>It’s Monday morning and we are sitting aboard Pandora in a wonderful little cove about 15 miles north of Portland Maine, the Goslings. The fog is thick following a rainy night and it’s as peaceful as you can imagine without a ripple on the water. We headed out from Portland Yacht Club yesterday afternoon after jamming all of our stuff aboard from the car that Brenda brought along from New Jersey. We wanted to head someplace close by as we are heading back today to the club to view the fireworks aboard Frank and Gail’s SAGA Alcid. You know, the one that they sailed to the Med? Thought so.
So back to the question posed by the title of this post. Some time back two boat shoppers considering a SAGA 43 visited me and Brenda aboard Pandora to take a look at her as they were considering what sort of boat that they wanted to purchase. The questions were varied but as they planned to live aboard for several years while they got their cruising kitty in order, one of the big areas of discussion was “how much storage does she have?”. The answer is complex as perhaps the better question is “how much stuff to you have to have with you?”. They were trying to decide between a SAGA and an Island Packet, two different vessels entirely. I have spouted on and on about what a great boat Pandora is but it’s sufficient to say that she will certainly out perform most other boats her size and certainly will outrun an Island Packet, a design known for ruggedness but not speed. However, the Island Packet will certainly out perform a SAGA in the “store your stuff” department as they are a much wider and voluminous design.
So, how much *%$# can you put aboard Pandora? I am glad that you asked as I have been wondering too. Well, we certainly are putting her to test as we move aboard for two months in Maine. It seems to me that, as this photo illustrates, you can put a good deal of &%^$ on a SAGA 43.
And that’s just what Brenda brought along to meet up with me here in Portland. There is literally several tons of stuff aboard and we never seem to take anything off. It’s always a one way trip, it would seem.
Alas, there is order in life, at least aboard Pandora.
Did I mention that I raised Pandora’s waterline a full 2 inches over the winter? Thought so. So, will she still perform under sail? I guess the answer to that an other cosmic questions will have to wait until another post.
The trip across the Gulf of Maine was uneventful with almost no wind at all. Even now, at 10:00 we are motoring into a light breeze but it’s not from a good angle to put the sails up.
As we are headed to Portland we were never more than about 25 miles from shore but that’s still plenty far out to feel isolated and alone.
I have always enjoyed being out of sight of land and can still remember when we sailed out 20 cape cod catboat TAO out of Bridgeport CT. Sometimes we would head out on a hazy day and it was always a thrill for me when we couldn’t see land. I would imagine myself out on the ocean heading for some exotic place.
So, here I am nearly 30 years later writing this while off shore making what must be my 15th or 16th trip to Maine. A lot has changed for us and it’s still a thrill for me.
When I make a run to Maine I am always hopeful that we will see a whale or some other interesting creature and this trip wasn’t to disappoint. While we left the Cape Cod Canal at dusk we were in darkness long before we were over the areas frequented by whales. Besides, most of them tend to congregate east of our intended path.
However, this morning we saw, about a few hundred yards off, what was probably a finback whale. We didn’t get close enough to get a good photo but it was exciting, never the less.
What was even more exciting was a fin that appeared of in the distance, a fin that looked pretty chewed up. Thinking that it was an ocean sunfish, a slow swimming, very docile fish, we headed over for a closer look. With the engine barely ticking over so as to not alarm our quarry, we drifted over to see what we had discovered. As it turns out, we ended up right on top of an enormous shark. You tend to think of sharks as long and sleek but this one had enormous girth and had to have been 15 to 20 feet long. I don’t know what it was but I was mighty happy to be on the bow of Pandora and not in the water. It might have been a basking shark as I did see that it was spotted. This link is to some photos by those clearly quicker on the photo finger. Besides, there aren’t that many shark species that are this large.
I was so stupefied that I wasn’t able to get a shot into the water even though it wasn’t five feet from the bow and I was standing on the bow sprit, literally on top of the monster. So, you will have to settle for a shot of the fin. I can only imagine what sort of creature chews on the fin of a shark that big. I guess it would have to be an even bigger shark. Hmm…
Thinking that I would need my telephoto lens to get a good picture, it was way too close and much too big to get picture with the lens that I had.
The trip wasn’t all excitement though as I was able to enjoy a magnificent sunrise over glassy calm water. As I was on watch from 1:00 to 5:00 I was treated to sights that began with magnificent stars over head and no moon to light up the sky and obscure the view, followed by a gradual lightening in the east and finally treated to this wonderful sight as the sky brightened and the sun finally came to life .
Just as the sky began to brighten to the east.
Finally peaking up over the horizon
Ever higher, the day has begun.
Now we’re cooking with gas!!!
It’s hard to believe that it can be this calm in the ocean.
Motoring across a glass like sea gently breathing as the waves went under us.
We are now less than ten miles from our first waypoint since the canal as we begin to thread our way through the islands to make landfall at the Portland Yacht Club.
Brenda will be on her way too and tonight we will visit our friends to get ready for Monday’s Portland fireworks display. What better way to watch the show than from the deck of a boat?
>It’s 9:00 and we are about 5nm east of Watch Hill Passage (eastern Long Island Sound) and are on our way to Portland Maine. It’s hard to believe that we are finally under way after months of working on Pandora and planning for our summer aboard. My crew assembled in Mystic last evening, provisioned and had a nice dinner out prior to getting to bed. We arose early enough to watch the sun rise and at 7:00 headed out to Long Island Sound for the run to Portland Maine.
Pandora’s happy crew 5 miles south of Newport RI.
We have not been to Portland by boat yet so this will be a new experience for us. We will be hooking up with fellow SAGA owners Frank and Gail of Alcid who live in the area and are members of the club. It’s worth noting that they took Alcid to the Med some time ago and enjoyed sailing the waters from Gibraltar to Egypt for 7 seasons before having the boat shipped back to the states on a ship about a year ago.
Our landfall will be at the Portland Yacht Club, a few miles north of Portland proper. The cruising guide says that the club is the second oldest in the US, although I wouldn’t be surprised if other clubs claimed the same.
It’s a beautiful day out on Block Island Sound and while the winds are not sufficient for sailing (It’s always that that way when you are trying to make miles) It’s great to be out on the water.
A bit later on in the day, off of Newport RI, we spotted a magnificent yacht ICAP Leopard go by at an impressive pace. Out for a easy day of cruising, Leopard is a go fast world class racer that has participated in many events world wide. You too can charter Leopard for an afternoon of fun. Check out their website. If you really want to be wowed, take a look at some of their videos. And, if that’s not enough. They have a number of world records to boast about and they do on their website.
This was about as close as we got to Leopard.
How about this video of Leopard at speed on their record transatlantic?
I couldn’t resist putting in a video. How about this one of Lizard Light at the entrance of the English Channel.
Yes, putting this video in is a bit random but it is the finish line for races from NY Ambrose to England, a hotly contested route for as long as there have been boats crossing the Atlantic.
Well, back to our poky run to Maine. The plan is for us to catch the tide at the Cape Cod Canal at some point after it begins the flood so that we won’t be going against the current, which runs hard at nearly the speed of Pandora under power. That means that if we are with the current we will be making double digit speeds over the bottom as opposed to 2-3 knots if the tide and current are against us. As the canal is about 10 miles long that means that the trip will take about one hour with the help of the current or 3-4 hours if it’s against us.
If all goes well we should be pulling into the club mooring field at mid afternoon on Saturday.
Fisher’s Island marks the eastern end of Long Island Sound and while it is just a few miles from Stonington CT, it is part of New York State. Fishers, unlike Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket has been largely privately owned during it’s modern history so it’s development has been very carefully controlled by a small group of very powerful individuals. If you are lucky enough to visit the best way to get there is on a private boat. There is a ferry from New London but once you are on the island you are largely on private property. For our visit, we left Mystic and motored over the few miles as there wasn’t any wind. Our destination was West Harbor which is, incredibly enough, located at the western portion of the island on the north side. There are moorings for rent in the harbor just south of can #7 behind the reef. It’s well protected and very pretty. You can take your dink ashore at the yacht club and go for a walk. There’s a well stocked market about a half mile up the road if you turn right out of the yacht club lot. The club is host to a variety of boats from the most humble to this visitor while we were there to this massive yacht. Clearly, the folks on this island have the means to keep everything just so.
You can charter Gene Machine for your own cruise if you wish. She’s was built by Westport Yachts and is 130 feet long. I understand that there was a wedding the prior evening at the yacht club so perhaps the wedding party spent the night aboard. If you like the design there are 30 others similar to her so perhaps you can find one at a location around the world that suites your needs.
A nice shot of the clubhouse. It looks like the entire clubhouse and tent would fit aboard Gene Machine.
There isn’t much to do on the island except in the center of “town”, actually a town green and a few shops, is only a short walk from the harbor. Along the way is a wonderful cooperative garden that’s always a treat to visit.
The garden is very well tended and oviously gets a lot of care.
It’s impressive what money will allow when it’s not coupled with a stucco mansion as is sadly so often the case. As you would expect, there is also a very tasteful graveyard along the way.
It looks like there’s plenty of space still left so book your spot for your eternal resting spot.
In spite of our many visits to Fisher’s over the years we have never heard of or visited the Henry L. Ferguson Museum, a wonderfully organized collection of the history of the island. We were treated to a personal tour by the curator who spent nearly an hour with us showing us around. He was deservedly proud of his current exhibit that chronicles the early history of the island’s homes,in pictures, both then and now, from first settlement through the early 20s. There is also a nice newsletter that tells a lot about what’s going on at the museum and on the island. For such a modest museum, it’s obviously well endowed and the building itself is quite new. I understand that some involved in the layout of the museum are associated with major institutions on the scale of the Metropolitan in New York City and it shows.
This interactive map rotates to show archaeological sites and other areas of interest on the island.
There are some dioramas that are of very high quality, and certainly of a caliber than you would not normally expect in a museum of this scale.
There is also an very nice model of the Race Rock Light, which is located on the south western point of the island. This light itself has a fascinating history given the technical difficulties in building it. $3,000 was appropriated by Congress to begin construction of the light back in 1838 but it was not completed until 1878 at a total cost of nearly $280,000. The piece of water that it marks is particularly dangerous and is the site of countless wrecks. While it’s possible, I doubt that the lighthouse ever had a $100,000 toilet seat in it. However, with Congress holding the purse strings, who knows.
If you are interested in the history of this light, a long and complex one for sure, check this out.
The island, along with an early history of raising livestock, including cattle, sheep and even poultry in large numbers, is currently known for it’s terrific oysters. This is a shot of cages used to hold growing oysters for commercial sale. We wouldn’t want our oysters laying on the dirty, muddy bottom would we? Never!
Speaking of meals, what blog post isn’t better if it’s ended with a shot of a meal aboard. Here’s Brenda with a wonderful omelet ready to dive in. Visit Fishers’s, you won’t be disappointed.
Is it me or is the horizon tilted? Perhaps it’s the earth listing to port. Something else to worry about. Well, at least there are fresh flowers on the table. I guess that means that everything will work out in the end. Hmm…
>As I write this blog I am sitting aboard Pandora on a mooring in Mystic CT. It was truly a “saga” getting Pandora into the water and up here this year. It is very unusual for me to have not launched by Memorial Day weekend but this year was quite different. Actually, in 40 years of sailing this is the very first year when my boat wasn’t launched. However, it was for good reason. Sadly, Brenda’s father died about a week prior to the long weekend so we headed of to VA to help her mother and take care of many issues. It was a number of very tough weeks but things are getting back to normal and well, here I am, a few weeks later and Pandora is in Mystic and the summer of sailing is under way.
My good friend Roger, who’s SAGA, Ilene, is in Granada, yes the one near South America, now for the summer, agreed to help me bring Pandora up to Mystic last Friday. As the yard where I have been keeping her over the winter is on the other side of the RT95 highway bridge, with only 61′ of clearance at high water, I have to bring her under the bridge at low tide. By doing so, there is adequate clearance for her 63′, plus instruments, mast height.
Although I have brought Pandora under that bridge a number of times, my heart was firmly in my throat as I watch the mast pass within what seemed like inches. No, I was actually convinced that we were going to hit. Alas, we didn’t hit but it sure looked like we were very close. My heart was pounding. I’d hate to think of the sort of damage that dragging the mast head under a bridge would do to the gear at the top of the mast. My approach is always to make the approach to the bridge at the slowest possible speed of one knot or less. However, I doubt that would make any difference at all given the fact that 25,000 pounds of Pandora, even at one knot, would easily scrape off all of the gear at the top of the mast.
Getting under the bridge wasn’t the only obstruction that I had to get past, as there was also the railroad bridge and the downtown Norwalk Water Street bridge. The railroad bridge opens as needed but you have to call several hours early as they don’t keep an operator on site and it takes 6-8 guys to throw the necessary switches to get the bridge to swing. This shot shows a bunch of guys getting ready to open it. It’s hard to imagine what it costs to have that entire crew head out to open it up for any boat that wishes to pass.
I have been sailing the Norwalk waters for over 40 years and I never tire of seeing the oyster boats plying their trade. This old oyster dragger is a classic and judging by the mound of oysters on deck, business is good. It’s possible that these are empty shells that will be spread on the beds for the baby oysters, or spat, to cling to. Oystering has been a part of Norwalk history for generations. You can purchase oysters from the local producer Norm Bloom and Sons, at their website. They are terrific and I have seen them on menus in many top seafood restaurants.
If you are interested in reading about the history of the oyster business in the New York area, I strongly recommend Mark Kurlansky’s The Big Oyster, a book that is as much about the early history of Manhattan as it is about oysters. Trust me, this is a really good book as this review from the New York Times attests.
As is so often the case, we headed toward Mystic with the tide against us and not enough wind to sail. Why is it that the wind always blows from dead ahead. I guess that’s God’s way or reminding you that you have to work for a living and have a schedule. My retired friends always remind me that they just wait a day or so and get great winds. Hmm… As the day progressed, the wind backed around to the East, as forecast, right on the nose, and increased to nearly 20kts. Our destination for that night, Duck Island Roads, harbor of refuge, ended up being just that as it was really rough as the seas built and it got choppy. After the tide turned in our favor after nearly 7 hours, remember we left at dead low, the wind was against the current which is always nasty.
In the morning, after a good rest, we continued east with a full ebbing tide, which pushed us along nicely. Unfortunately, the winds were still very strong and again we slammed into waves and wind. However, we did make good progress in spite of the constant slamming that we and the boat endured.
Finally, into Mystic and calm waters. Pandora is now safe and sound on her mooring where she will be for the next few weeks until we head to Maine.
Now, for something completely different. I have been struck for some time now with the dramatic changes that have taken place in yacht design over the years. Pandora, designed by the noted marine architect Bob Perry, draws inspiration from a class of boats designed to go fast offshore. These designs, including the Open 30 class, are designed to surf at high speeds. While they lack the creature comforts of Pandora, they are impressive racing machines, never the less. A few hundred yards from Pandora’s mooring is Dragon, a terrific example of the class. Actually, Dragon won line honors (first to finish) in the 2010 Lobster Run, a 350 mile run from Stonington CT to Booth Bay Maine. Note that I won second place on Pandora in the cruising class in 2008. Dragon is a very high tech boat, for sure.
This video shows another boat in her class at speed. These boats really move.
I guess that I would put graphics on my boat like this if she were such a rocket ship.
Everything about Dragon is high tech. Look at this cockpit layout.
There is no doubt that yacht design has evolved tremendously over the years. Here’s another racing boat in the same marina from early in the 1900s. Yes, it’s a lot different.
And, check out the cockpit layout, a bit different. Yes?
There was a time when I would have chosen the classic but I have to admit, that I love those creature comforts aboard Pandora. Did I say that I have a microwave?
I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer will bring along with my rewarmed and microwaved coffee.
