The last week has been full of high points and low points, both literal and figurative. It also saw our farthest point downeast, as we've decided that it's time to turn around and start heading south and west.
We lucked out with good visibility and a sailing breeze for our trip from Somes Sound to Bar Harbor. First, we motored the rest of the way up the sound to check out Somes Harbor at its tip, since we wanted to visit it later; we then turned around and put up the sails for what turned out to be far from a straightforward downwind run down Somes Sound. The fjord funnels the wind, so the wind tends to parallel the shoreline, which is of course not straight. The sails went first on one side, then the other; we tried wing-and-wing, jib only, main held out wide and jib flopping, main sheeted in and jib pulling, trying desperately to keep up with the shifting wind direction. The windspeed fluctuated rapidly between 4 and 21 knots as we passed through wide and narrow parts of the sound. Alternately drifting and zooming, we finally made it out of the sound, then set our course counterclockwise along the coast of Mount Desert Island.
It
was a beautiful sail in 12-18 knots, past harbors filled with moored
boats, past lighthouses and vacation homes, cliffs and pine-covered
knolls. A sailboat race was in progress, and we sailed downwind
through the competitors beating up the channel toward us, heeled hard
over with fancy sails sheeted in tight. Sunlight winked from the
windows of the unending stream of tourist cars along the Acadia
National Park loop road, and when we trained the binoculars on the
rocky beaches we could see dozens of shivering people in swimsuits.
Above it all loomed the granite peaks of Mount Desert.
Bar Harbor is in a beautiful setting, surrounded by a half-dozen high and wooded islands, but it turned out to be a great disappointment. The small section of the harbor that has a soft bottom is filled with moorings. Each time we dropped the anchor, it dragged across rocks and wouldn't dig in, so we finally paid for a city mooring for a few nights. What a rip-off: the place was rolly, the local lobstering fleet deliberately waked us (and woke us) at sunrise as they zoomed close by, there were no amenities (no showers, no email access), and they charged $25/night.
We wouldn't have been in Bar Harbor at all, except that we had to get Britt's brother Clay back to Bangor to catch his very-early-morning flight. Originally we'd planned to put him on a bus, but the schedules had changed, and we ended up needing to rent a car instead. The only place to rent a car was the airport, 12 miles out of town. Fortunately, the Island Explorer (the great free bus service around Mount Desert Island, which was inaugurated last year) got us there; unfortunately, there is a 10% tourism tax plus a 10% airport concession tax on car rentals, so it felt like another rip-off.
We
made the best of it, though. That evening we drove up Mount Cadillac,
at 1530 feet the "highest on the east coast" (I guess it depends on
how you define "coast"!). Cadillac's broad granite summit was
crawling with tourists, almost all lazy bums like us who'd driven
up.
The next morning we rose with the lobstering fleet and drove Clay to the Bangor airport, then headed north up I-95 to Baxter State Park, home of Mount Katahdin (also called Baxter Peak), the highest mountain in Maine and terminus of the Appalachian trail. We bought a berry identification book at park headquarters and meandered up a trail on Katahdin's flank, stopping frequently to identify plants (sometimes nibbling at their berries) and to take in the great views. It was fun taking a side trip to see a little more of the state than just the coast.
On the trail we chatted a little with another hiker, a man from Virginia who was on a road trip vacation. Two nights ago he'd been on Mount Desert, last night was spent at the campground at the foot of the trail, and he hoped to make a hundred road miles before stopping at a motel that evening. Talking with him reminded us of how fortunate we are to be able to explore at the slow pace of a sailboat, to spend as much or as little time in a place as we choose, subject only to the vagaries of the weather.
It was a good thing we'd had such a lovely day for our sail to Bar Harbor, because we had dense fog for our return trip around the southeastern edge of the island, and didn't see a thing until we neared the entrance to Somes Sound. Friends of ours were leaving a mooring in Valley Cove (the anchorage just inside the sound where we'd spent two nights before going to Bar Harbor) so we grabbed it as they left.
The
weather continued to improve in the afternoon, so we decided to go
hiking. The mooring we'd snagged was near Man o'War Brook, a steep
and rocky stream where British naval ships once took on drinking
water; we tied our dinghy to a chockstone and then carefully
scrambled up the slick granite to the trail above. The trail led us
over rocky ledges (more scrambling) to the summit of Acadia Mountain.
From the top we could see Somes Sound, and our tiny little sailboat
below us in Valley Cove. A glacial lake stretched along the other
side of the peak, like the other lakes on Mount Desert long and
north-south skinny. Somes Sound itself only avoided being Somes Lake
by breaking through the bar to join the ocean at its southern
end.
The next day we sat out a rainy morning aboard, then continued the few miles to Somes Harbor. We found a place to anchor among the moored boats, but later were told that most of the moorings are available for free for visitors. We're still not used to this northeast mooring culture.
The weather improved dramatically overnight, and we awoke to clear blue skies with no hint of humidity in the air. A perfect day to bicycle the famous carriage roads of Acadia National Park. Like anything really worthwhile, though, we had to go through great trials and tribulations to get there. First, we discovered that my front tire was flat. I'd gotten a flat toward the end of our last ride, on Islesboro, and although I'd fixed it then, I apparently hadn't done a good enough job. The necessity of dealing with a flat tire right at the beginning of the day threw me into a horrible mood; I was about ready to throw the bike into the water (and Britt was about ready to throw me in after it). After we got the tube patched again, we headed for the carriage roads. Unfortunately, the nearest one was about four miles away -- four miles of unshaded narrow two-lane highway with lots of fast cars and heavy trucks zooming by. Yuck.
We finally got to one of the carriage roads, and my mood steadily improved as we left the traffic behind. Built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the 20's and 30's, these gravel roads crisscross the park, gently switchbacking up mountains and circling around lakes. They are open to bikes, hikers, and horses, but not to cars. We connected segments of the various roads more or less randomly, trying to cover as much territory as we could without backtracking.
We pedaled through the cool forest, occasionally breaking out into the open where we admired the views, sometimes of coastline and ocean, sometimes of mountain peaks. We also stopped to admire the bridges we rode over; Rockefeller designed sixteen stone-faced bridges for the carriage road system, each unique in design, each curved and arched to fit its place. At beautiful Eagle Lake we sat on a perfectly bench-shaped rock at the water's edge, and picnicked on homemade (boat-made!) bread with sausage and cheese, figs and apples.
We continued to the park visitor's center, which turned out to be mostly a gift shop in disguise, and then followed another carriage road to the outskirts of Bar Harbor where we treated ourselves to huge ice cream cones. Having learned our lesson in the morning, we didn't ride back on the highway, but instead put our bikes and ourselves on the free Island Explorer bus, which took us right to Somesville.
The
following day we motored through typically fluky and light winds to
East Cove on Long Island. There are about twenty Long Islands in
Maine; this one is frequently called Frenchboro after the town on its
other end, where we had stopped for lunch last week. On this visit we
were after the blueberry bushes on the island's uninhabited eastern
end. It turned out to be a total bust, as they had already been
picked clean by previous visitors and the local deer. Our
disappointment was somewhat abated by the next day's fantastic sail,
north to Blue Hill in the southwest winds that Down East is famous
for (but which we've seen only rarely). We took the sails down only
when we got to the tricky entrance, successfully motoring through the
slalom course between the buoys and the rocks, past the
Kolledgewidgwok Yacht Club to
the inner harbor where we anchored amid the usual collection of
moored boats.
When you live a normal, non-nomadic lifestyle, and have mail delivery six days a week, you can deal with life's administrative details as they happen; if something goes wrong, you can fix it right away. When you're a cruiser, things are a bit different. Every time we pick up our mail, I spend an hour or so reconciling all our accounts, updating our financial information and making sure that all bills are paid. Since we get our mail more or less monthly, problems can accumulate for weeks before we find out about them.
Our Visa credit card is automatically paid in full each month from one of our savings accounts. We keep track of all purchases and make sure that there's enough money in that account to cover the bill, transferring funds if necessary from our other accounts. This has worked with no slip-ups until just this past month, when we found out that we had nearly $2000 more in charges than we'd expected, which was $1000 more than available in the account. The automatic transfer failed, we got a stiff bounced-check fee on the savings account, and the credit-card bill started accumulating interest.
During our most recent boat outfitting spree in June, we bought lots of stuff at a West Marine, and many items had to be ordered from the warehouse or manufacturer. Sometimes they charged us when they ordered the equipment, sometimes when we picked it up, and -- as we discovered by carefully going through our bill -- sometimes both. Only a small part of the missing money was due to being double-charged, though. Most of the error was ours: since we kept track of purchases by entering receipts into our computer accounting program, Quicken, if we didn't get a receipt, that purchase wasn't counted. In usual no-receipt situations, like restaurants and laundromats, we jot a note to remind us about the amount, but credit-card transactions almost always produce a slip. Several large special orders were charged to our credit card with no transaction slip, and in the multitude of actual paper receipts these no-receipt transactions were overlooked. Only when we went through the equipment list we'd prepared for our shopping spree did we find the discrepancies.
Murphy's law being in effect, the day we untangled this financial mess happened to be while we were in an anchorage where, due to the mountains all around, our cell phone service was non-existent. Ultimately I gathered up our notes and made my way to a pay phone, where several 800-number calls got the situation more or less straightened out. We're going to have to eat the $300 of double charges, since we don't have receipts to prove them, but the credit card company waived late and finance charges.