Seven nights off the dock

The time had finally arrived for our week long sailing vacation. After a morning of provisioning at the farmers’ market, we finally got underway around 2pm on Saturday August 17th.

With the late start we decided to do a short trip to the Goslings, since we knew how to get there and knew we loved the location from our previous overnight there. Besides a small scare that we had lost steering as we approached the anchorage, it was a beautiful sail. We ‘lost’ steering because Stumpy (the autopilot) was steering, and forgetting that Stumpy had the helm we were flummoxed that we were unable to turn the wheel more than 5 degrees in either direction.

This was the first trip that we have really used Stumpy (besides the delivery 2+ months ago) so its understandable that we didn’t realize he was engaged, but it was a scary couple of minutes before we figured it out!

We picked up a mooring at the Goslings, as with the colder weather there were not many other boats around and lots of empty moorings. After some delicious blueberry pancakes the next morning, and letting the fog clear, we spent the day paddle boarding and cleaning the bottom of the boat. She was filthy! Ben scrubbed the underwater parts from in the water, and I cleaned the water line from on the paddleboard. I also took the flaking varnish off of our rub rail. We stayed a second night at the Goslings, briefly explored one of the islands in the morning and then headed off into the fog for our next destination.

We headed through the thickest fog we have seen yet toward Cundy’s Harbor, another place we had been before. The AIS was super helpful in locating other boats on the water, as we could only see about 100ft for most of the trip. The wind was also very uncooperative and we motor sailed most of the way. There was maybe an hour (out of the 4 of the trip) that we got to turn off the engine and sail!

By the time we got up the bay it was closing on dinner time, so we decided to pick up the mooring at Bear Island instead of continuing to the Basin which had been the original plan. We ended up spending 2 nights at Bear Island, visiting with our friends on shore and enjoying the protected harbor and beautiful sunsets, but not enjoying the mosquitoes! Thankfully we had recently found our full enclosure bug net to keep them out!

We took off first thing Wednesday morning heading further up the coast. Again we had little to no wind, and ended up motor sailing most of the way, but it was a trip full of wildlife! We saw at least 10 sunfish basking in the sun, multiple pods of porpoises, a few seals and lots of sea birds.

Ben jumped right into the water to dive on the anchor, but the water was VERY cold and murky so he wasn’t able to see the anchor or dive for long enough to find it. Knowing the bottom was muddy we were pretty confident that we weren’t going to drag. We did get a new ‘Anchor Watch’ App and set it so it would let us know if we dragged.

The alarm went off Every. Hour. Overnight – not because we were dragging, but because it lost the GPS signal….. it was a long night. While we did swing all the way around, we didn’t drag at all.

We woke up to super thick fog, we could barely see the water alongside the boat it was so thick. Perfect morning to do laundry! We got out some buckets and soap and our bag of laundry and headed to the fore-deck to wash. The whole family helped out and it went pretty quickly.

After getting the chores out of the way we headed to shore to explore Indiantown Island. Half of the island is owned by a local land trust, the other half is private. There is a loop trail on the ‘public’ part and a straight trail through the private part that you are allowed to hike. We decided to just do the almost 1 mile loop on the public side of the island.

It was beautiful and there were lots of opportunities to put my Masters Degree to work and teach the kids about forest ecology! Boat school turned shore-school for the afternoon!

After we got back from our hike we had to decide where to go next. We thought about going around the corner to Boothbay, but decided not to spend money on a mooring and went up-river to Wiscasset instead.

Sailing UP a river was pretty neat…until we came to the field of lobster pot doom. It was pretty high tide as we headed up, and there were SO MANY buried pots! I was on bow watch with Ben at the helm as we attempted to dodge the pots we could see (and the ones we couldn’t). We did end up hitting a group of 3 pots that were tangled together and about 5ft UNDER the surface. I saw them as they went under the bow and Ben tried to turn away but they did hit the keel and propeller. Luckily they didn’t catch – they were SO deep that we hit the actual buoy and not the ropes.

We anchored across the bay from the town dock and hopped into the dinghy to go ashore to a populated location for the first time in 6 days! The outboard started right up…and then died. And wouldn’t restart.

We were all bummed, but being determined I declared that I would row us across the bay, as long as the oars could be extended. Our dinghy doesn’t have a central seat so we grabbed Trixie’s white stool for me to sit on, and Ben was able to figure out how to extend the very short oars so I could row normally. (On the way to Indiantown Island earlier I had rowed with short oars, it was awkward.)

It didn’t take too long to row across the bay, and we brought the outboard along, hoping it might have time to think about how it wasn’t working and help us out on the way back. After a great dinner and some ice cream we headed back to the dinghy with fingers crossed. As the sun began to set and the bugs came out we were really hoping for an outboard miracle.

No. Such. Luck.

Resigned to rowing back while swatting mosquitoes and fighting the outgoing tide we set off. I got us as far across the bay as we needed to go before being too exhausted to go on, the only problem was we were about 500ft down river from the boat. The outgoing tide had pushed us out as I rowed across. Ben took a turn, but fighting the current was impossible alone. So we each took an oar, took them out of the oarlocks, and canoe-rowed our dinghy, using all of the strength we had, against the current, directly upstream to get home.

It was exhausting!

We all ran directly below to get out of the bugs and put the kids right to bed.

The next morning we got up, and having already prepared the boat the night before, took right off. We wanted to ride the outgoing tide down the river so we weren’t fighting the current. We went back through the lobster pot field of doom. As it was mid-tide this time it was a bit easier to avoid the sunken pots – at least the ones we could see.

We were headed for Seguin island, which we had passed on the way into the Sheepscot river a few days before. Seguin has a lighthouse that you can hike to, free overnight moorings, and the oldest wooden tramway in the state of Maine (for lighthouse use only, but we wanted to see it.) Unfortunately by the time we got there, directly behind two other boats, all the moorings were full (there are only 5) and anchoring is prohibited. So we had to change our plans and we kept heading back down the coast.

Deciding that Snow Island would be our destination, we mostly motored there (the wind was right on our nose) but we did get to use the sails a bit. As disappointed as we were to miss Seguin island this time, we ended up really enjoying Snow Island and Quahog Bay.

We anchored for the 3rd night, did some swimming and paddleboarding before turning in for the night. Unfortunately, we had anchored a bit closer to some rocks than I was comfortable with (the chart plotter said we had plenty of room, but they looked so close at 10:30pm with a spotlight off the side) so I didn’t get much rest that night. We set the Anchor Watch again, and the winds were predicted to be coming only out of the North, meaning we wouldn’t be spinning, but I was still nervous. We ended up moving very little during the night, and didn’t come anywhere close to the rocks, but if we return we will anchor further away.

While we were sad to not explore the island at Snow, we left early the next morning to start heading back home. We thought we might stop at Eagle Island, then we thought about stopping at Jewell, then we thought about stopping at Cow, but ultimately we ended up sailing all the way home. The winds were very favorable for the whole trip and Tristan asked if we could just keep sailing all day. We got home right around 5pm after a long and wonderful day of sailing.

We sailed most of the way home with just our Mizzen and our Staysail flying. We had been having troubles with the Yankee (see the next post to find out why!) and had left the main down in the heavier winds of the early morning. We did end up raising the main for the last couple hours through Casco Bay as the winds lightened.

We had a lot of family time, giggles, stories, delicious food (all cooked by Ben, I got a WHOLE SEVEN DAYS off from cooking!) fun adventures, new sailing conditions and got to see lots of new places. It was a great week all around!