Rocky road to Rockland

Our Maine Plan: seasonal slip, winter storage, summer cruising, floating condo.

Birch Point Beach State Park, Owls Head, Maine

With COVID informing our plans, it seems that we have missed a year. To catch up from our last blog post, we took only a couple short trips on Aquavit and Bay Breeze. One with our Sarasota friends, socially distanced, to Dog Island and Apalachicola. Pat and Judy were on Aquavit and we were aboard Bay Breeze. And we took trips on both boats across the Gulf down to Sailors Wharf in St. Petersburg for a little service. 

Bay Breeze and Aquavit in Apalachicola with Pat and Judy

While sailing Bay Breeze down to St. Pete, a weather front chased us in to Steinhatchee

it's good to see dawn's first light after sailing all night form Steinhacthee to St. Pete.

Aquavit hauled and ready to load by May 9.

Bay Breeze is now in storage at St Petersburg for hurricane season and we had Aquavit trucked to Maine. Unfortunately the transport was more stressful than our previous experiences, leading to a lot of frustration. The transport company never missed an opportunity to disappoint, mostly by not keeping us informed.

But the silver lining was meeting some nice young folks, Raleigh and Eric, at their historic Lindsey Guest House in Rockland Maine, who put us up while our boat was delayed. Rockland was unexpectedly full of visitors making up for their lost year and we had no reservations as were expecting to stay aboard Aquavit. They are wonderful young techies and Peace Corps alums just starting out with their new B&B enterprise (lindseyguesthouse.com).

Finally arrived - late, dirty, and disassembled, but in Maine! July 16.

Launched at "Journey's End" - fitting.

Rockland is a unpretentious town. It has several excellent museums, a working waterfront, restaurants and a walkable street of galleries and tourist shops. Far less crowded than Booth Bay, Bar Harbor, or Kennebunkport, it's nice to be in a community that is not entirely based on tourism. Having a car makes it easy to get to stores and take day trips to nearby venues like Port Clyde and the Maine Boat Builders Boat Show in Portland.

Happy to be in Maine reunited with Aquavit.

We got Aquavit put back together after her road trip and provisioned for cruising. When the weather opened up from the usual overcast and rain, we headed to Swan's Island to check out the venue for the Sweet Chariots Music Festival. This small quiet community is about 5 miles off Bass Harbor on Mount Desert Island and only accessible by ferry or boat. About 350 people live on the island year round, sustained by a lobster fishery. During the summer, there are about 1000 people on the island.

We took a mooring in Burnt Coat Harbor (we're sure there must be a story behind this name.) The harbor is well protected from all points and has a few mooring balls for visitors. First-come-first-served, you pick up a green mooring ball and tie up, placing $25 in a floating empty soda bottle that is attached to the mooring line.

We took the dinghy to the Fisherman's Co-op landing, using our new Torqeedo electric motor. It’s so quiet and easy to use and no stinky gasoline tanks. We walked a bit discovering that “town” is about 2 miles from the harbor and the island’s only store closed at 5 pm, minutes before we landed. 

While at Swans Island we were joined by the schooner J&E Riggin. A dozen passengers were on board for a windjammer cruise along the coast of Maine. 

We continue to encounter our nemesis – weather forecasting. We set our plans to return to Cross Island National Wildlife Refuge, but Marine Weather predicted storms and seas that were not appealing. We bailed on our plans and cruised around less-remote areas. The weather turned out to be beautiful and the predicted weather never materialized. We’ve found Maine's weather to be as variable as Florida – from overcast to sun, sun to fog, warm to chilly, fog to rain. As they say back home, "if you don’t like the weather - just wait a bit, it will change”. We’ve come to accept only trusting the weather we are in and know that the NWS is better at weather history than forecasting.

Cruising from Swans Island up the fabled Eggemoggin Reach we passed more of the windjammer fleet. They are beautiful, huge ships that look like they would be fun. 

 

In Belfast, we enjoyed walking along the scenic historic town and visiting the local farmers' market. We enjoyed more good restaurants and Maine ice cream. Though our boat was rocking with each passing boat, it’s good to be tied up at a dock. The Front Street Shipyard has the biggest travel lift we have ever seen and a large footprint of repair services. That’s a good thing for the enormous pleasure yachts and commercial vessels we see plying the waters of Penobscot Bay. The Harborwalk path goes right through their operations. When there's a danger (like a boat launching), they block the footpath until it's completed.

Cruising around on short trips, it's interesting to see so many pleasure boats on the water and observe the extravagant homes built upon the rocky shore. Navigating the coast is easy with modern electronics with only a little underlying anxiety to know that, if you hit something, it will certainly be a rock. The greatest challenge, other than unexpected fog, is winding through fields of lobster pot buoys. Although we noted that Eggemoggin Reach and further up into Penobscot Bay seem to have fewer lobster buoys than we encounter on other trips.

With winter storage secured with the Journeys End Marina, we will be ready to return next year to resume cruising and apply what we’ve learned on this initial outing.  We are on a wait list for a slip at Journeys End. The Journeys End organization has far reaching investments from commercial fishing fleet operations as far away as Dutch Harbor Alaska to shipyards and fish processing facilities in Washington state. They look like they are professional and well regarded. In the meantime, we are hoping that we have our dockage secured for next summer at our present marina. It’s a very nice place and we get to see how the 1%ers live. Every day there seems to be at least one pleasure yacht of over 80’ docked here. Some have been 180 feet! It’s amazing watching these large vessels ease up to the dock!

Super Yacht "Silver Shalis" 160 ft - Our friend Ethan in The Bahamas has been on board her for dinner!

Name of the yacht is "Tamsen" flagged under Cayman Islands

It’s time to take a vacation from our vacation and return to the heat and humidity of Florida for a couple weeks for appointments and chores. But, hurricane season permitting, we will be back up to Rockland for some late summer and early fall cruising.

There's no place like home - but it's nice to visit other places.

Thanks for reading and Stay Safe!

08.02.2021