Everyone tells us it has been an unusually cool, wet, and windless summer here in Maine. This, of course, is small consolation when we're damp and shivering and motoring from one place to the next. So now that we're heading back south, the skies have been blue much of the time, and the prevailing winds have, at season's end, finally begun to prevail.
This theoretically means winds on the nose as we head more or less southwest. But we've actually been able to sail more now than we did on our way east, since our course zigzags along the coast, and in any event the wind has been anything but constant in both force and direction. Over the past week, we've been on just about every point of sail. We've beat into it, reached across it, and spread the sails wing-and-wing for a downwind glide.
Mornings are usually flat calm. The boat is covered with dew and the glassy water is covered with fine white mist, both dissipating as the sun strengthens. Sometimes the mist is enough to trigger the foghorns, their low calls echoing the occasional caws of birds on nearby islands. The bass note of the morning music is the drone of lobster boats, every day but Sunday, when lobstering is prohibited and silence reigns.
We tend to leisurely mornings, since we never have very far to go and would just as soon wait for the wind. Usually we have breakfast around 8 and then do our SSB radio nets: the Cruiseheimer's Net on 8152 kHz at 8:30, and what we've dubbed the "Portsmouth Net" -- us and four other boats who are all from Portsmouth, New Hampshire -- at 9 a.m. We listen to the weather on VHF and construct a route to our next destination. Usually we're underway by 10:30, but occasionally we don't get the anchor up until noon.
While we wait for the wind to come up, we do chores or explore our surroundings. Our last morning in Blue Hill, we dinghied in to town and hiked up the eponymous Blue Hill. The town dock muds out at low tide, and we got moving at about two hours after high; we figured we had two hours to make the roundtrip, a distance of about five miles and just under 1000 vertical feet, before the tide would strand us in town for four more hours. We set a brisk pace and made the summit in about an hour, even with a few breaks for enjoying the views. The old fire tower at the top was (amazingly) open, so we climbed the steps for an even better view[*] of Blue Hill Bay and Mount Desert Island, then raced back down to meet our deadline.
The morning calm doesn't last long. Eventually, the sun warms the land, the land heats the air, and the warm air rises. Cool sea air rushes in to fill its space. By mid-morning, the breeze is usually up to eight knots, roughly from the southwest. But Maine's coast squiggles back and forth, and falls apart in cascades of islands at the edges, so any given bit of sea air may go in just about any direction.
Sailing from Blue Hill to Mackerel Cove took us by many large islands, and each seemed to bend the wind in a different direction. We sailed to the wind rather than trying to keep a course, trying to make as much south as we could in the light southwesterly breeze. Every once in a while the wind would drop to under 2 knots, then restart from a totally different direction, slowly increasing and swinging back around to the southwest. When this happens, the sails just flop around uselessly, and once we ended up doing an "accidental tack" when the jib backwinded -- we just pulled the sheet over to the other side to complete the tack, since we had been planning on tacking soon anyway! Despite the fluky wind, it was a wonderful sail, in part because Blue Hill Bay is, astonishingly, almost devoid of lobster pots. What a pleasure to be able to look at the scenery instead of having to watch for and avoid trap floats!
The
wind tends to build through the afternoon, and a day that began with
no hint of a breeze may see twenty knots and reefed sails by three
p.m. Even if it's sunny, the wind cools things down a lot, and it's
usually downright cold in the cockpit, but the sailing is a blast.
Heading up Eggemoggin Reach (another of those delicious Maine place
names!) we had the wind on the port beam, and we zipped along at a
great pace. It was Saturday, and "The Reach" was wall-to-wall sails.
We are proud to report that nobody overtook us, and we passed two
other boats (although one was an Island Packet towing a big console
dinghy with a 35 hp outboard, which we must admit is an unfair
handicap).
After the anchor's down and the drinks are poured, the wind usually slacks off. We may sit in the cockpit or explore the nearby shoreline, but we are careful to be back inside, screens up, by dusk, when ravenous clouds of mosquitos stalk unwary cruisers. By the time we crawl under the covers, the water is a still, glassy black mirror.
A
highlight of our trip (quite literally!) was a visit to Seguin
Island, site of the highest elevated lighthouse in Maine, at 186 feet
above sea level. The light is also the second oldest in Maine,
commissioned in 1795 by George Washington, and the only light in
Maine with a first-order Fresnel lens (the highest magnification),
making it one of the brightest lights on the coast. The light was
automated in 1985; four years later the island and structures were
leased, and last year they were given, to the nonprofit Friends of
Seguin Island (FOSI), which maintains the buildings and trails and
operates a small museum in the lighthouse building.
The island itself is high and rocky and covered with wildflowers and grasses. Anchoring is prohibited in the one semi-protected cove, but there are several moorings which were put in by the Coast Guard and by FOSI, which are available for free to boaters. Most visitors just make it a day stop since the cove is rolly, but we had so much fun we stayed for two nights.
After
dinking to shore, we hiked up the trail to the lighthouse, where
Jenn, one of this year's caretakers, greeted us and let us inside the
museum. The exhibits covered the history of Seguin Light, from its
past days when several families lived and worked together year-round
to maintain the light, through its years as a Coast Guard facility,
to its present status as an automated light with a seasonal
caretaker. We then went up the tower, where we learned about the
light's operation and admired the 12-foot high Fresnel lens.
Britt and I decided we needed to stretch our legs, so Jenn directed us to one of the many trails where, she assured us, there were bunches of blackberries. After a scenic and delicious hike, we returned to the lighthouse around 5:30. Jenn and her husband Rick were chatting outside, and since they were around our ages, and Jenn had been such a super tour guide, we invited them down to our boat for drinks.
We ended up spending the entire evening together. Jenn and Rick are former liveaboard cruisers, so we had lots to talk about. After five years aboard, they moved ashore in Key West, although they still have their sailboat and plan to do more cruising, and they still resist the conventional life. They found the job at Seguin in a newsletter for caretakers, and were chosen out of 60 couples partly, they feel, because as former cruisers they understand boaters, are self-reliant, and are accustomed to spending a lot of time alone surrounded by water! They are paid $75 a week for their work maintaining and repairing the buildings, mowing the lawns, keeping the trails clear, and giving tours. Every Wednesday morning they are picked up (there's no boat kept at the island) and brought to town for a few hours so they can shop and run errands.
The next morning, after a breakfast of blackberry pancakes, Britt and I went back up to the lighthouse, where Rick and Jenn gave us a tour of their half of the building. The house part of the lighthouse is a duplex which used to house two families when Seguin was manned full-time; now half is the museum and half the caretakers' quarters. The house is on the rustic side, as there is no heat or flush toilet, and the running water is not potable (they get jugs of drinking water on their trips to town). Rick mentioned that the head of FOSI was coming out to supervise a repair job on the trestle railway which is used to pull heavy materials to the top of the hill, and invited Britt to stay and help. (Unfortunately the FOSI man was unwilling to delegate tasks, so Rick and Britt spent most of the day standing around watching a small part of the job s-l-o-w-l-y get done.)
Meanwhile,
Jenn and I baked zucchini bread and talked each other's ears off.
Rick and Jenn's caretaking stint is up on September 9th, but both
their garden and their pantry are overflowing with more than they
have room to take with them. Over my token protest (my arm didn't
need too much twisting), Jenn packed a huge bag for us with things
she swore she didn't want: boxes of tea, cans of soup, carrots
and yellow squash from the garden. When visitors came and she went
off to do the tour guide thing, I sat out on the porch and read
through the caretakers' log from a few years ago, when a couple from
Colorado were the Seguin caretakers. The log was filled with stories
of daily life on the island: garden triumphs and failures,
belligerent boaters and friendly ones, dead seals washed up on the
beach, foggy days and cold nights. Rick and Jenn had similar stories
to tell. They all resonate with us, echoes of the cruising life, but
the world coming to you rather than the other way around. Maybe one
year, we'll be lighthouse keepers for a summer.
After the day's visitors had left, Jenn and I went for a hike while Britt and Rick gathered mussels and checked the few lobster traps that the caretakers run. Success! The four of us ate a magnificent meal of steamed lobsters and mussels with our last bottle of red wine and a salad fresh from the Seguin Island garden, then played Hearts until it was way past our bedtimes.
Our last stop in Maine was the Harraseeket River, in Casco Bay near Portland. The Dunns, who we visited when we came to Portland, keep their boat Effie on a mooring there, and they arranged for us to use a vacant mooring. We had had a few things shipped to the Dunns, which we needed to pick up, and we also just wanted to see them again, since they are back at work after their cruising year, and will not be heading south with us this winter.
The Harraseeket is the "port" in South Freeport, which is just a few miles from Freeport, which (as anyone who's ever received their catalog knows) is the home of L. L. Bean, mega-retailer of outdoorsy stuff. Bean's retail store in Freeport is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year -- they've closed twice ever, both times for three hours: once for founder Leon Leonwood Bean's funeral, and once for John F. Kennedy's funeral. The store operates a free shuttle from the waterfront so that visiting boaters can go spend their little hearts out.
We hadn't been consumers in a while, so we called for a pick-up and were taken to Freeport. About a hundred outlet stores and other retailers line the streets; the town has the feel of a giant outdoors shopping mall. The "anchor store", of course, is Bean's huge building, and we duly spent some time and money there before distributing our plastic to a variety of merchants.