Home for a Holiday

-
After spending a couple days in South Portland at the South Port Marina, we are on our way back to take care of some things at home. We spent a day prepping AQUAVIT for the time she will be alone at the dock. Flights from the Portland airport leave early and arrive late.






With a rental car, we set out to explore some of the sites Marvin's mother and aunt recalled in their stories of Maine. First there was Old Orchard Beach and pier - an amusement park on a cold water beach frequented by hearty Maineiacs in summer.


Then we drove up to Lewiston-Auburn to see the home where my mother grew up.

Orphaned at a young age, she lived with her Aunt Lucy on Cook Street in Auburn. Lucy and Donat had a bluing business (manufacturer of bleach) in a building behind their home. We explored this once thriving mill town on the Androscoggin River. At the turn of the previous century the sister towns had over a million square feet of mill factories. Six mills were operated by Bates - well known for the bedspreads and the college. The Speakman family was part of the worker migration to this community from Petitcodiac, New Brunswick and Northern Maine. Archie Donat Moussette's family was also attracted from Massachusetts and "French Canada".



Lewiston has amazing stone churches built in grand gothic style to punctuate the hills with their steeples. The most impressive is the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul.

Basilica of St. Peter and St Paul


    

Now the community is known for its diverse population of immigrant families from far and wide, with low crime and low cost housing, along with 5+ colleges. We think the Moussette family property was razed to accommodate a road realignment. (The aforementioned Patrick Dempsey, who we met in Kennebunkport, is a native son and sponsors a run and bicycling event to benefit cancer research.)


Mom's beloved  6th St. Congregational Church

Sandblasted bottom ready for epoxy barrier coat.

Meanwhile....Bay Breeze 

While we are on our AQUAVIT adventure, Bay Breeze is in St Petersburg at Sailors Wharf getting some maintenance and improvements.  Most significant is a bow thruster to help with maneuvering the single engine sailboat into and out of tight spaces. A bow thruster is a small, reversible propellor embedded in a tube in the hull that can push the bow in a direction. This will be a nice feature to have when we are docking at inside slips at marinas. We will even have a remote control for the thruster and anchor windlass.

  

We are also having a barrier coat of epoxy applied to the hull to prevent the formation of blisters in the fiberglass. The yard is installing a fiberglass headliner to emulate the one we saw on Steve and Edie's boat, Edie K, along with their nice sliding screens on the hatches.

Headliner and hatch screens on Edie K 

We really are looking forward to getting back on our sailboat when she is all spiffed up. But that won't be until after hurricane season. We're fortunate to have our sailing-hero friends Terry and Suzanne, who live in St Pete, stop by to check on the progress. It's good to have a competent boat yard working on the boat after a lot of hit-and-miss experiences, mostly miss in the Panhandle.

It may be November or December before Bay Breeze launches and we bring her home.

Weather dependent plans...

Following returning to Portland we will resume hopping our way up the Maine coast, to Boothbay Harbor, Mount Desert Island, and on up to East Port (the easternmost point in the US.) We plan to travel from 30 to 60 miles a day. After a much anticipated stop to see our friends Judy and Pat at their place in Blue Hill, near Acadia, we'll head back down the coast of Maine, retracing our route up but trying to get to different ports. After Maine is New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut until we are back for a week or so in NYC. We only have one date on the calendar - tickets to see The WHO at Madison Square Gardens on September 1.

After the concert, and maybe another play or two, we will have AQUAVIT hauled out at Lockwood's Boatyard on the Cheesequake River (love the name) in New Jersey for a bottom job and to spend some time on the hard while we return home again to wait out the height of hurricane season. When the weather settles, we will resume bringing AQUAVIT back down the ICW to Florida. Perhaps we will spend time in Washington DC and Chesapeake Bay and certainly Manteo NC and Brunswick Georgia.

What a trip it has been...

 We've enjoyed the start of this adventure and look forward to what's to come. It is great to spend time with the one you love, on the water, discovering parts of the NE best seen from the waterside. And, the experiences with friends and new people are a treasure.

So we are taking a break now for a couple weeks. Watch for the blog to start again when we do. For now, happy sails til we meet again and thanks for indulging us with reading the blog and following our exploits.



Marvin and Lee


07.17.2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

12 Years and still venturing south.

-
Image
Year 12 sailing south to the Keys in spring and back to our dock for hurricane season. This year we have not published a blog until now. We have visited a lot of the same venues and our adventures are similar to those we've experienced in the past. Mostly, we have delayed publishing because we are looking for a new blog host. We have seen in our statistics that most of our traffic is coming from China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. We are not believing there is that much interest in us, the Florida Keys and Maine in those places. It makes us nervous about security and hackers and our present host will not allow blocking country IP addresses. So here's a summary of our twelfth year cruising down to the Keys for a little over a month this spring.  We were delayed by weather from our planned departure in early April. Our original plan was to leave home with plenty of time to get to Dunedin, stay a couple days, and make a presentation to the Dunedin Boat Club thoughtfully arranged by o...
Read more

THANKSGIVING - 35 years on and we're still sailing!

-
Image
  Tropicbird This is the 35th anniversary of a Thanksgiving that we hold very special.  It was November 21-23, 1988. In our 37-year career, it was rare that we took a dedicated vacation. Running a small mom-and-pop company limited the time we could be away from our business. We might take an extra day tagged onto a work trip or a long weekend to visit family in South Florida. But, that really wasn't recreation time. Besides, we traveled so much to so many wonderful places, we never felt the need to take time off to change the scenery. But, we did long for more time to cruise on our sailboat. Our  Tropicbird,  a 1960 Pearson Triton, was a well-found sailboat. We became her caretaker in 1979. The fabled classic Triton was a Carl Alberg designed, heavy displacement craft, full keel with a four foot draft. We worked to refit and upgrade  Tropicbird  and invested much sweat equity and funds. In 1985 we repowered with a Westerbeke diesel. A few years of neglect b...
Read more

Wicked wet and fog he-aah this summah!

-
Image
  Wicked Wet and Fog He-aah This summah !   This is an unusual summer for the folks here in Maine. From Rockland, where we stored and launched, Downeast to Southwest Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, the weather has been unusually foggy and rainy. With only brief days of clear skies and sunshine, their tourist-based economy has slumped. Most Mainers are giving up on July and hoping for better prospects in August. A schooner that broke away from its mooring in a storm, winding up on the rocks, near Dysart's Great Harbor Marina. For us, it's been pleasant, if only a little disappointing that we are mostly stuck in our slip at the marina. We are so happy to have landed at Dysart's Great Harbor Marina (https://www.dysartsmarina.com). At least it's cooler than at home in Florida. We miss the friendly dock crew at Safe Harbor, but Miccah and Jane here at Dysart's are wonderful dock masters. And, a bonus is the interesting stories of boats and their owners who are regulars here...
Read more