out of the fog.  Whether or not it lifts tomorrow we are out of here with metric wrenches in hand.  Navigating in fog is somewhere between white-knuckle driving and flying in a cloud.  As long as the electronics work you are golden.  Milly and I have done some bad fog together.  It is very much a bonding experience.  Unlike wall papering, but that's another story.

A segment of the path from the Harbor to the Garden and Curtis Lodge

So for now, we are forlorn in the fog, but as ANNIE said "the sun will come out tomorrow....tomorrow will be another day.  I love that song.

Penobscot Bay and Mt. Desert

Written lying Northeast Harbor, Mt. Desert Is.

It's been a week since the last post and this one is probably not going out today as Internet service is really weak to non-existant.

Geology geeks will note the subtle curves of this formation.

Anyway, we have put on some miles and are now at the mid-point in our journey.  We will go into Bar Harbor later this week and leave the boat for a week to attend to family and business.

The tides are now over 11 feet but soon they will be 20 and 30.

Merchant Island...our private anchorage.

By far the most secluded cove so far was the one on Merchant Island which is uninhabited.  There is a tiny cove that at low tide is no more than 125 yards across.  Our anchor found a sweet spot and we stayed two wonderful nights.  Beaches and granite gave Bella a lot of space and I later realized nobody had previously reported on this cove to ACTIVECAPTAIN" which is like the ZAGAT of boating.  Gave it four stars as there was no Starbucks.

We treated ourselves to a slip for one night in Southwest Harbor and it was well worth it for the boat really needed to be cleaned up and so did the crew.  This is the home of many old and successful boat builders and as such the joint is loaded with floating eye-candy.  A Hinckley here and a Hinckley there.  We fueled, watered, laundered and shopped.  Then we dashed up Somes Sound which is a very favorite place for us.  It is not unlike a fjord about 6 miles long with the heights of Mt Desert Island on both sides and depths over 300 feet.

Somesville street scene and a granite flower box.

The Somesville Museum and memorial bridge.

Did I mention Somesville.  So sweet.  I have no clue how few people live here, but those that do have some wonderful 18^th and 19^th century homes, gardens and landscapes.  We tried to capture them here.  The pics here are of the Furniture Gallery (a cabinet for $60k, a pool table for $25k and so on. ) So while this place is isolated it is obviously well populated with deep pockets and the gallery gave us some insight to the culture as did the Arcadia Repertory down the road.  This is rural folks, and yet not.  The homes on the shores of the Sound are McMansions of the first order.  

Need a bench for the hallway?  $17,000!  We considered but it was sold.

Then we moved on to Northeast Harbor on Mt Desert and our last stop will be at the Woodenboat School where we have always had a great time.

When we return from the break we will turn east and leave most communication and settled shoreline behind.   There is very little until the Canadian line.  We must fuel for the leg in both directions as there is no fuel available along the way up or back.  I've crunched the numbers many times.

The blog just passed a milestone in that there have been 1,023 pageviews.  So my sister is doing her job of hitting the link 50 times a day.  

Thanks for tuning in.

 

Dinghy Follies II

Written lying Pulpit Harbor, North Haven Is.

It's raining today for the first time in over two weeks, but this harbor is definitely the place to be for sitting it out.  The harbor is virtually landlocked and among the must-see places in Maine.  We are surrounded by Friendship Sloops and other very kewl yachts.

Exemplary Friendship Sloop "BAY LADY" 

Anyway...Regular readers here will recall our being busted for dinghy infractions in Glosta.  We have done it again.  There we were in Boothbay Harbor.  Gorgeous day, and we had been in town doing errands.  We returned and were settling into the wine hour with Hob Nob and Clois duBois.  A dinghy with a salty looking guy pulls up and asks where our dinghy is.  This is my first alert that it might not be tied to CODA.  Sure enough it has floated away and this guy knows where it is.  He offers to take me to it which I humbly accept.  It is now tied to the public pier and being guarded by two Coasties.  He drops me off and high-tails it before this gets more dicey.  The coasties want to know if anyone was in it.  I said yes there had been two infants and their mother....NOT.  But after I assured them it is a willful boat that is prone to attracting the fuzz they rolled their eyes and left me to my dubious devices.  By now there is a small audience for this entertainment.  People in a restaurant, people in boats, and tourists who all obviously thought this was just great fun.  See the silly old man and his wayward dinghy!!!!!  I expressed to all that I was happy to have made their day and left as fast as I could; to applause actually from one boat.  My children are now rolling THEIR eyes.

Our dinghy trials were competing with these entertainers for gawking.

We went on to Long Cove, and then Rockland for a music festival before mooring here yesterday.  Thought we would leave today, but it just feels ok to stay another day.  Met a couple, Jim and Cynthia, from Annapolis on board NEVERLAND (Crealock 34 cutter) who are doing about the same thing we are and had a great evening with them last night.   Might this be our buddy boat?  Stay tuned.

The Cabot family boatshop and railway.  Yes those Cabots.

Islands are a big deal up here.  One of the more popular names for islands is TWO BUSH.  Now none of them have any bushes so I guess this is a very old name and that the bushes were extant at some point back in the 1800s and likely died off for lack of proper pruning.  Island names (nobody knows how many islands there are in Maine) are either utterly unoriginal (LONG, LOVE, LITTLE, AND LOBSTER being rampant) or totally inscrutable as in NIGH DUCK, PATTISHALL, and KNUGGLE.  It affords imaginations great opportunity to define them.  I particularly liked working with pattishall.

Verizon is becoming more scarce, but we will ultimately lose it after Bar Harbor so this and one more post are likely to be it for a awhile.  Uploading photos is now a very tricky and long deal.  But your earnest reporter perseveres. 

Well that's enough of my ramblings for this post.  On to Winter Cove in VINALHAVEN IS.

Pics tell the story.

Written while lying Love Cove off the Sheepscott River.  

CODA in Snow Island Anchorage

Snow Island was the home of the late great Dodge Morgan.  Dodge was a hero to many.  He invented the Whisler Radar Dectector in the '70's, then became a newspaper publisher, and then did a solo, non-stop circumnavigation at the age of 58.  His record of 151 days still stands.  In 2010 we had been set to meet him, just three weeks before he died.  This was an entirely peaceful two-night stay with great food, swimming, and dinghy rides.  Somebody has to do it.

.

Bella supervises scrubbing of the dinghy bottom.

A terrific squall with winds up to 40 in Biddeford Pool.

Milly captured this in one of our anchorages.

We are presently moored in Love Cove near Boothbay, Me.  and we are really poking along, but just can't pass by these wonderful harbors and coves.  We will go into Boothbay tomorrow to pick up the mail and some odds and ends.  Then push on further downeast.  Weather has been extraordinary, and the crew is very content.  Boat running well.  Intent now is to gunkhole to Bar Harbor by the end of July.  Then take a short break before heading out to the really remote downeast region.  

Portland provisioning stop was the pits.  Brutally hot and errands to run all over town in a very short period of time.  Marina was expensive and not that great.  Anyway we then went out to Great Diamond Island to recover for a day before pushing on to Snow Island and now Love Cove.

Tomorrow on to Boothbay for just one night and out into the Penobscot Bay region where there are so many wonderful places to anchor.