8/10/00 | Penobscot Bay

• 8/2-8/4 Rockland
• 8/5-8/6 Islesboro
• 8/7-8/8 Bangor
• 8/9 Castine
• 8/10 Searsport

blue skies smiling at me

It was a foggy ride to Rockland. As we passed among the many small islands in Muscongus Bay and Muscle Ridge, we could only see vague shapes of coastline and the edges of forests and towns. We passed the Rockland breakwater and anchored out beyond the immense mooring field.

The 53rd annual Maine Lobster Festival had just begun, and Rockland was hopping. The fair had been set up right at the public landing, so when we dinghied into town we were in the heart of it. The lobster dinners there seemed awfully pricy compared to buying them and cooking them ourselves, though, so we just listened to some musicians and looked at the marine displays. Thursday night, Willie Nelson headlined; we didn't pay for our seats aboard Windom, out in the harbor, but the acoustics were great.

We checked out the downtown, did laundry, and got our culture in at the Farnsworth Museum before heading on to the Seven Seas Cruising Association Down East Rendezvous in Broad Cove at Islesboro, a big island smack in the middle of Penobscot Bay. It was a nice windy afternoon until about five minutes after we hoisted sail. We coaxed Windom along for half an hour, then finally gave up and motored for a while. After an hour or so, the wind seemed like it was a consistent 6-8 knots from directly behind us. We hooked up the whisker pole and began the laborious process of setting it. By the time we got the sails set, the wind had increased to 12 knots and come around to our side, making the pole superfluous. Who are we to complain, as long as we could sail?  We enjoyed the rest of the trip to Islesboro, the first decent sail since Cape Cod.

At the SSCA gam, we pigged out on the potluck lunch while listening to Dodge Morgan, who set all kinds of records with his solo circumnavigation about fifteen years ago, read excerpts of his book punctuated with hilarious and profane anecdotes. The only people we knew when it started were our friends on Effie, but we finally met a lot of the voices we'd heard on the radio over the past year. Most liveaboard cruisers in the US are over-55 retirees, and (unsurprisingly) so are most members of the SSCA, but there were also a healthy handful of people around our age. Those of us too young to have grandchildren naturally gravitated to each other. (Not to put down the older folks, some of whom are interesting people with amazing amounts of cruising experience.) The best part of the whole day was that the sun actually shone!

The next day, the skies were unaccountably still blue and fog-free, so we bicycled around Islesboro with a couple of the other cruisers we had met. They whipped our butts. We hadn't had our bikes out since Block Island, and it showed. Islesboro is a lovely double-lobed island, hilly and forested. The northern lobe has modest houses and moored lobster boats; the southern lobe has the airstrip, the golf course, and John Travolta's summer home. We pushed on through both lobes and returned to the boat many calories lighter.

queen city of the east

The weather was too good to last, and true to form the fog closed in Sunday night. We awoke Monday morning with pea soup atmosphere and a plane to meet in Bangor. On went the radar, and we motored out. It's an eerie feeling to drive up a river not seeing either bank. Fortunately, there was almost no other traffic, and the fog thinned enough after we passed Bucksport so that we could at least see the buoys.

The Bangor Harbormaster sounded harried on the phone -- "You didn't make a reservation?  People usually call four to six weeks ahead. Bangor's jumping in the summer. Well, I'll see what I can do."  He called back later and told us he'd "fit us in" at on of the city's floating docks. Our dock turned out to be conveniently located behind the Sea Dog brewpub, so naturally we had to have a burger and a local beer.

There were a few other boats there when we arrived, but we didn't see any of them actually move during the few days we were there, nor did we see anyone arrive or depart, and we suspect the harbormaster was indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. Bangor's boom days were in the middle of the 19th century, when it was the lumber capital of the world (and everyone needed lumber). Elegant granite and brick buildings stand vacant in a downtown that looks like it belongs in a much bigger city. The days when 200 ships crowded the waterfront are long gone. But plans are in the works for a redeveloped harbor, so maybe one day Bangor will be worth the long slog up the Penobscot River.

We were in Bangor to pick up Britt's brother Clay, whose plane arrived a mere three hours late, and we left the next morning on the tide. The sky became more overcast as we proceeded downriver, but it never got foggy, so we were able to see the scenery as we hadn't on the upstream trip. Lush forests and craggy granite lined the river, with small houses peeking out here and there. We passed a few small towns, with riverfront industry and a few boats on moorings.

A chilly rain began to fall shortly before we got to Bucksport. We anchored outside the moorings and I made a pot of lentil soup for lunch (and to heat up the cabin); we hung out and read a while, and in less than an hour the rain stopped. We dropped the dinghy and headed across the river to Fort Knox, making for the shallow basin, probably once dredged for big ships but now forgotten, at the base of the lower fortification. We carefully ascended the huge stone steps, now slimy with seaweed, tied the dinghy to an old iron ring set in the granite rim, and entered the fort through the "back door".

This is not the Fort Knox where the gold is stockpiled, but they are both named for Henry Knox, Boston patriot and the first Secretary of War, who retired to Maine. This fort was designed to protect Bangor and the northern US border, as Canada was a hostile power -- i.e., part of Great Britain -- in the early 1800's. Work began in 1844 and ended in 1869, with the fort still unfinished but already obsolete. This didn't matter much, since the Penobscot River was not threatened during either the Civil War or the Spanish-American War, the two periods of military activity at the fort. We poked around the rooms and the battlements, all in terrifically good shape considering their age. The massive hunks of Maine granite obviously required a lot of labor to cut and place.

That evening we anchored in a little cove near Castine, and the next morning we had a fun but short sail to Searsport, where we visited the Penobscot Marine Museum. The museum was a treat, with exhibits on the 19th century coastal and seafaring life, model ships of all sorts, and paintings with maritime themes. We all loved the short movie, "Around the Horn," filmed in 1929 by a teenage seaman aboard a square-rigged cargo ship, and narrated by him some sixty years later. The black-and-white film was a window into a long-gone world. Wiry sailors scurried up the rigging without safety gear, while the captain speared fish over the side to the cheers of the crew. The guy who made the film dragged that camera around all over the ship in the worst weather, climbing the mast with it during storms which washed the decks with huge waves and dunked the 50-foot-high bowsprit.