>One of our favorite things about Maine is the ability to slip into a narrow creek and be alone in the wilderness. Since leaving Rockland we have visited a number of great “gunk holes” including two of our favorites, both on the island of Vinalhaven.

Our friends Keith and Rose aboard Camelot, another SAGA 43, told us about Perry Creek along the Fox Island Thoroughfare, one of the major East/West passages across Penobscot Bay. What a great place, and the land around it has been preserved by some local families as part of the Nature Conservancy. Only a few houses visible from the water. The view is spectacular.

It’s always nice to have fresh flowers aboard. We actually have a “secure” vase down below so that the flowers don’t fly all over the place when we are under way.Here I am up the mast to fix the wind speed and direction indicator that had gotten a bit sticky and wasn’t properly registering low wind speeds. A trip up the mast to get the sender unit, a little WD40 and a toothbrush on the bearings, a trip back up to put it back and it was as good as new. Fortunately, we have an electric winch that can pull me up the 63’ mast without any sweat. I also had to tend to a loose bulb in the anchor light that was refusing to cooperate. The bulb is a new LED that draws about 1/10th of the power of the old one. Most of the lights on Pandora have been replaced by LEDs, and now we can turn on most of the onboard lights in the evening and only pull a few amps, a massive change from the past. It’s a real plus as now the solar panels can keep up with our electric useage even if we don’t run the engine. That’s me way up there. Yes, it’s really high! The photo below is what I saw looking down. Notice the solar panels on the bimini. They are really great and supply most/all of the power that we need. You can see a long way from that high up. I prefer to not look down but somehow it’s less intimidating when viewed through a camera. Not!!! As I write this we are in Winter Harbor, a really narrow cut in the eastern coast of Vinalhaven where we anchored the other night following a visit to Burnt Coat Harbor on Swan’s Island. It’s about the narrowest place we go and not many boats come up this far as the channel winds around past some unmarked rocks that are right in the middle of the channel. This picture doesn’t show how narrow it really is as the tide is high covering all of the mud flats and rocks. I have been here many times and haven’t hit one yet. On this visit only one boat ventured further up the creek. As we came in we saw some seals and osprey. Later we saw an eagle too. Very remote and hardly a house to be seen. Our dog Rip appreciated the gently sloping granite ledges to get ashore without getting his feet dirty or wet to do his business. That’s a view of Pandora from on top of one big granite ledge. Rip surveying the scene. Master of all he can see? Perhaps not.

One of the schooners that takes groups out for week long cruises. Very picturesque.An osprey nesting on top of an old granite quary ruin. It’s fun to think about what life must have been out in these islands back when thousands of men (mostly) worked out in the islands cutting stone. Granite from this area was used to build the New York City Post office and many other buildings prior to the advent of concrete’s wide use as a structural building material. Pandora safely at anchor in Winter Cove.

We are at the half way point for our cruise as of Saturday and plan to visit with some friends back in Rockland tonight and also plan on taking in the a show put on by magazine Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors. If you like Maine, you should subscribe to this magazine, I do. There are endless things to look at as you cruise the coast. Here’s a very nice boathouse we saw yesterday. We also see an endless series of great boats. Here’s a lovely schooner sailed by an “older” couple. I expect that he gets help keeping the varnish and paint up. Actually, an army of help is probably about right as it was in pristine condition. What’s a blog about Maine cruising without a few lighthouse photos. The one above is off of the entrance to Burnt Coat harbor on the southern end of Swan’s island. The one below is in Fox Island Throughfare. Many of these lights are privately maintained by a lighthouse society and a few are in private hands. There is a lot of support to keep them looking great so they will be around for years to come.

>We arrived in Rockland Maine on Sunday morning at 04:30 and picked up a mooring. The crossing was uneventful with a nearly full moon to keep us company. The wind was very light out of the southwest so we ran the engine for the full 23 hours that it took us to make it to Rockland from Provincetown. There were seas of up to 8 feet but they were so gentle and far apart that you could hardly feel them unless you looked out on the horizon to see how much you were going up and down as they ran under the boat. There’s really nothing much to see except 360 degrees of horizon. You are really on your own out there.

After the moon set it was amazing to see how bright the sky was with billions of stars so clearly visible. Pandora runs at night with no white lights at all so your eyes really adjust to the dark and you can see quite well. Down below we have red lights so it’s easy to find your way around in the “dark” but not disturb your night vision.

These photos were all taken within a 12-18 hour period. Welcome to Maine where they say, “if you don’t like the weather, wait an hour”. So true.

Here’s the same shot a few hours later. Near perfect visibility and very dry air. Wonderful!Not a bad sunset last night.

And, the moon came up and is nearly full. Nice boat!I woke up really early today, Tuesday, at 04:00. Who knows why. Nice to watch the sunrise but that didn’t last long as the fog soon rolled in. Let’s see what it looks like an hour from now. Very excited as Brenda (and Rip) will be here this afternoon. Hope that they get up early too.

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August 1, 2009

Off to Maine

As I write this we are about 40 miles out from the Cape Cod Canal. It’s a beautiful day with tremendous visibility. Yesterday, Friday we left from New Bedford and headed out. Unfortunately, the weather was really awful with a massive line of thunder storms headed our way. By 3pm we were nearly off of the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown, MA with following seas building and about 30 knots of wind dead astearn, an uncomfortable and somewhat precarious point of sail under those conditions. The forecast called for more storms overnight so we decided to duck into Provincetown Harbor and wait for better weather on Saturday. This proved to be a good idea as the seas would have surely been worse the further off shore we got.

Provincetown was as crazy as ever, a mix of families with strollers and guys in loin cloth’s, and nothing else, hawking their latest review. After some debate my delivery crew, Rodney, Burt and I opted for a seafood dinner instead of the “all naked male review” show. Sorry, no pictures of that, or the other wacky sights of Provincetown. What a difference a day makes. We left at first light and dropped the mooring at 05:30. Just after we cleared the end of the Cape, we spotted two large whales, probably finback basedon their size, spouting a few miles off. What a sight. I hope to see more as the day progresses. There is a very moderate wind but it’s just about on our nose so we are motoring with the mainsail up and making about 7kts over the bottom helped by a 1kt current as the boat speed is about 6.2kts. (A knot is about 1.1 statute mile per hour). Our course to Rockland Maine will place us over Stellwagen Bank, an area with a very large population of whales. On past trips, this is probably my 13th crossing, we have seen many whales and some have surfaced within a few hundred feet of the boat. It’s best to stay away from them but sometimes they come over to check us out and it’s amazing just how large they are.

The computer says that we will be arriving in Rockland in about 19 hours which means that we will make our final approach in the dark and arrive as the sky just begins to brighten. I’d prefer to make landfall a bit later as there are a lot of obstructions along the way as we get closer inshore. However, with the radar and chart plotter we should be fine. It can’t be any worse than approaching in dense fog, something that I have done many times.

Here’s a shot of a Shearwater, one of the species of birds that live offshore all the time and only go ashore to bear their young. They are a fairly large bird with a wingspan greater than the largest shoreside gulls. Alas, no more wales for this crossing.

>It’s 6:30 on Friday morning and Brenda, Rip and I are back in Wickford, RI. I left the office in a rush Thursday evening with the hope of arriving before dark. With the traffic we barely made it as it was pretty dusky when I got out to the mooring in the work skiff. Our friend Eric at Pleasant Street Wharf told us we could put Pandora on the dock beginning on Thursday night until we leave to head out on Saturday afternoon. So, as soon as I was able to get out to Pandora, make way and get the fenders out, I moved her in to the dock. I was quick but it was dark by the time Brenda took the lines from me.

Good thing that Mother Nature cooperated as a thunder storm hit about one hour after we came along side the dock. Is it possible to make it through a day without rain this summer? It doesn’t seem so. While the boat was a bit warm after being shut up for the week, we had a glass of wine and enjoyed the quiet of the harbor.

This place is really beautiful so here’s the view of Pandora and the harbor today. The sunrise was really spectacular. Sorry, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take some photos until after my shower and a cup of coffee. Imagine these shots with more reds, oranges and yellows. You get the picture.

Yes, I do want to live here! What a beautiful place.

I will work this morning while Brenda’s out making the rounds followed by dinner out on Friday night and off to meet up with our friends on Firecracker, another SAGA 43. Let’s hope that the weather is OK. Who knows.

I have to get to work so bye for now.

I

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We have now moved Pandora to Narragansett Bay for the month of July. Our home port will be Wickford, a town that we would dearly love to move to eventually. Our good friend Eric Collins, with his brother Chris, runs a wonderful old time marina called Pleasant Street Wharf, a place that looks much like it did 50 years ago. Their website is in keeping with it’s laid back nature and is unpretentious as they are. Where else will you see cookouts every weekend where the owner is there drinking beer with the rest of the gang. And, if that’s not enough Eric has a beer tap in it’s own fridge (kegerator?) in the back of the shop so he, and his friends, will never be without a cold one. Eric’s wife Sandy is a real estate agent so perhaps she will sell us a house one day.

We will be making weekend trips from Wickford through July until we move Pandora to Maine in early August.

On the 4th we went out on Eric and Chris’s 40′ lobster boat to watch the fireworks. There was a wonderfully eclectic mix of folks on board including a tie died shirt clad bagpiper. That’s not something that you see every day. What a great time we had.

We also went to Jamestown, right across from Newport but a lot less busy. We picked up a mooring in Dutch Harbor about a 3/4 mile walk on the other side of the island from town. The harbor in Jamestown is fairly open to the east and the boat traffic kicks up a chop that makes the boats bob at their moorings and on the dock. Never the less, there are a number of very nice boats on the waterfront. Two that really stand out are a small coastal cruiser that looks like it would be right at home on the Inter Coastal waterway headed to Florida for the winter. The real winner ihowever is this dark blue beauty. Who needs a mirror when you have the hull of this one to gaze into? What a stunner. It was built in Germany in the 40s. I wonder what sorts of stories it could tell?

Not all the boats in Jamestown are big and shiny. This massive wooden catboat Kathleen was built a few years ago by Beetle Boats and is ably sailed by her owner. Check out pictures of the build at their site. Last I heard, the boat didn’t even have an engine. Well her sail is big enough to get her home in even the lightest breezes. It makes me wonder what he does when the wind really pipes up. Scary to think about.

A few visitors aboard Pandora in Wickford. It was funny but this sparrow came back time and again over the weekend and made quite a racket. I wonder what he/she was looking for.

On the other hand, our cocker spaniel Riptide knows exactly what he wants from us. It’s a good nap and many runs ashore between meals. Not a bad life and what a great guy he is.

Today I am writing this from Potter’s Cove across from Bristol where I spent last night with my friend Bryce. He sprung for a great load of lobsters, steamers, corn on the cob and massively large shrimp last night for dinner aboard. What a feast. hToday we are going to head 10 miles up the bay to Newport for a very different experience ashore. More to come on that.