Coastal Cruising: Bay Breeze & Aquavit

A spectacular sunset from our dock at the Safe Harbor Marina in Rockland   Down East to Mount Desert Island   When the weather window opens you go through it. Such was the case for leaving Rockland to take a short cruise over to Mount Desert Island and poke around a bit in Acadia National Park.    It’s a mere 35 miles from Rockland to Southwest Harbor as the crow flies, but the navigable route is more like 50. A good bit of it is stressful through fields of lobster buoys. We broke up the trip by staying at Isle au Haut. There is a narrow channel at Isle au Haut that is called a “thorofare”. These cracks in the rock islands provide shortcuts between the larger water bodies and provide safe sheltered places to anchor.   We picked up a free guest mooring ball to spend a quiet night off Flake Island across from a private club.  Only 92 folks are full time residents of Isle au Haut and their livelihood is tied to the sea and summer vacation homes.  Hal...

St. Croix River, Calais, Maine      Back to Maine - Safe Harbor Marina, Rockland AQUAVIT is often blocked in by visiting mega yachts.  Foreign flagged to evade US taxes? Good to see the cats. Lady Marmalade happy to see us .   We took a break from our Maine adventure to return to Tallahassee; we missed the heat and humidity – HA! After a week or so at home, we left Tropical Storm Fred in our wake to head north back to Maine. We had no damage from the storm even though its landfall was 150 miles to the west of us. It was a minimal tropical storm, unlike Hurricane Michael that came ashore in the same area in 2018 and did so much damage to Mexico Beach.   We hurried north to Rockland because another tropical storm was headed to the northeast U.S. Henri was projected to glance off of the Maine coast as a tropical depression. Instead, Tropical Storm Henri came ashore on the Connecticut coast and hung around raining on Massachusetts for a few days. We had tied up...