When you're trying to go southwest in a place where the prevailing wind is from the southwest, any fair wind is fair game. So when the forecast was for 15-20 knots from the northeast, we slipped out of the Harraseeket early Saturday morning and headed out to sea.
The wind was directly behind us, a difficult point of sail, and as soon as we got out of the protection of Casco Bay, the waves started tossing us around. The morning wind was less than 10 knots, and we were not making great headway, so we discussed turning back for somewhere near Portland and waiting for another day. Just as we were about to turn, the wind piped up. Our speed increased to a respectable pace, so we gritted our teeth and continued on.
There's a lot of mythology out there about how wonderful it is to sail downwind. I don't know any cruiser who really likes it! In protected waters it's great -- we've had some amazing downwind runs, including a great day last week in Blue Hill Bay -- but if there's any sea running, it's hard on the equipment and hard on the body. With sails spread wing and wing (jib and main on opposite sides), the boat can only be pointed a small bit off dead downwind before one or the other sail backwinds. As the waves slew the boat, the sails flop around, doing the "fill and spill" dance. But it's worse when the wind is just a little off, because then the sails can't be both set. If we set the jib normally on the lee side, the main steals all the air and the jib flops uselessly. If we pole out the jib upwind, it still backwinds when we slide across the waves, which slows us down and is hard on the sails. At one point the jib flapped so badly that one of the reinforcing patches tore -- our first "sail injury" so far.
We experimented every which way, finally settling on sailing on the jib alone. That doesn't drive us very fast unless we have a lot of wind, but since we had18-24 knots, we made decent speed, even though we were still wallowing back and forth in the fat waves. It was like a carnival ride (the kind your mom won't let you go on, because she knows better) and both of us were a little queasy. In fact, I felt more seasick than I ever have before -- not quite throwing-up-sick, but definitely gee-I-don't-feel-too-hot seasick. It was cloudy and cold, which made things worse. Later, talking to friends who have lived in Portsmouth for many years, we learned that the stretch between Portsmouth and Portland is frequently lumpy and unpleasant, particularly when bound southwest. (We'd had flat foggy calm on the way up, so we escaped taking our lumps.)
It was a pleasure to get out of the wind and into the Piscataqua River, where things magically settled down. We headed for the protected Back Channel, where our Portsmouth friends had told us about a free mooring (Ted Brown Memorial Mooring -- thanks, Ted, whoever you are!) which we grabbed gratefully.
The
next day we were both still a little groggy from our sixty-plus miles
in the Atlantic washing machine. Sometime after lunch, we managed to
muster up enough energy to do a very little bit of sightseeing,
taking the dinghy over to a nearby dock on the Kittery, Maine side,
then walking about 3/4 mile to Fort McClary. This fort, like
Fort Knox near Bangor, was never completed
because advances in weaponry in the mid-19th century made it
obsolete.
We finally made it officially into New Hampshire the following day, dinghying past the submarines docked at the Portsmouth Naval Station and across the Piscataqua to the city dock at Prescott Park (which used to be the red-light district until it was cleaned up and turned into a pretty waterfront park). Portsmouth, like many other northeastern cities such as Newport and Portland, is an old and historic city turned hip-funky-yuppie. Brick buildings house shops, which here seem to run to bead stores and artsy blown-glass galleries, and there seem to be enough restaurants to eat at a different one every night for a year. I was particularly impressed that we only saw two national chain stores in the central downtown.
The history of Portsmouth is presented in a unique way at the Strawbery Banke museum. This ten-acre spread of historic buildings and gardens, named for Portsmouth's original 17th-century name, was once the "Puddle Dock" neighborhood of Portsmouth. Most of the houses were built between 1750 and 1800, and continued to be lived in as the area changed from a waterfront center to an immigrant neighborhood, and finally to a run-down block of mostly rental houses. The neighborhood was on the verge of demolition when the museum was created to preserve it.
Interestingly, Strawbery Banke's restoration does not just focus on the oldest time period. Buildings are restored to various periods, and some to several at once: half of the Shapley house, built in 1795, is set up as old Mr. Shapley's home and dry-goods store, and the other half shows the duplex apartment that the building housed in the 1950s. A few of the buildings have actors in period costume -- Mr. Shapley, a wizened fellow with a long gray braid and severely cut dark clothes, was in his store, and when we said that we'd arrived by boat, he demanded a wharfage fee!
Some buildings showcase the restoration process and explain the construction techniques and styles of different eras. The terminology of construction and architecture is like another language. But by studying these exhibits intently, we have learned that a "common purlin" is a roof beam, not a bird, that you can rive clapboards with a froe, and most importantly, which is the mortise and which the tenon.
We
wandered from house to house and from century to century, stopping to
examine a display of 18th and 19th century craftsmen's tools in one
building, an exhibit on early 20th century immigrant life in another.
The admission fee is good for two days, and we needed all of it to
see the whole thing.
The wind died two hours after a promising start, so we motored the rest of the way to Salem. As usual, we found the harbor chock-full of moorings, but managed to anchor at the edge of one of the mooring fields. After a few days we moved to a slip at the Palmer Cove Yacht Club, since we needed the water and power to do a little maintenance work.
Salem is well known for the witch hysteria of the 17th century, and the town capitalizes on that fame; there are at least six different witch museums, every other storefront offers palm readings, aura divinations, or new-agey and occult merchandise, and a little witch on a broomstick decorates the local newspaper's logo (and the yacht club's burgee). We did indulge in a little witch-watching, but most of our touring was focused on Salem's maritime heritage.
The National Park Service operates a National Historic Site on the waterfront, where merchant ships once returned from the East Indies laden with tea, silk, and spices. Between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, Salem was a world-wide shipping center, and many fortunes were made here.
We also visited the Peabody Essex Museum and immersed ourselves in their extensive maritime history exhibits. Among the displays of figureheads, scrimshaws, and treasures from the Orient was a model and partial interior mock-up of Cleopatra's Barge -- the first American ocean-going ship built strictly as a pleasure yacht. This 83 foot hermaphrodite brig was built in 1816 for George Crowninshield Jr. He then sailed to Europe and cruised the Mediterranean Sea for six months, which makes him sort of the spiritual forbear of us cruising sailors.
We lucked out on our timing, since the Peabody Essex Museum was hosting a traveling exhibition of photographs from Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition. We had read several books on the expedition, including Shackleton's South, so we really appreciated and enjoyed those amazing photos. The dramatic and intense scenery, the visual documentation of the men's behavior in the face of incredible hardships, the difficulties involved in saving and preserving the glass plate photographs through the entire ordeal -- all combined with the artistry and skill of the photographer to make a truly unforgettable exhibit.
The museum shop sold various items related to the Shackleton exhibit, including small replicas of the medals struck each year to commemorate the surveying and marking of the geographic south pole (the marks move during the year since they are on top of snow and ice, and need to be re-sited). The 2000 medal bears the inscription, "To inspire and explore," but I thought the 1999 inscription more apt: "God what an awful place!"
