Great Lakes sailors can be somewhat smug when they talk about the lack of salt, sharks, tides and hurricanes. We were no different until we sailed True North, a Beneteau Oceanis 41.1 that we had acquired new in 2018, from Rochester, New York, to Portland, Maine, via the St. Lawrence River and the Canadian Maritimes. We discovered a fascinating world beyond the Great Lakes and an adventure that made giving up those Great Lakes advantages worthwhile.

Equipped with Capt. Cheryl Barr’s Down East Circle Route, we had started planning the trip several years ago but had a pandemic delay. Finally, in late June 2023, with some apprehension about what might come, we left Rochester for an adventure that would be truly life-changing.

I am an experienced sailor with a 100-Ton US Coast Guard Master Captain’s License. I’m also a US Sailing-certified Basic Keelboat Instructor. My spouse, Sandy, has American Sailing Association Bareboat certification. We have cruised together for 15 years on Lake Ontario in the United States, and on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Even still, this trip would be like nothing Sandy had experienced before. During planning, I often asked her whether we were really up to this. She held fast. It was largely her resolve and courage that enabled this voyage to happen.

The Down East Circle Route connects Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean by way of the St. Lawrence River, leaving New York State via the Thousand Islands, passing through six Canadian provinces, and crossing the Bay of Fundy to arrive in Down East Maine. This route includes close encounters with whales, seals, puffins and porpoises, as well as some of the most spectacular scenery that maritime Canada and the Northeast United States have to offer.

To prepare for the trip, we made numerous boat improvements, such as an arch with davits, a full cockpit enclosure, solar panels, Starlink, zinc anodes (replacing the magnesium ones used in fresh water) and an inverter. Our other preparations included upgrading our boat insurance, arranging for mail and travel medical insurance, and figuring out what to pack for temperatures that would range from 30 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

As we departed from our home dock, we were fortunate to be escorted on the first few legs by sailing friends, an act of kindness that tempered the emotion of leaving home for an extended period. On the first day, a rare, thick fog set in along the south shore of Lake Ontario. Although unexpected, it enabled us to practice using our radar and foghorn. This was useful for the “real” fog we would encounter in Nova Scotia and Maine, where it is supposed to be.

After overnight stops in Fairhaven, Sackets Harbor, and Clayton, New York, we entered Canada by way of Brockport, Ontario, along the St. Lawrence River, and caught up with a sailing couple we had met the year prior while cruising the lake, when we all realized we’d be making the same journey. We sailed as a loose flotilla for the early part of the cruise, a strategy that was helpful to build confidence for both crews, and that provided welcome company and occasional assistance.

There are seven shipping locks along the St. Lawrence Seaway, two in the United States and five in Canada, designed to raise or lower seagoing freighters. Pleasure boats are tolerated, but long, unpredictable waits are the rule.

As we made our way down the river, we began to experience strong currents, something new for lake sailors. Heading downstream meant these currents added to our boatspeed. I learned the hard way that you need extra space to clear an obstruction from upstream when True North swiped a navigational buoy while giving way to a freighter coming up the shipping channel. Fortunately, there was no damage, other than to our pride. 

On the other hand, the current allowed us to cover record ­distances each day, until we reached Montreal. The last lock lets out downstream of Montreal, so, to visit the city, we needed to head upstream several miles, fighting 5 to 6 knots of current. With our 45 hp engine nearly full out, what would normally be 8 knots over ground was only 2. After reading that many sailors have had to skip Montreal and move on to Longueuil or other points downstream, we felt fortunate to dock in the heart of Old Montreal. We thoroughly enjoyed the culture, cuisine and atmosphere of this cosmopolitan city. We also caught up with friends we’d met several years in a row while cruising Lake Ontario.

Moving on to Quebec City added tides to our repertoire of unfamiliar phenomena. In addition to river currents, we also needed to consider tidal currents, the interplay between tidal and river currents, and depth changes. The Canadian Hydrographic Service publishes a 130-page tide and current document, but we kept it simple, timing departures a few hours before high tide. The combined river current cancels the slowing tidal current, causing slack water to occur before high tide. Then the river ­current combines with the ebbing tide to give the boat a nice push downstream. Tides are a big factor in Quebec City, where the main marina has a dedicated lock to lift and lower boats to meet the marina’s depth, which is maintained constant.

I had yet another lesson when heading out of an anchorage near Sorel-Tracy where, according to charts, tides aren’t yet a factor. We ran aground, even though we traced our breadcrumbs from when we entered the anchorage. 

We tried, to no avail, to twist True North off the shoal with the bow thruster. I eventually lowered our dinghy, Lil’ North, and towed True North astern with all the might that the dinghy’s 10 hp outboard could muster, while Sandy reversed hard with the diesel. This did the trick, and we met out in deeper water to collect our wits and move on. Many cruisers use two-way headsets (“marriage savers”) while anchoring or docking. They were invaluable here too.

Quebec City is a beautiful, European-spirited town, rich in history, culture and delicious cuisine. We lingered several days to enjoy the sights and soak in as much civilization as possible before heading into increasingly remote territory.

Moving on, we added salt water to currents and tides, ­expanding our sailing experience even further. I observed that salt added buoyancy, enabling the boat to move faster. I also ­observed the mess it makes of everything. We couldn’t stop imagining salt water flowing through the various raw-water circuits, leaving a trail of corrosive destruction. But it was a small price to pay for the experience that it afforded.

A short detour to Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay Fjord, allowed us to get up close with beluga and minke whales, as well as seals, amid a landscape reminiscent of Alaska or Norway.

We never stopped being impressed with the kindness and generosity of people we met in rural Quebec. Fishing boats were moved around to make room for us in ports. Dock neighbors, to whom we were complete strangers, offered the keys to their vehicles to facilitate our provisioning runs. We preferred to walk to stretch our legs, but the gesture was so kind that we always brought a little something back as a measure of gratitude for those who offered.

The northernmost part of our route found us slipping briefly above the 49th parallel before veering southeast to Gaspé. The river widens progressively from this point as it flows toward the Atlantic. Marinas are fewer and farther between, but there are anchorages and surprisingly welcoming fishing ports. 

Gaspé, near the mouth of the St. Lawrence, is stunning. Pictures of the region’s Percé Rock were an inspiration for this trip and became emblematic. This was also the coldest part of the trip, with nighttime temperatures dipping into the 30s in August. 

Gaspé is a peninsula that also boasts a national park, a quaint town and the luminescent green Emerald Falls. We rented a car to explore. Driving felt strange after so much sailing. When eventually sailing on from Gaspé, we got one more close-up view of the majestic Percé Rock, this time from the water.

And then, there was the Atlantic Ocean. We worked our way down the coast of increasingly remote Quebec, anchoring or squatting space in fishing ports. Again, we were delighted by how we were welcomed. Speaking French certainly helped, but Anglophone sailors we met had had similarly positive experiences.

We were impressed with the generosity of people we met. Complete strangers would offer their vehicles to facilitate our provisioning. 

We crossed the Chaleur Bay toward New Brunswick. This bay is notorious for aggressive sailing conditions, and we close-reached 80 nautical miles in 30-knot winds and 6-foot seas for most of the day. Sandy is not a fan of heeling, chop or gusts, yet she held on bravely as we plowed forward. The reward was a calm anchorage in Miramichi Bay, New Brunswick, and a beautiful sunset.

After a day there, we crossed the lower stretch of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province, and tied up at the Summerside Yacht Club and Marina on the western side. We did need maintenance after some pretty tough sailing, and we provisioned, washed clothes and crew, and enjoyed town life for the first time in weeks. We rented a car and took a side trip to Charlottetown, the main city on the island, and caught up with a colleague from 20 years ago who lives there.

After several days, we crossed back to Nova Scotia, a province we were eager to visit. We were welcomed by an anchorage with an unspoiled beach full of clams and crabs. It was fascinating to watch their behaviors and the small geysers caused by clams buried a few inches below the sand. 

We worked our way east along the coast, entering St. George’s Bay for another tough sail, with strong winds on the nose and choppy seas. We got into position to traverse the Canso Canal, without which we would have had to add significant distance to circumnavigate Cape Breton. After the canal, we had hoped to detour to visit Bras d’Or Lake. Unfortunately, the forecast required us to move on quickly, but we promised ourselves we’d sail back there another time.

The Canso Canal moved us from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the wide-open Atlantic Ocean. From this point, we experienced yet another new phenomenon: swells. They are much more pleasant than the short, irregular chop we experience on the Great Lakes. Nevertheless, there can also be chop, which taught us the meaning of a confused sea state. 

We worked our way down the southeast coast of Nova Scotia, stopping mostly in beautiful anchorages, usually ­encountering seals. Halifax, Nova Scotia’s principal city, is home to The Binnacle, where, like many sailors, we made our pilgrimage to buy parts and supplies. Halifax is full of interesting history, delicious restaurants and an attractive waterfront. As the nearest city to the site of the sinking of the Titanic, it played a key role in rescuing the survivors and is the burial place for many who did not survive. 

We worked our way down to Lunenburg and then Yarmouth, our departure point for crossing the Bay of Fundy and entering Maine. We left Yarmouth in pitch-dark in order to arrive in Maine in daylight. Despite the bay’s 50-foot tides, the crossing was uneventful. We had expected to find lobster traps as we approached Maine but were astounded by the sheer number of them, including in the middle of marked channels and anchorages.

Checking in with US customs was uneventful: After a quick video tour of our boat using an app, the officer cleared us. We then worked our way down the Maine coast, with a prolonged stop in Bar Harbor. We anchored in the Skillings River, a short dinghy ride from downtown at high tide, when the sandbar connecting Bar Island is submerged. Bar Harbor is touristy but maintains its charm and is, of course, the gateway to Acadia National Park and all its beauty. 

From there, we headed out into Penobscot Bay and enjoyed numerous anchorages, lobster-fishing villages, and a steady flow of classic windjammers. In Camden, Maine, the annual Windjammer Festival was in full swing. A short, steep climb on foot took us to the 780-foot peak of Mount Battie for spectacular views of Camden Harbor and Penobscot Bay.

From Rockland, Maine—with its active fishing industry, ­red-brick-lined downtown, and ferry terminal—we worked our way down the coast, anchoring in the lobster-fishing towns of Tenants Harbor and Port Clyde, home to the lighthouse we knew from the movie Forrest Gump. In lovely Boothbay Harbor, we stopped at Boothbay Harbor Marina, the most welcoming marina that we’d visited. 

After a final night at anchor in Harpswell, Maine, we made the final run into Portland, where we were met by the thickest fog we’d encountered during the entire journey. Anything more than 50 feet off our bow was not visible, including the city. To make our arrival even more dramatic, Hurricane Lee was expected in a few days. We had just enough time to get from there to Yarmouth, where we hauled out in record time—just before the storm hit. 

The trip truly changed Sandy and me. We increased our ­confidence and learned to face our fears. And we became even more familiar with boat systems—mechanical, electrical, ­plumbing, navigational and communications alike. 

We also changed our future plans, now wanting to make a sailboat our floating summer home. While we missed our friends and family, we learned that one can have an interesting social network while cruising. We were reacquainted with old friends, and made many new ones. 

The boating community shares common interests and ­experiences, and cruisers look out for one another, like in a real neighborhood. If you’re considering the Down East Circle as a future cruise, by all means, do it.

The post The Long Way Around appeared first on Cruising World.

From our back porch in Annapolis, Maryland,we gaze out on 6 miles of the Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the Severn River. On a good summer weekend, we’ll see scores of sailboats milling about—hundreds if a big regatta is on. Some will catch the eye and get you to take a longer look. But only one stops me in my tracks every time.

Well, two, actually: the schooners Woodwind I and II. They are swan-white 74-foot twins that carry tourists on two-hour cruises daily from early spring to late fall. They’re just too pretty to ignore.

So it is with schooners. There’s something about the beamy, swooping hull shape and the dynamic angle of the rig that demands special notice. With a short mast forward and the tall one aft, the sail plan looks like a butcher’s knife cleaving the wind. When all the canvas is up and pulling—two or three jibs, foresail, topsails, and main—these graceful boats carry an air of timeless utility and majesty. 

Imagine the scene 150 years ago, when schooners by the hundreds roamed the coast, laden with cargos of lumber, coal and other dry goods. What a sight to see them tacking and jibing off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, or Provincetown, Massachusetts, killing time waiting for a fair breeze to make the rounding.

No boat is perfect, of course, and schooners have their ­downside. Fred Hecklinger, the late guru of wooden boats around the Chesapeake, used to say, “If you love schooners, get a picture of one and put it on your wall.” It was his way of ­acknowledging that for all their beauty, schooners of old were also heavy, not particularly good at going to windward, and relatively slow except on a screaming reach.

There’s only one place left on the East Coast where you can reliably see a gaggle of schooners hard at work on any summer day, and that’s Penobscot Bay off midcoast Maine. A dozen or so of the wooden beauties up to 100 feet long charter, offering four- to six-day trips out of Rockland and Camden. Smaller ones run daily excursions. A few are purpose-made for the charter trade, but most are meticulously maintained relics of the ­freight-­carrying past, including two—Lewis R. French and Stephen Taber—that each turned 150 years old in 2021.

Schooners hold a special place in my heart because they’re where I caught the sailing bug. Sixty years ago, my father and I took a four-day trip on Mattie out of Camden, Maine. It was the first overnight sailing trip for either of us. We drove up from Long Island, New York, stopping at Cape Neddick, Maine, where I cracked my first lobster claw. We boarded that night for early departure next morning. I was 16.

Mattie’s new owner and captain was a slim fellow named Jim Nesbit, who showed us around what would be our humble digs for the next few days. Mattie was then 78 years old, having launched in 1883 in Patchogue, New York, just 37 miles from our Long Island home.

The old freighter had few amenities. Lights were kerosene, and cabins were tiny and had no portholes. The head was dark and airless. Meals, including daily fresh bread, were cooked on a cast-iron wood stove. Passengers ate on deck or in a dim, low-slung main cabin. Back then, there were no electronic navigation aids, so when fog swept in, you made your way to the next anchorage by guess and by God, with a man in the bow sounding the mournful foghorn while peering through the mist for danger.

We found our fog the third day out, thick as soup. I was a nervous rabbit, so when we finally heard the clang of a bell and then saw a green buoy heave up through the mist as proof that we were safe, the moment of relief and joy formed my lasting attachment to sailing and the sea.

Advance the log by 60 years, to 2021, and little has changed. We’re back in the same cold, clear waters off Vinalhaven, Maine—the biggest island in Penobscot Bay—and the fog is back, thick as ever but no longer quite so scary. We know where we are thanks to electronics. The chart plotter inside a varnished box near the helm shows precisely where we’re going.   

Everything else remains much the same. A starry, moonless sky at midnight. The gauzy curtain that hangs as dawn gives way to misty day. A protected cove at daybreak with no breeze, ripples emanating from a circle of bait as little fish spin nervously on the surface and seals lurk below, popping up to grab a snack. Eagles and ospreys wheeling overhead; terns squawking and dipping for minnows; black guillemots, a northern seabird, paddling along the bank.

 A dark blockade of spruce lines the shore, ending in a band of pale granite, beneath which sweet-smelling seaweed clings from the high-tide line down to the ocean, which will rise and fall 10 feet and more with the diurnal pull of the moon.

Then there’s our boat itself, pretty as a picture once the sails are up and pulling. 

When my wife, Fran, and I decided to take a trip back in time this past summer, the schooner we chose was Heritage, out of Rockland, Maine. It’s one of the bigger vessels in the modern fleet at 95 feet on deck, and one of the newest, launched in 1983. It’s the creation of Capt. Doug and Linda Lee, who built the boat over three years in the boatyard they own at the foot of Front Street.

If the Lees took advantage of modern technology in construction, you couldn’t tell by looking. Heritage weighs 165 tons. The frames and hull are oak, steamed and bent to shape. The decks and cabin tops are straight-grain pine. Heritage has no engine for propulsion; to get in and out of tight spots, this vessel (like most in the fleet) uses a diesel-powered push boat that tucks quietly under the stern.

The Lees did have the advantage of designing Heritage for people, not freight, so they could fashion a central cabin for dining where everyone can sit at once, instead of in shifts. Other than that, this is a traditional Maine schooner, stem to stern. Meals are prepared on the antique wood stove, and sails are heavy canvas. To raise the weighty gaffs, sails and anchor, the crew fires up Old Joe: a 1921, make-or-break, single-cylinder donkey engine that the Lees rebuilt from junk. It snorts like a misfiring freight train.

Twenty-nine of us, a full house, paid to board this sturdy anachronism to stuff ourselves into cramped cabins, to clamber up the companionways in the dark to use the head, and to wait our turns for the only bathing facility: a showerhead on the end of a flexible tube in one of the three heads.

Missing, sadly, were the Lees, who sailed Heritage for 37 years after they built it. Now in their 70s, they sold the schooner to two crewmen in 2020, when chartering was suspended in the pandemic. 

Fortunately for the new owners, 2021 proved a boom year, as vacationers looked for holidays closer to home. I don’t remember it, but Fran says that I came home the day in March when I got my second vaccination shot and announced that we were going schooner sailing in Maine.

You might wonder why a couple with their own cruise-worthy sailboat (albeit small, at 27 feet) would drive 11 hours to get on somebody else’s boat with a crowd of strangers. The answer is uncomplicated: The food is plentiful and good; the scenery is incomparable; the company is generally soft-spoken; and it’s nice to find yourself in the hands of competent, cheerful young people whose main interest is keeping you safe and happy. You know, instead being the one who is fretting about rocks and tides and fog.

The new co-skippers of Heritage are a pair of bearded, scruffy, 30-something bachelors who worked for years on the vessel, and who seem as devoted to tradition as the Lees were. 

Capt. Ben Welzenbach was teaching guitar in Chicago nearly a decade ago when his dad took him on a father-son trip on Heritage. As soon as he got home, Welzenbach sent a job inquiry. He was on the deck crew the next season. 

Capt. Sean Grimes was a line cook in a southern New Hampshire restaurant when a buddy dragged him to Maine and introduced him to schooners. The next year, he ran the wood stove on Heritage.

Welzenbach had the helm and Grimes was in the push boat when we departed Rockland under a mackerel sky and little breeze. Passengers ranged in age from 15-year-old Cassidey Card of Connecticut, tagging along with her grandparents, to 85-year-old Faith Hadala of Tennessee, who quizzed anyone who looked like they might be in the running to make sure she was indeed the oldest.

Hadala was with her 84-year-old husband, Paul. Her first marriage lasted 17 years, she said. The second also lasted 17. She and Paul had been together 16 years. “We’re waiting to see what happens next year,” she said with a chuckle.

Schooner trips skew to the upper age brackets. You won’t find many go-go, 40-something J/70 racers from Scarsdale, New York, on the passenger list. They’re more likely down in St. Martin sipping Red Bull and vodka on a Caribbean beach.

But you still do get characters, like Bo Kinsman, a lobsterman from Ogunquit, Maine, who takes a week off every month in summer to sail on Heritage. He likes going from having to do everything on his boat to doing nothing on the schooner. A ringer for Ernest Hemingway with his silver fringe beard, gimlet eyes and battered fishing cap, he usually works alone tending 400 pots on a 32-footer.

He surprised us when we stopped the first night at tiny Burnt Island for our lobster bake, a staple of every Maine Windjammer cruise. We had 65 live lobsters in a tank; the crew steamed them over a wood fire in a blanket of seaweed plucked from the rocks. They were unbelievably fresh, and you could eat all you wanted. Kinsman took none. He chose hot dogs and burgers. “I don’t eat lobsters,” the lobsterman sniffed.

There were other bright lights in our thrown-together crew. Steve Berthiaume, who builds flutes in Massachusetts for a living, brought a travel guitar and led singalongs at night while his wife, Kim, sang nice harmonies. Suzanne Farace, a divorce lawyer from Baltimore, spun yarns about previous kayak-camping trips she’d made in Penobscot Bay. Her paddling partner, John Garon, told of his days as a spy in the National Security Agency—no state secrets but good palaver nonetheless. Jill McConnell of upstate New York jumped in and swam around the boat for an hour one evening, as if we were in the Bahamas, which we certainly were not.

The crew were young, with interesting lives. Ginger-haired Courtney King was born to the sea: Her parents own the schooner Mary Day out of Camden, and she’s working on her own master’s ticket at Maine Maritime Academy. She hopes to buy a small schooner to live on. Kyle Gray was working long hours at a commercial real estate firm in New York when he decided to kick over the traces and work long hours climbing the mast on Heritage instead. He’d be heading to the University of Pennsylvania to study education policy in the fall.

Our cook, Stephanie Cech, was a wiry small-boat racer in Ohio when she got the urge to head east. Everything she knew about cooking meals for 35 people on a wood stove she learned in a few weeks from Capt. Sean, who rose at 5 every morning to help her start the fire. It was fun watching her pound out huge blobs of dough for the daily bread. 

Jeremy Schmich was bored writing software code for a living. Now, he’s in charge of Old Joe, the donkey engine, and arms himself with an oil can and ether spritzer to get it going. “First time, every time,” he chanted while spinning the flywheel with one hand and tickling the compression release with the other, hoping for the chug-chug-BAM that signaled success.

We never got much wind. Usually in Maine you can count on an afternoon southwesterly sea breeze, but this year was fickle, Capt. Ben said. Yet, the push boat was quiet enough that you barely knew it was running, and the sails were up all day to catch any breeze that came along. The scenery never disappointed. At 68 degrees, the water was warm enough for the bold to swim. And three lovely old rowboats were launched at each anchorage for exploring the shore.

All in all, it was a memorable trip. Yes, you could occasionally hear the guy in the next cabin snoring, and the shower situation took some getting used to. But there is much to admire in a place that has changed little in 150 years.

The Maine charter trade for schooners was hatched in 1936 by a 20-year-old entrepreneur named Frank Swift, who saw the sailing fleet moldering away as motor vessels took over. He wondered if a boat could be cleaned up and pitched to adventurous vacationers as a cruise ship. He found a skipper and a boat, dubbed the enterprise Windjammer Cruises, and sold the first trip to a trio of ladies from Boston who paid $35 for a week on board.

Twenty-five years later, when I got my sea legs on Mattie, an industry was already in place. It’s still thriving today. I asked Courtney King if Mattie was still around. “Oh, sure,” she said. “She’s out here doing the same thing we are. She’s still running out of Camden. They changed her name, though, back to the original: Grace Bailey.”

She tugged on my sleeve the next day and gestured across the sparking sea to a sailing relic, shining proud and going strong at 138 years of age. “There she is,” she said. “There goes the old Mattie.”

Angus Phillips is a longtime Chesapeake Bay-based racing and ­cruising sailor, former outdoor columnist for TheWashington Post, and frequent contributor to CW.

The post Passion For All Time appeared first on Cruising World.

This summer, with the pandemic and social distancing still in mind, taking the family on a Down East cruise to Maine might be just the thing. After all, it’s not only one of the world’s great sailing destinations, but also there are isolated coves, vacant beaches and uninhabited islands where self-isolation is just fine. If you take your own boat, there are ample shore services, yards, marinas and harbor towns in which to haul or moor your vessel between visits. Or you can charter a bareboat or reserve a crewed yacht. Let me provide an overview of what’s entailed in cruising Maine in the second summer of COVID-19.

The coronavirus restrictions remain fluid, and of course you’ll need to investigate the current situation before shoving off. Now, on to the fun stuff.

Sailing to Maine is the easy part.

It’s only 144 nautical miles on a rhumb-line course from the Cape Cod Canal to Monhegan Island. At 6 knots, that’s 24 hours. It’s another 24 miles up through Muscle Ridge Channel to Owls Head Lighthouse—the front door to what I feel is the greatest cruising ground anywhere: Penobscot Bay.

The distance from York Harbor, near the southern border with New Hampshire, all the way to the Canadian border is 200 nautical miles in a straight line…but the Maine coastline is anything but straight. If you add in the shoreline around each of the 4,500 islands—then include the coves, bays, harbors and tidal rivers—Maine has more coastline than the rest of the entire East Coast, more than 5,000 miles. Logic suggests there must be a few places along that stretch where you can find a secluded spot to anchor for a spell.

Maine’s largest bay, Penobscot, is split down the middle by a chain of islands: the Fox Islands to the south, Islesboro to the north, with a dozen small islands in between. There are half a dozen harbor towns, some small fishing villages, and lots of isolated coves in which to anchor. You’ll find uninhabited islands and beaches to explore, mountain trails to hike, waterfront restaurants and seafood shacks, and open-air farmers markets. There’ll be blueberries to pick, corn to shuck, lobsters to boil, and quiet evenings aboard in your own boat.

Nice, right? Now let’s get to the particulars.

The two-week cruise I’ve outlined below will keep you and your crew safe, in your own bubble, on your own boat. Each day includes a few hours of sailing to a new anchorage. Afternoons are for exploring uninhabited islands, secluded coves and a few villages. Evenings, you are alone, anchored in a secluded cove, as the sun drops behind the Camden Hills. There are enough wilderness islands there to fill up a few weeks—if not the entire summer, and many summers to come.

I’ve lived on and cruised along the coast of Maine for 50 years, and my ideal two-week getaway would be a circumnavigation of the Fox Islands. A couple of kayaks and a RIB with at least a 10 to 15 hp outboard are essential for this kind of serious gunkholing. The anchorages I’ve described are no more than a few hours apart, affording the crew some time to test their sailing skills, and the navigator to plot courses to keep everything off the rocks. You may also find your own anchorages. There are untold options galore, so go explore. I won’t mind at all.

Day One: Rockland is a good place to start (and also a good spot to leave your boat between visits). This large commercial port is easy to enter, with ample space for anchoring. There are rental moorings, docks, fuel, four marinas (including a mega-yacht facility), a large chandlery (Hamilton Marine), supermarkets, canvas shop, mechanics and boatyards. Main Street is abuzz with shops, a theater, two art museums, lots of art galleries, and half a dozen restaurants; the four-star Primo eatery is also nearby. Cape Air provides regular service to Boston from the local airport; the Concord bus line stops at the ferry terminal twice each day. US1 passes through town, and rental and loaner cars are available. Box stores are a few miles out of town. It’s almost civilized there.

To kick things off, leave Rockland midmorning and steer northeast for Pulpit Harbor on the northwest corner of North Haven Island. It’s only 10 nautical miles, and with a southerly breeze, you’ll be there by lunch. Leave Pulpit Rock, with an osprey nest atop, to starboard and find a spot to anchor inside. The moorings are all locally owned, so find a spot in midharbor in 25 feet of water to anchor, or in the two coves on the south side.

There’s a public dock farther in for your dinghy. The island’s food store is a half-mile walk south, from the bridge. Take your dinghy farther up into the cove, past the traffic bridge. Farmland, fields of lupine, and cottages covered in roses line the banks and roads. In the summer, the sun sets over the Camden Hills across the bay well after 8 p.m.

Day Two: Two options: north around the top of North Haven, or south. The wind that day will dictate. The northerly route offers up a scattering of islands with four possible anchorages. Hank and Jan Taft have described these in their comprehensive A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast (see “Resources and References,” page 51). The Barred Islands and Butter Island are accessible and a good place for lunch, beachcombing, a hike, or even an overnight stop in settled conditions.

Quick aside on dinghies: Finding a place along these islands to beach a dinghy is one thing; securing said dinghy is another. Pull it up on the beach, and when you get back from your hike, you might find that the tide has floated it off the beach and it’s drifting away, or it’s high and dry, 30 feet from the water’s edge.

There are numerous techniques to solve this problem. The captain can drop off the landing party and return to the yacht for a nap. Go ashore in kayaks; they are easily pulled above the high-tide line and carried back. Or rig a dinghy-retrieval mooring system: Secure a floating buoy to the dinghy anchor line with a shackle. Drop it in deep water. Nose into the beach, off-load, then with a long loop of line rove through a shackle on the anchor float, pull the dinghy back out to where you dropped the anchor. Tie the shore end of the loop to something above high tide. When you get back, just pull your dinghy in to the beach. Make your own, or try West Marine’s Anchor Buddy, a ready-made dinghy mooring system using a long bungee cord that snaps your dinghy back out into deep water.

Days Three and Four: With a fair breeze, steer southeast from Butter Island, down to Oak Hill on the tip of North Haven. Give the hodgepodge of small islands and ledges a wide berth on the way. Mind the current. There are two possible anchorages: Marsh Cove, below the hill on which sits the Watson Estate. No access ashore. Mullen Cove is better. The beach provides access to hiking trails through a town-owned park. Just south is Burnt Island, now a North Haven park, with a walking trail all the way around and a float to which you can tie a dinghy at any state of the tide. Or head for the beach off the northwest tip of Calderwood Island. You can’t go wrong with any of these.

Calderwood is tucked in between Simpson and Babbidge islands on the northeast side of the Fox Island Thoroughfare. Uninhabited and open to the public, it is now owned by Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which keeps the trails open now that the sheep have left. There’s a spruce forest at the southern end where the kids can build fairy houses. Anchor off the beach on the north side where hiking trails begin. Be aware of the rock in the middle of the anchorage. I spent a few hours there once waiting to be floated off. This is a popular anchorage, and if too crowded, there’s another spot to the east, between Calderwood and Babbidge. Two beaches provide access ashore and to the trails. The passage between the two islands is strewn with ledges and rock. When departing, go back around the north side of Babbidge or Calderwood. Calderwood might need two days to fully explore. I’ve spent weeks there photographing.

Nearby are two obvious anchorages for the night: Carver Cove, south of Widow Island, is calm, with views of saltwater farms, fields and forests. To the north, past the Goose Rocks spark plug lighthouse is Kent Cove. There’s no shore access, but if there’s a breeze, there’ll be no mosquitos.

Day Five: You have decisions to make: You could go east to Stonington, the Deer Isle Thoroughfare, and on to the islands farther down the Maine coast. (We say “down” up here in Maine when heading up the coast, as in Down East. The prevailing winds are southwest, meaning you’re mostly sailing “downwind.”)

But for the purposes of this itinerary, that cruise is for another time. So we’ll head west through the Fox Islands Thoroughfare, a narrow body of water separating North Haven from Vinalhaven. It’ll be busy with schooners, fishermen, gleaming classic yachts, and powerboats of all sizes passing through. The shore on the south side has a few summer cottages from the previous century. In the 1800s, Maine was a summer retreat for the wealthy from Boston, Manhattan and Philadelphia. With extended families and servants, they arrived by steamship to “camp out” in rambling cedar-shingled cottages. These “cottages” might look small from offshore, but up close, they are massive mansions with dozens of rooms, rambling porches, and servant’s quarters. They are still there. In recent years, the wealthy have returned to buy up fishermen’s shore frontage to erect even-more-lavish estates, with a jet-powered Hinckley picnic boat tied to the dock.

On the north side of the thoroughfare is the small village of North Haven, established by wealthy New York yachtsmen in the last century. North Haven is a world apart from its neighbor, Vinalhaven. The only grocery store is in the middle of the island, but the village might have places to order lunch, ice cream or dinner. This changes annually. Anchor outside the mooring field and out of the ferry’s approach to its terminal. Dinghy docks line both sides of the ferry terminal. The village has a library, art galleries and a community center with frequent performances, plays, lecturers and concerts. The roads wander inland past Victorian cottages, farms, fields and forests. Eric Hopkins, an island painter with a wide reputation, has a studio and gallery in the village, and there may be others. Seasons change, as do the residents.

Spend the night at anchor, or duck around to Perry Creek, a narrow cove on the south side of the thoroughfare. Ashore is a wilderness park with walking trails. Wander through spruce forests, over ledge outcroppings with views. It’s tight in there, but there are a few moorings that can be used by transients for a donation to the Vinalhaven Land Trust. Or drop the hook at the eastern entrance in 20 feet of water. If that’s too crowded, head farther south into Seal Cove. Watch the chart closely because rocks are about, but you should be able to find a spot with sufficient swing room. Take the dinghy back up to Perry Creek, where there’s access to the trails on the southeast side. Watch for a sign nailed high up on a tree. Set your dinghy moor and climb ashore.

Day Six: Heading west down the thoroughfare, pass Browns Light to port, the Sugar Loaves to starboard. You’re heading to Leadbetter Narrow. Pass north of Dogfish Island. To port is Crockette Cove, where there’s room for a boat or two, but mind the underwater cables. At high tide, you can take the dinghy or kayaks a mile and more up into the cove. There are more anchorages on the other side of Leadbetter Narrow.

Narrow is the operative word. It’s a tight squeeze between Leadbetter Island and the mainland of Vinalhaven. Steer north of the green can that marks a rock in the middle of the gap. The current is swift through there. Pass through, and you are at the head of Hurricane Sound, surrounded by a string of islands to the west and Vinalhaven to the east.

There is a lot to explore there, but first get the boat anchored. There’s a nifty spot to the east of Turnip Island, a small tree-topped isle at the entrance to Long Cove, a milelong fjord carved into the solid granite of Vinalhaven Island. There is an abandoned quarry on the hill that provided building blocks for the post offices in Boston and New York in the 1800s. At that time, more people lived and worked the granite quarries on Vinalheaven than live there now.

Read More: Maine

The entrance into Long Cove, to the east of Hall Island, narrows to 200 feet, but once through, the cove opens up into a quiet pond with room for a few boats to anchor. The shoreline is tall, covered in spruce. There are a few floating docks along both sides of the shore. Pathways lead up to large private estates. No access there.

A third of the way in, there’s a ledge barring the way, so take the dinghy and explore. Be back before the tides are low because the bar might be too shallow to navigate.

Day Seven: From your anchorage in or near Long Cove, there are small coves and islands—including Fiddlehead and a spot called the Basin—to explore. Use the kayaks, but someone should be in the RIB as a chase boat. The Basin is a large, almost landlocked body of water that’s worth a whole day fussing around in small boats. The narrow entrance to the Basin provides a reversing-falls effect, so enter at slack tide, or with the RIB. Be warned: The narrows can be a whitewater experience.

Day Eight: There are dozens of small islands to the west, a few with limited anchorages. One is south of the neck between Lawry’s Island and Cedar Island. There’s enough room for one, so leave early enough or give it a pass if someone is there. Farther south in Hurricane Sound are White and Garden islands, with two possible anchorages. Go ashore on the beach and take in beautiful vistas of the Camden Hills, and across to Owls Head.

Day Nine: Sail south to the anchorage and mooring field off the east side of Hurricane Island. In the 1800s, this island was a bustling community working the granite stone quarry, still visible today. In the 1970s and ’80s, it was home to the Outward Bound School. In 2009, the Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership took over the site, with science, technology, engineering and mathematics experiential education programs for youths between the ages of 11 and 18. Guest rental moorings might be available, and you are invited to go ashore. Anchoring is possible, but the bottom is rocky, with kelp. There are trails around the island and a center to visit.

You’ve been gone a week now, and you might need a few provisions. There’s a small grocery store nearby in Carvers Harbor. You can get there by going southeast around Herons Neck light or up and around Greens Island, then down the Reach, a narrow, twisty passageway between Vinalhaven and Greens Island leading to Carvers Harbor, the main settlement on the island. Keep an eye on the chart and markers as you go because they can be confusing. You might meet the ferry on its way to or from Rockland.

Just before the ferry terminal, drop the hook off Dodge Point or on the opposite side of the entrance, south of Potato Island. Send in the dinghy to see if there is a rental mooring available. Look for a buoy with a bottle wired atop a stick. It’s for the rental fee. Call the harbor master if necessary (207-756-0209).

Carvers Harbor is one of Maine’s busiest lobster-fishing harbors, landing some 5 million pounds of lobster annually. The harbor is narrow, full of lobster boats, and the shore is lined with floating docks piled high with the traps, wood crates and scales. It’s there where fishermen offload and weigh their haul, and cash out. There’s no room in the harbor to anchor, and the bottom is too hard anyway, so anchor outside.

There’s lots to do ashore, so take the crew to the dinghy dock at the head of the harbor, where you can tie up. Across the street is the Nightingale Restaurant, formerly the Harbor Gawker. There are shops, a grocery store, art galleries, pubs, offices and buildings that date back to when this town was a granite shipping port. The streets lead to lanes, past Victorian homes and farms, summer estates, forests, and abandoned, water-filled quarries. Stay overnight because tomorrow will be a long day.

Day 10: It’s just 4 miles from Carvers Harbor to Brimstone Island, a tall, rugged, uninhabited island on the outer edge of Penobscot Bay. It might as well be on the edge of the world. Anchor off the pebble beach at the northwest corner. This is a day-only anchorage. The bottom is rocky with kelp. Holding ground is better on the south side between Brimstone and Little Brimstone but only in settled weather. Dinghy ashore, but keep an eye on the tide or set a dinghy mooring.

The island beach is famous for its small, round, black basaltic pebbles, polished smooth by 100,000 years of wave and tidal action. The stones arrived there eons ago from far, far to the north, carried by the ice sheet as it moved slowly south. I’ve carried three of these small black stones in my left pocket for years. Wherever I am in the world, I can grab a handful of Maine. Stay clear of the east side of the island because it is a bird nesting area.

By early afternoon it will be time to gather up the crew and return to the boat for lunch and a discussion of what to do with the remaining days of the trip.

Day 11: Six miles north of Brimstone, halfway up the eastern shore of Vinalhaven, is Seal Bay, a nifty piece of water with anchorages, coves and islands. The entrance is between aptly named Bluff Head and Hen Island. The channel is narrow and the current swift, but inside there are five or six individual and secluded anchorages. You’ll be surrounded by a granite and spruce wilderness. The only trail access is through Huber Preserve, south of Burnt Island. With a kayak or the dinghy, you can explore the coves and islands, and watch wildlife, birds, dolphins, foxes, and perhaps see a deer. Next to Seal Bay is Winter Harbor, another narrow cove cut deep into the island. There are three or four spots to anchor, but mind the current and swing room.

Days 12 and 13: It’s time to get back into civilization, and cellphone service. Let’s head to Camden. This is a morning trip from Seal Bay. Head up through the Fox Island Thoroughfare, put the Sugar Loaves to port this time, and turn right at the Fiddler, a granite stone monument at the southern end of a ledge off Stand-In-Point. From there, it’s an 8-mile dash across West Bay to Camden. Watch out for the Graves, a ledge above high tide, marked by a light, a mile and a half southeast from Camden.

Put Curtis Island Lighthouse to port as you enter Camden’s outer harbor. There’s room to anchor inside to the right, east of the mooring field, west of the ledges. The Yacht Club, Wayfarer Marine and the town have rental moorings. Call ahead. The inner-harbor floats are filled with local craft, but Wayfarer and the town docks might have space to come alongside. Wayfarer has a fuel dock and pump-out station. The town has a pump-out boat that will come to you in the outer harbor. Call ahead.

Ashore, Camden is as charming a town as you could imagine. It was the film set for the 1950s movie Peyton Place. There are shops, a library, provisioning, laundry, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays, there’s an open-air farmers market. There are hardware stores, T-shirt shops, and art and home-furnishing galleries. Camden has also become Maine’s foodie town, with more a dozen restaurants, featuring Italian, Asian and French cuisine, and good-old New England seafood. There’s waterfront dining, and Harbor Dogs—a fish-taco truck—is right there on the public landing.

There’s a large, freshwater lake nearby and half a dozen hiking trails that wander through the Camden Hills. A half-hour climb to the top of Mount Battie, which oversees Camden, provides stunning vistas of Penobscot Bay. You can see the islands you just explored, with views all the way to Blue Hill, Cadillac Mountain and Isle au Haut. The trail begins just a 10-minute walk from the dinghy docks.

In non-COVID times, there are concerts and plays, as well as performances on the library lawn and at the Opera House. Wandering the streets or hiking over the hill to Rockport will get you back in shape from two weeks of cruising. It’s so nice there, you could move in. I did.

Day 14: Last day—it’s back to Rockland, 7 miles south of Camden. The crew can pack up, unload and head back to civilization. The boat can get parked on a mooring until the next adventure, or take you south. From there, it’s roughly 36 hours to Newport, Rhode Island. Or you can haul the boat for the winter, with plans to sail farther east next summer.

You can also think about future trips.

Northern Penobscot Bay needs a visit, including Warren Island, a state park next to Islesboro Island with hiking trails. Then into East Bay to visit Castine Harbor, Smith Cove and a dinghy trip up the Bagaduce. There are small coves and anchorages such as Bucks Harbor, along Eggemoggin Reach. Swans Island is next, then up into Blue Hill Bay, over to Mount Desert Island and Somes Sound. That’s another two-week jaunt before returning west, back through the Deer Isle Thoroughfare, with stops in Stonington and the islands of Merchants Row. Then a day’s sail back to Rockland.

The opportunities are endless. This could become a habit.

The Challenges of Cruising Maine

here are a few navigational challenges I should mention, such as fog, 10-foot tides, 4-knot currents, anchoring among rocks and ledges, and lobster buoys and trap lines. I didn’t say cruising the coast of Maine was going to easy, but it can be an exciting challenge for any cruising sailor. I can think if no better place to test your skills while exploring one of the world’s great archipelagos.

Fog: There are three degrees of fog, I’m told. With “normal” fog, you can see a quarter-mile ahead. “Thick” fog is when you can see only a few boat lengths ahead. With “dungeons” of fog, it’s so thick, you can’t see the bow of your own boat. In the old days, Mainers practiced potato navigation: a kid on the bow with a bag of spuds tossing them ahead. A splash? Keep going. A thud? Tacking!

Today, AIS, radar, GPS, chart plotters and VHF have reduced the anxiety, but many lobster boats fail to use AIS, radar doesn’t see trap buoys and lines, and the currents haven’t changed. Someone on deck needs to keep visual watch while you are below glued to the radar screen. The sounder doesn’t help much in fog. Your keel could be in 30 feet of water with the bowsprit tangled up in the spruce trees ashore. The most valuable piece of equipment to have on board in fog is the anchor. Fog will burn off by late morning—if it’s going to. In June and early July, fog is more common, less so later in the summer. September is the best month in Maine.

Tides and current: Tides in Maine run 8 to 10 feet. That’s a lot of water to push up into the bays and drain back out, twice each day, at six- and 12-hour intervals. The tidal current running in and out of bays and coves can reach 4 knots. An hour’s run across the bay can set you off a mile on arrival, unless you compensate. With all those ledges and rocks lurking about, even a few feet off course can put you aground.

Anchoring means deploying sufficient scope to cope with the tidal range. Then there’s the set of the current: When the tidal current switches direction, where will your boat sit? Best to have a few anchors and extra line aboard to deploy in a Bahamian moor, to anchor astern or to run a stern line ashore.

Lobster buoys and trap lines: Lobster buoys are as much a hazard as fog and currents. Maine is prime lobster-fishing territory, with buoys so thick in places, you could walk to shore on them. The colorful buoys are not the problem—it’s the line that floats just below the surface from the buoy to the toggle. The toggle is a small float that keeps the trap line off the bottom, but when the tide is low, the toggle might reach the surface, and the 20 feet of line to the colorful buoy floats just below the surface.

Steer around the top of a buoy, not the bottom end where the line exits the base of the buoy. Do not go between the buoy and the toggle; you’re liable to find that you’ve snagged the line and fouled the prop. This might require a dive overboard into frigid water to cut the line free. And in most places, the sea rarely gets above 60 degrees, even in the middle of the summer. Lobster boats have a wire cage around the prop to keep out their trap lines. You can have a line cutter bolted to your prop shaft to cut the line, but then the fisherman has lost his trap. Radar doesn’t see the buoys, and you can’t see them at night. Keep a constant watch when navigating in Maine, and steer clear of buoys and trap lines. Even sailboats with their prop locked can snag a line on the blades or the rudder. Divers can be hired in many harbors to free a fouled prop. Still, lobster buoys are helpful in seeing which way the current flows and at what speed.

Prevailing winds: A midsummer day in Maine is apt to be under a high-pressure system, resulting in sunny, fog-free days but little wind, especially in the mornings. As the land heats up, a southwest sea breeze is likely to fill in after lunch, and might get up to 20 knots by late afternoon, just before dying off before dark. Gales are infrequent in the summer, and when a low comes up the East Coast, it tends to pass by just offshore to the east, producing northeasterly winds. Most Maine bays and harbors are open to the southwest, providing a lee to those winds. Hurricanes are infrequent.

David H. Lyman is journalist, author, photographer and sailor. He sailed into Maine in the early 1970s and started a summer photography school, the Maine Photographic Workshops, which continues today as Maine Media Workshops (mainemedia.edu). He has been owned by four different sailboats, from an Alden 34-footer to a Bowman 57. He has sailed the entire East Coast, and made more than 24 offshore voyages between Maine and the Caribbean. His first memoir about his hitch as a Navy photojournalist with a Seabee outfit in Vietnam in 1967 was published in 2019. He lives and writes in Camden, Maine.

The post Cruising Maine’s Penobscot Bay appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s a typical down-on-the-dock scene in Maine. A handful of old-timers who have cruised this coast for better than a half-century share stories about favorite anchorages, shoreside hikes and precious swimming quarries. For them, the islands of Maine make life worth living, and the chance to sail among them summer after summer has more than justified the annual expense and effort they put into maintaining their sailboats. And then along comes Steve Stone and Amy Tunney, relative newcomers to town. Each is carrying a dry bag and wearing a backpack in preparation for a camp-­cruising voyage down Blue Hill Bay. Once out in the open water, they’ll make a final assessment of the wind forecast over the coming days, and they’ll ease off toward Acadia National Park to port, or toward Merchant Row and Vinalhaven to starboard.

Instead of spending countless hours sanding and painting and caulking their wooden boats as the purists do, Stone simply pulls the cover off their elegant craft, Howdy, slips it off the trailer into the water, and it’s good to go. No big hydraulic trailer necessary, no knuckle-busting engine work, no masts to step with a crane. When the wind blows, he and Tunney sail. When the wind quits, they row. Naturally the old-timers want to know more about how they go about the camp-cruising thing they have going.

Well, first of all, Stone and Tunney chose the right boat and boatbuilder: an Iain Oughtred-designed Caledonia Yawl built by Geoff Kerr. Kerr has built more than 20 boats to this design using marine-grade okoume plywood and epoxy, both of which are light and strong. And because the wood doesn’t shrink and swell like traditional sawn lumber, they can be stored on a trailer in a hot garage or under a tarp and be ready to launch at a moment’s notice without danger of leaking.

Besides this, Caledonias are great sailing boats: stiff in a breeze, easily reefable and surprisingly fast even to windward. A virtual ballerina of a boat at the hands of skilled sailors, these yawls are always in balance as they roll along before a freshening sea breeze on a summer afternoon.

At 19 feet, 6 inches, with a 6-foot-5-inch beam, Caledonia Yawls can carry a lot of gear and still have room for people. Occasionally we have even seen as many as 10 aboard Howdy with Stone and Tunney—plus a couple of dogs—enjoying an evening margarita cruise. With a draft of only 11 inches with the centerboard up and a sturdy keel, Stone can haul their Caledonia up the beach or pull it into deeper water with a haul-off anchoring system.

So how do they find big quantities of summer enjoyment in a small craft?

Besides choosing the right boat to carry them on their sail-camping adventures, Tunney and Stone have amassed gear and equipment to ensure that while they might be camping, they definitely aren’t roughing it. First off, they insisted on comfortable bedding. For this they chose a couple of Therm-a-Rest NeoAir inflatable mattresses. Rolled up, each one measures 4-by-6 inches, so onboard stowage is no problem.

And this was only the beginning. Summer by ­summer, they have added to their gear, all of it a sweet balance of simplicity, portability and comfort. Stone says their go-to website for discovering the best in camping apparatus is outdoorgearlab.com.

Another thing they make sure they do is carry ample fresh water, not only for drinking and cooking, but also for showers. What they take adds up to something like a gallon per day per person, plus fresh water for their hang-in-a-tree sun showers from Hydrapak. Water is heavy and takes up valuable space in the boat, but to stay fresh and clean on a five-night trip seems well worth it to them. As the water gets used, the bags roll up to the size of a tennis ball and stow away.

There’s only one real menace along the Maine coast, but it’s so reliable, you can set your clock to its irritation: mosquitoes. The only defense is to wall them off; set up the tent early and then dive in as soon as the first mosquito appears. Naturally they bring along bug dope, but they resist a total DEET soak-down if at all possible. Their other defense is to avoid islands with intense mosquito problems: islands with standing fresh water or adjacent salt marshes. Setting up camp on the windward side of an island also helps. And camp-cruisers generally stay clear of islands with rocky beaches. They make for hard landings, and swarms of biting flies often lurk beneath the stones. Once when Tunney and Stone veered off course to an unscouted island too late in the day to find an alternate site, Stone recalls that his partner came under a ferocious attack of these biting flies as she scouted out potential tent spots ashore while he rowed along the cobblestone beach waiting for her signal to land and unload. Seeing her slapping and cursing as she strode through the high grass, he pulled ashore and threw her a can of bug spray. Vigorously scrubbing chemicals into her thick hair and coming up with a total grin at the situation, this otherwise chemical-averse woman showed him that camping-wise, she was signed up for the long haul.

RELATED: A Celebration of Boats in Maine

Besides a tent and comfortable bedding, they carry headlamps, a good Whisperlite white-gas stove, super-insulated soft coolers to keep food fresh and ice cubes at the ready for the daily margarita, a grate for campfire grilling, and a horse-feed-style rubber bucket with a rope handle. The bucket, they say, is good for chores and fire safety. Anything needing to stay dry goes in large dry bags. True, it’s a lot to lug, but that’s what it takes to make their life comfortable—a priority of their own choosing.

For food, Tunney does the planning. She puts together meals before they go, such as a vegetable hash with chicken, frozen pizza from their favorite pizzeria that they grill by the slice over a charcoal fire, or veggie burgers. What the meals have in common is that they are easy to transport and simple to prepare.

But what ties it all together is the beauty and accessibility of the Maine coast. Not only are there countless islands to camp on within easy reach along the midcoast, the islands are generally strung out in a way that makes four- to five-day trips work for them.

When summer weekends arrive, they cross-reference wind and weather apps on their phones to get a feel for upcoming conditions. No matter what they have laid out in theory, it’s the weather that will shape their actual trip. This means the starting point isn’t usually chosen until the day before the launch, and the specific route they end up taking through the islands develops as they go. They always have a rough plan, usually with a specific island in mind for the evening, and Stone draws upon his old flight training to keep one eye on the weather for storms as well as a stream of bailout islands and coves as “emergency landing strips” along the way.

A key part of the Down East camp-sailing planning process is finding a safe place to bring the boat ashore or anchor it off with a haul-out system. Given the 9- to 12-foot tides, using an anchor and line and hauling the boat out past the low-tide line often means anchoring the boat 100 or more feet from shore. Getting things right is essential to a good night’s sleep. The last thing campers want is to find themselves wading out in the middle of the night if bad weather blows up.

Like sailing itself, sail-camping is a learn-as-you-go experience. And both Stone and Tunney have found it to be an economical and enjoyable way to experience one of the most beautiful, safe and accessible coastlines in the world. In summer, winds are generally manageable and predicted with great accuracy on phone apps and National Weather Service VHF-radio broadcasts. Navigation, once a challenge, has been made simple by GPS-enabled smartphones and other portable devices. Although they prefer charts and a compass, they use Navionics on their iPhones as a backup. A great many, perhaps even a majority of Maine islands, are located in waters protected from the open sea.

The reward for all that’s involved in small-boat adventures? “Cruising without an engine, with only oar and sail power, releases the tension from sticking to some plan,” Stone says. “If we follow the wind and currents each day, there’s no hard plan that requires sticking to. We often speak of ‘going with the flow’ and being forced to be in the moment. Without an engine, self-reliance becomes a necessity, and self-reliance usually brings peace and independence.”

Ultimately it is this peace and independence, enmeshed as it is in the challenges of exploring the natural world of Maine’s ­beautiful islands, that make Tunney and Stone love their ­getaways so deeply and brings them ever closer as a couple.

Bill Mayher is a writer and sailor who hails from Brooklin, Maine. He and Steve Stone are co-founders of marine video site ­ offcenterharbor.com.

Get to Know the Islands

To better familiarize themselves with the geography of potential camping spots, Amy Tunney and Steve Stone often take time to scope out potential islands to camp on, dipping into coves and up creeks to see what might work on a future voyage. Luckily a great many potential camping islands are under the auspices of either the Maine Island Trail Association or the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.

MITA has arranged permission from over 200 island owners to allow access to the association’s members. Many allow overnight camping. In exchange, MITA runs spring and fall cleanup programs and generally keeps a close eye on things. Accordingly, island owners have come to value their relationship with MITA, and the number of islands designated for camping has increased over the years. For beach cruisers, the best reason to join the association might be to get a copy of its guidebook and be able to access its app by smartphone. The book makes for great bedside reading and dreaming in the offseason, while the phone app is particularly useful during the cruise itself.

Both the book and the app are arranged geographically and give a convenient regional overview. Additionally, there is a chart of each MITA island that points out landing places, informs campers about various regulations that might apply, and shows the locations of campsites. MITA is vehement about the latter. The last thing they want is campers roaming around on an island with hatchet and bow saw, whacking out additional campsites. If the guide indicates one tent site on a given island, that’s it—one campsite. Faced with such limitations, camp cruisers are advised to get going early to their next landfall so they can be sure to get what they want, particularly on summer weekends.

The Maine Coast Heritage Trust, according to its mission statement, “conserves and stewards Maine’s coastal land and islands for their renowned scenic beauty, ecological value, outdoor recreational opportunities, and contribution to community [well-being].” So far the trust has conserved 154,150 acres, protected 320 islands and established some 93 preserves featuring 93 miles of trails. Without question, the coast would look far different without both the efforts of the trust and the generosity of coastal land owners who have donated land in order to keep it the way it was when they found it.

The post Sailing and Camping Along Down East Maine appeared first on Cruising World.

The first ankle biter struck while we were a couple of miles offshore, sailing past the twin lighthouses on Thatcher Island, off Rockport, Massachusetts. One moment, shipmates Herb McCormick and Tom Famulari and I were all chill, enjoying a lazy reach along Cape Ann. The next, we were boarded by a horde of flies with fangs. We swatted with ball caps, slapped with rolls of paper, but they kept on coming in an attack that raged until sunset—and resumed at dawn on the other side of the Gulf of Maine.

Who knew battling bugs would the hardest part of a Down East passage? The actual sailing? Pure delight: All it took were 25 hours and a southerly breeze for us to be snug on a mooring in pretty Tenants Harbor, Maine, with a fine sunrise in our wake, a refreshing beverage in hand, and more than a month’s worth of Penobscot Bay adventures about to begin with family and friends.

With a life moored in southern New England, my winter thoughts the past few years had often turned to a summer cruise along the Maine coast. But for a whole variety of reasons, time, distance and logistics repeatedly ruled it out. But then, out of the blue, the stars aligned this past July, and with minimal advance planning, the trip was on.

Our departure point was Nahant, Massachusetts, a small seaside town north of Boston where Tom and I live, and where my wife, Sue, and I had our Sabre 34, Jackalope, hanging on a mooring. Herb, who is Cruising World’s executive editor, and I had just finished putting out the annual charter issue, so we had a free spell to grab a good-weather window, which, as luck would have it, opened wide just two days after the issue shipped.

It’s roughly 125 nautical miles from Nahant to Tenants Harbor, or about a day’s run for Jackalope in most conditions. So while Herb drove to meet us, I grabbed a few provisions, loaded them up, and by Saturday morning at 11, we were good to go.

We motorsailed the first few miles until a sea breeze filled in off Gloucester. Late in the afternoon, with flies nipping and Cape Ann disappearing astern, we watched a steady stream of whale-­watching boats parade past on their way to and from the waters surrounding Jeffreys Ledge. Soon, they too were out of sight, and by dusk, we were well offshore, enjoying a stunning sunset, surrounded by nothing but open water and occasional patches of buoys and fishing gear.

To make things easy, we stood two-hour tricks at the wheel through the night. Just before dawn, I came up from a nap below to find Herb on the helm and Jackalope surrounded by shark fins that curiously seemed to be waving at us. They, along with a blazing sunrise, were a memorable way to begin the first day in Maine.

We were perhaps 10 or so miles from a waypoint we’d set off the southern end of Monhegan Island, and it wasn’t long before we heard the beefy rumble of diesel engines and spotted the glowing deck lights of fishing boats. Maybe that was what woke the flies, or perhaps it was the warmth of the day returning. In either case, soon Tom the Slayer was back at it, dispensing vengeance in a now-bloodied cockpit.

Past Monhegan, the mainland began to come into focus: bold granite shorelines topped by evergreens. First came the outer islands—Allen and Burnt and Mosquito—and then the coast, with cottages dotting the shore. By noon, we had Southern Island in sight, and then we were past it, making the turn down the channel into Tenants. As luck would have it, several salty-looking Friendship sloops were visiting, having just finished their annual rendezvous.

RELATED: Changes on the Gulf of Maine

Later in the day, after a nap and a bracing swim in the 61-degree water, we dinghied ashore to Tenants Harbor Boat Yard. In the guest center up the hill, I couldn’t help but wonder what prompted the management to post a sign politely asking visitors not to shower with their dogs. At any rate, we didn’t. Instead, we made the best of the remaining daylight and took an extended inflatable tour to check out the lobster boats, work skiffs, all manner of sailboats and visiting sloops swinging on moorings. Later, we enjoyed a tasty dinner of kielbasa and beans, topped off by a blazing redish sunset and star-filled sky.

The Rockland area, with Tenants Harbor nearby, is a convenient place to set up camp or juggle crew when cruising this part of the Maine coast. By car or bus, the city is about three hours from Boston, and there is regular ferry service out to the islands. Once a fishing town, the harbor today is teeming with residential and transient moorings. Ashore, there are well-stocked grocery stores, chandleries, several full-service marinas, shops, museums and restaurants. But better yet, Rockland sits at the southwestern end of Penobscot Bay, long a sailor’s playground filled with countless islands, coves and harbors waiting to be explored. During late July and August, weekend classic-yacht and full-on-racing regattas attract an array of yachts and their motherships, which move from one venue to another in an endless parade of sail.

With Jackalope’s delivery complete, Tom and Herb headed home, Sue and the dog arrived, and I shifted into vacation mode for a couple of weeks. First on the agenda: a few days sailing with my brother, Dave, and his wife, Peggy, who live just down the road from Tenants and on whose mooring we were squatters.

With the boat ­provisioned, refueled and tanks filled with water, we got a late-­morning start two days later. The breeze was light as we motored up Muscle Ridge Channel, a lobster- pot-studded waterway between the mainland and a series of off-lying islands. By Rockland, we set sail and rode a southerly sea breeze east to the entrance of the Fox Island Thorofare.

The Thorofare is a busy, meandering channel that runs between North Haven and the larger Vinalhaven to the south. With the wind behind us, it was an easy run, with plenty of time to gawk at the sprawling “cottages” along either shore. Even on a midweek afternoon, there was plenty of boat traffic to keep us company. Maine is Vacationland, after all.

In North Haven, we found an empty transient mooring near the ferry dock. It turned out to be a ringside seat to an endless stream of schooners, sloops, runabouts and, of course, lobster boats, which roared past, rocking ­everything with their wakes.

A work colleague and his wife have a summer home a couple of blocks from the waterfront, so eventually we dinghied ashore and went to find them. But not before a visit to Brown’s Boatyard, where we paid our $25 rental fee for the night. Brown’s is the sort of yard you’d expect to find in a working harbor. Its rambling red buildings are filled with boat parts, machinery and projects in various stages of repair. For a sailor, the weathered wharf and yard were a visual tapestry to behold.

From there, we walked a rambling route through the village to find our friends, enjoyed a cocktail on their porch that overlooks the Thorofare, then walked back into town for pizza at Calderwell Hall. The place was packed, and for the record, the food was delicious.

The next morning, we used the dog as an excuse to take a long walk along the one road that heads north out of town, and then we continued on through the Thorofare to East Penobscot Bay. It was another light-air day, but we were in no hurry and were content to reach across to Merchant Row, an island-speckled body of water between Stonington and Isle Au Haut. Even with a chart plotter, iNavX on my phone, and paper charts, it was easy to get quickly disorientated and lose track of just which rocky outcropping we were passing. Throw in a few thousand lobster pots to snag, and well, it was a navigational experience that kept everyone focused. We continued east into Jericho Bay, then swung north and eventually circled back toward Stonington through the Deer Island Thorofare.

Our plan was to spend the night in town, but of course, plans change. Instead, we met up with a friend of Peggy’s—who was sailing nearby—and dropped the hook alongside in a well-protected anchorage off Camp Island. It had been several hours since we were last ashore, and my ­attention—as well as the dog’s—was immediately drawn to a nearby rocky islet with the welcoming name of Hell’s Half Acre. Before we could get there though, a schooner dropped anchor and delivered its guests ashore. No matter, there were plenty more deserted granite knobs nearby to explore.

In the morning, the sea was glassy-calm as we motored toward the southern end of Eggemoggin Reach. That’s when we, or I should say I, snagged the first lobster pot. All of a sudden, there was a loud thunk, thunk, thunk on the hull and the diesel died. Luckily, I’d brought along a wetsuit, so I was able to dress for the occasion. In the water, the current tugged the boat and stretched the pot warp tight, so all it took was a slice with the knife and we were free. But then we began drifting along at a pretty good clip, and there were several wraps of rope still knotted around the prop shaft. The crew managed to grab a passing pot, which we used as a temporary anchor while I sawed away at the remaining line. Eventually, Dave donned the wetsuit and finished off the job while I caught my breath and kept a wary eye on the lobstermen working traps nearby. I wondered out loud what the protocol might be for meeting the missing buoy’s owner in such a situation.

The rest of the day more than made up for that inconvenient start. We emerged from the Deer Island Thorofare as the breeze filled in across Jericho Bay. Our timing was perfect, and we watched dozens of small sailboats cross our path in the Small Reach Regatta, put on by the Traditional Small Craft Association. The annual raid-style multiday event begins and ends in Brooklin, home to the Wooden Boat School and the Brooklin Boat Yard.

With a 10-knot breeze behind us, we had a long run up the Reach, jibing between Deer Isle to port and the mainland. To starboard, a couple of large schooners ghosted along the shore. Our destination was Bucks Harbor, where we picked up a mooring for the night and took full advantage of the marina’s outdoor showers.

Ironically, Buck’s Harbor Marina is now owned by a couple with the last name of Buck. Jon works in the medical field, but during summer, he manages to spend most of his time at the marina along with his wife, Jessica, and their hardworking kids. Together, they keep the place spotless and have even found time to launch a small fleet of charter boats.

Bucks Harbor, it turns out, would be as far afield as we’d go in our wanderings. Our shipmates had to get back for work, so in the morning, we sailed across the north end of Deer Island and headed for home by way of Islesboro, the long island that bisects this part of Penobscot Bay. A lively wind picked up from the south, and we were closehauled all the way back past North Haven. As we neared the southern tip of Islesboro, our timing once again proved perfect, even if our luck wasn’t. We found ourselves smack-dab in the middle of the Camden Classic Cup Regatta. Yawls and ketches and schooners, all under billowing clouds of sail, blew past us toward the windward mark just as we managed to snag our second lobster buoy. It was a scramble to get the sails down in the 20-knot breeze, and even after we got the line cut, it was too rough to think about going under the boat to pull what remained from the prop shaft. Instead, we unfurled the jib to get underway and avoid the rocks to leeward. But now, the fleet was upon us once again with spinnakers flying. They, of course, were on starboard tack, and we were closehauled on port. And yes, we had a few interesting crossings as we headed off in search of calmer waters.

Back in Tenants Harbor, I took a day to catch up on work, and our daughter, Lily, joined us. Now maniacal about avoiding lobster traps, we sailed back up Muscle Ridge Channel and caught the opening day of the Lobster Festival in Rockland. The waterfront was abuzz in anticipation of the coronation that evening of the Maine Sea Goddess.

From there, we headed back to North Haven to visit Pulpit Harbor, where we anchored with a tremendous view of the Camden Hills to the west. By the time the sun set, I was running out of superlatives to describe the surroundings.

Much of the rest of August, I had to work. Still, we found time for dinghy rides and daysails, and enjoyed quiet nights on the boat at the mooring. Then toward the end of the month, Dave and I made one last three-day visit to investigate the anchorages on the east side of Vinalhaven. Anchored in Seal Bay, we took the dinghy to explore long fingers of water cut into the granite shoreline. We motored deep into Winter Harbor to get a closer look at the towering granite cliffs that line it. And we spent a final afternoon and night on a mooring back at Brown’s Boatyard in North Haven.

But days were getting shorter and the weather cooler. It was time for this excellent summer adventure to come to an end. Sue and I had already decided to leave the boat in Maine for the winter rather than sailing back south, and had found a yard where we could haul out sometime later in the fall. We were hooked, and we knew it.

But as Dave and I beat our way south toward Tenants Harbor in the morning, I pondered my fall schdule and checked my phone to find the National Hurricane Center tracking multiple disturbances, any one of which might spin its way up the coast. It had already been a season filled with abrupt changes in plans, so why not the endgame too? A quick call to Spruce Head Marine sealed the deal. We’d leave the boat on one of their moorings, and they’d take care of the rest. A simple solution meant no need to worry. Turns out, aside from lobster pots and flies, staying in Maine was just as easy as getting there.

Mark Pillsbury is CW’s editor.

The post Cruising Maine, by Chance appeared first on Cruising World.

The wind’s blowing 20 across confused seas as a 5-foot swell reminds us Hurricane Chris went by not long ago. It’s a great day for my dad, my nephew and me to sail the Nova Scotia coast. We steer a broad reach at 7 knots, and that takes the sting out of the gusts as we wend through lumpy seas like a skier through moguls. It’s not all good times; the sky’s gone the color of old nickels, and our boat skids awkwardly off every 10th wave. Still, there’s plenty to like for three generations of McCarthys aiming south from Shelburne onward to round Cape Sable for a night on the Bay of Fundy shore.

A set of larger waves slides beneath Nellie, my trusty Beneteau First 42, and one dollop of wave spanks her transom and — splash! — lands in my father’s lap. It’s a pot-full of cold ocean, but on this day, it makes Ted grin. “Rub a dub dub!” he chortles. My nephew Mac responds from the wheel, “Three men in a tub!” and we smile to recognize ourselves in this building sea.

Yes, it’s the three of us aboard this tub, and from my nephew to me to my dad, it’s three perspectives on an ocean experience. You see, the old man’s been remembering the whales he saw 50 years back and the shoals of fish he sailed through when he was young. But Mac says he’s seen mostly jellyfish in his sailing, and rarely a whale. In other words, my crew combines past and future into a crucial ecological present: Ted McCarthy is into his eighth decade afloat, Mac Huffard is getting ready for college with two weeks at sea, and I’m somewhere between the kid my dad took sailing and the skipper my nephew knows.

The Gulf of Maine is changing around us in increments we register over a lifetime but overlook in any single season. Its illustrious fishing history has been on my mind this whole cruise, and sharing the cockpit with family born in 1941 and in 1999 gives me a new appreciation for the slow changes each generation lives through in any ecological community. Cape Sable is just ahead, and it occurs to me we’re rushing along atop the Gulf of Maine as an ecosystem, as a historical context and as a family setting.

The summer goal was pretty simple: first, cruise from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to Cape Sable across the Gulf of Maine’s celebrated fishing banks; second, visit eastern Nova Scotia; third, get back around Cape Sable and return to Maine on the shorter leg across the Bay of Fundy. The first leg was about 300 miles, with the promise our keel would pass over fish-rich Browns Bank and Jeffreys Bank and other shallows that arc from Cape Cod all the way to the Grand Banks. We weren’t going all the way to Newfoundland — I only had three weeks — but I was excited this little venture would combine marine ecology and family to truly appreciate the Gulf of Maine.

The area from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia is the Gulf of Maine: 70,000 square miles of life as deep as the Empire State Building and as cold as the refrigerator in your kitchen. If someone asks where I’m from, I say “Maine,” but I’d probably do better to say “the Gulf of Maine.” That second answer would emphasize coastline and islands quilted with spruce and known to heron and osprey. The prevailing winds blow from southwest to northeast, from Cape Cod’s glossy tip to the matte-gray breakers off Cape Sable, a journey of 300 miles, if run by sailboats in the Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race. It’s no surprise these racers encounter a living ocean’s emissaries in that rich expanse of currents and banks. Out there are fin whales, right whales, humpbacks and sharks. Maybe you’ve been, and out there you saw terns, gannets, gulls and storm petrels. Of course, amid these visitors to the surface are hints of deeper play from mackerel, herring, haddock and hake.

Aboard Nellie, the crew accommodates my enthusiasm for the lives and ledges 50 fathoms beneath our deck shoes. My nephew should care that right here in his family’s front yard is one of Earth’s miracles of abundance. Sandy shallows like Browns Bank separate the warm Gulf Stream from the cold Gulf of Maine, and tidal streams mingle nutrients that power spectacular plankton blooms, feeding the herring that feed the cod that bring the tuna and swordfish and sharks and whales. But when you’re 19, ecological history seems less important than the social present. Nevertheless, on this family cruise I try to impress that we follow enterprising fishermen who knew these banks before there was a United States or a diesel engine.

A mile ahead of us, a white hull steams east below whirling radar domes and scything antennas. I say, “Imagine it’s 1575. You’re sailing here from Cornwall or Brittany with a simple compass and a couple of prayers. Those people were adventurous.” The crew nods, wary of my enthusiasm for the historical. Today’s fishermen have my respect too, and in a sense, the fishing is the story. The fishing brought Europeans in their shallops and pinnaces, and even the longboats of Leif Erikson back in the year 1000. Erikson, they say, settled Vinland (what’s now Newfoundland), and on the foggy rollers off Matinicus you can imagine the squeal of those oars.

If wanderlust brought the Norsemen, cod brought Portuguese, French and English fishermen. Those were in the Cabot, Hudson and de Champlain days; fat-bottomed fishing boats rollicked in Maine harbors before Jamestown or Plymouth Plantation even existed. On the Isles of Shoals, at Popham Beach, up on Monhegan, men who might have drunk with Shakespeare and fired on the Spanish Armada dried their fish on New World racks, pulled their nets near Wabanaki families and, each autumn, packed their holds to sail protein back to a hungry Europe.

But where are the fish these earlier generations applauded? I’m listening through the hull to hear the Gulf of Maine’s gentle testimony — there’s a cautionary tale unfolding. Sailing from Cape Elizabeth to Cape Sable buys you a front-row seat to contemplate the plenty this gulf once held, and a view of what loss looks like at the ecosystem level. The marine life I encountered today — gannets, guillemots and terns in the air, a whale at some distance, a shoal of bluefish to port shepherded by five gulls — is a fraction of the vibrant communities that once interacted here. Early visitors left clear written records of their days. In 1602, John Brereton described: “Whales and Seales in great abundance … Tunneys, Anchoves, Bonits, Salmons, Lobsters, Oisters having Pearle, and infinite other sorts of fish, which are more plentifull upon those coasts of America, than in any other part of the known world.”

“More plentifull,” indeed. A dozen generations back, our ancestors reported walruses off Nova Scotia, beluga whales all the way to Boston, great auk in the thousands, salmon runs to push a rowboat upriver, right whales aplenty and, above all, the majesty of cod.

Looking out for fishing boats, I tell Mac it was the limitless regenerative power of cod that bankrolled early America. Cod are the perfect inhabitants for these perfect waters, feeding on the sand lance and capelin and other tiny denizens of the shallow banks nearby. Around 1740, rich men in the Massachusetts State House hung a wooden codfish above their chamber to remind themselves where wealth comes from. They called it “the sacred cod”! Today, you can barely find a codfish. By some estimates the Gulf of Maine holds only one-third of 1 percent of the cod here when the Mayflower came ashore.

My dad says he remembers boats going out of Boston and cod as cheap fish for Friday nights.

Mac says, “I’ve never seen a codfish.”

I think that if each generation normalizes the conditions it inhabits it can only presume the ecology it encounters to be “natural.” We’re trapped in a limited perspective, like boats in the fog. Maybe sailing is a useful antidote because so many of us learn to sail in family groups, and sharing a cockpit with your family’s youngest and oldest is also sharing the long view on ocean health.

Four hundred years along, Gulf of Maine cod teeter on the edge of endangered status. Industrial fishing in these waters pulled so many fish so fast that even the cod could not reproduce quickly enough to sustain their dizzying numbers. Endless supply was the assumption and endless resilience was the expectation as vigorous trawling of undersea banks like Jeffreys Ledge and Cashes Ledge dug and gouged the seafloor into a mucky morass. Powerful mechanized fleets were deployed from the 1920s on. “The combined force of decades of fishing by domestic and foreign trawl fishers stripped the bottom of life, and rearranged the very foundation of the gulf,” writes marine biologist Callum Roberts. “Trawling had become a geologic force.”

When I was a kid, more powerful fishing boats from Portland to Gloucester followed the cod offshore where they mated and shoaled, and there collected the oldest, healthiest fish in that vulnerable moment. We thought it was business as usual back in the 1970s, but factory fishing swept up the last best hope, and left us with a stunted ecosystem. I recall catching codfish on a jig off the New Meadows River, in Maine, in the mid-’70s, at a time when ecologists were warning of a collapse and the fishing industry scoffed and brought more technology to bear. That last cod I caught was green black, goggle-eyed, held firmly at the jaw by my big hook. I saw only a personal success in those fins and smells, a good fish I’d caught with my hands, and not the last twitch of a receding era.

In Nova Scotia, we tied up to fishing docks and I chatted with amiable, welcoming fishermen. They’ve adjusted their practices since the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing. “I’m mostly for the haddock when I can, and the lobsters all winter,” said one skipper in West Head. Another fisherman told me of the sustainable tuna industry off Cape Sable, where men fish hook-and-line for bluefin tuna in an enterprise free of bycatch and destruction. They all work hard to satisfy the appetite for fish ashore, and deserve our consideration.

Across the border, Maine fishermen suffered a record-low cod catch in 2015 (about 250,000 pounds), and promptly had a worse year in 2016 (170,000 pounds). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tells us the spawning population in the Gulf of Maine has never been smaller — and the overall decline since 2005 has been 80 percent. That is 80 percent from already rotten, overfished, habitat-debased 2005, not my heyday, shiny-jigging 1975, much less a robust base line such as 1575. For someone born in 1999, these fisheries seem normal; to my dad, they seem sadly depleted. I deduce that our influence unfolds at such a slow pace that profound environmental changes surprise us all — like watching the clock’s hour hand, you know it’s moving but you just can’t see it.

Another steady-slow cause of environmental harm is our hotter climate. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than just about any body of water on the planet. This warming means big changes to the ecosystem. A retired fisheries officer I interviewed said ocean warming is a threat to Nova Scotia: “You can blame Exxon or you can call it God’s wrath, but the fact is cold-water fish are going elsewhere, or not surviving.”

The cod, halibut and even lobsters are sensitive to temperature, and as the Gulf of Maine warms and as it acidifies, signature species such as lobster struggle. With spray coming aboard and Nellie fighting the helm in a trough, I wonder what this watery place will look like two decades on, when Mac takes his kids to the sea.

But it’s not all bad news. On the sail up here we glided across fishing banks on a calm day, and the flat seas were delightful with life. The cod might be all but gone, yet I saw humpback whales spouting bubbles into the setting sun, white-sided dolphins leaping clear into the air and shearwaters, storm petrels and gannets dancing against blue skies. The Gulf of Maine still thrives, still lives if we will let its residents rebound. The silly “three men in a tub” rhyme ends with the ambiguous line, “and all of them out to sea,” creating uneasiness, a sense of imminent catastrophe. But what if “out to sea” is where you want to be? Then you’re not condemned, you’re lucky to know that watery place in a personal way. That seems closer to the family experience I’m having this brisk day.

To be at sea with a young sailor is to wish for an ecological future healthier than the one I’ve occupied. Maybe with awareness and planning, the story of decline in these waters can change into one of revitalization. Mac turns the wheel and looks to windward; what blows from there is the possibility of a resilient, blooming Gulf of Maine or, sadly, a wholesale unraveling of the ecology under climate warming and aggressive industrial fishing. Which way will we steer? Which way will he steer?

The Gulf of Maine is just the place for cruising sailors to take on these questions because it hosts so much incredible sailing amid so much incredible marine life. Cruisers enjoy a direct view of ocean health, and organizations like Sailors for the Sea and Turn the Tide on Plastic attest to the sailing community’s engagement. You can only hope coming generations will know the thrill of marine creatures riding their bow waves or spouting in the distance.

A flash in the water was a chunk of driftwood. Dad says, “Your grandfather saw leatherback turtles off Cape Ann,” and I think of the creatures once neighbors and now merely memories. And here we are, three generations who care about the ocean, and each of us with our own ocean in mind. Soon we’ll drop a reef in the mainsail and send Mac forward to secure the tack, to tighten the clew, to motion from the mast while my father steers us into the wind and I crank the halyard snug. A metaphor? Sure, a metaphor of people working together for the well-being of the ship, a symbol of active cooperation guaranteeing sustainability for the craft that floats them.

Jeffrey McCarthy is director of the environmental humanities graduate program at the University of Utah.

The post Changes on the Gulf of Maine appeared first on Cruising World.

How can one possibly ­enhance Maine’s magnificent coastal cruising? Our answer: carry stand-up paddleboards. Indeed, the ­explorations and exercise they ­provide are high points of our sailing journeys. We would not want to carry our rigid boards offshore, but in near-shore conditions they travel without difficulty, lashed to the lifelines outboard of our Finngulf 391 West Wind‘s inboard chainplates. We still love rowing and exploring with the wonderful wooden Maine-built pea pod we tow, but nowadays, we more often find adventure on the paddleboards when the water is calm.

A memorable paddle up the Englishman River, a lovely estuary draining into Englishman Bay just east of Roque Island, exemplifies the fun and the connection to nature we ­enjoy. The anchorage off the river’s mouth is exposed, but we saw our opportunity on a sunny early September day with only light southeasterlies forecast. We slid the boards over the side and were off. We had been into the river once before by pea pod and knew the importance of playing the tidal ­current, which sluices through the entrance under a road bridge at considerable velocity. With the pea pod, timing our entry and exit to the tidal conditions had been crucial, but with paddleboards, there would have been the option of carrying them across the road and relaunching inside the bridge, if necessary. This day, though, we entered with a fair current a couple of hours before high tide. Once through the bridge, the current velocity was less but still sufficient to give a welcome boost.

We were soon past a ­handful of houses and into the river’s wild stretches. A forest of spruce and fir fringed the marsh grasses, and in the wide middle of the waterway, the rising tide rapidly covered expansive flats. In many places, we were slightly early in our timing, the fins of our paddleboards gouging the mud. Where necessary, we dropped to our knees and moved our weight well forward to reduce the fins’ draft, sometimes having to pole with the paddles to push our way to deeper water. Our timing of the tide was good enough that we never had to hop off and wade, and soon we had no worries as to water depth.

September held the ­promise of bird migration season. In our belt packs we had small 10-power binoculars and a waterproof camera for spotting and recording. Enthralling was the sheer number of yellowlegs and smaller sandpipers along the winding channel, as well as herons, Canada geese, the occasional eagle and other birds that one would expect in such an area. It was an education in how important these estuarine stopovers are along the eastern Maine coast.

Eventually, the channel ­narrowed and grew ever more winding between banks covered by marsh grass nearly as tall as us. Within the curves were pools in the grass with water levels higher than the channel except at the top of the tide. From some, we flushed black ducks.

As the tide turned, we ­also turned to ride the current down and out of the river before water depths dropped too much. We clambered back aboard West Wind and pulled the boards on deck, exhilarated by yet another wonderful cruising experience.

Our boards are relatively high-performance fiberglass touring boards. They have a shallow-V cross section and pointed bow with upward sweep. Ben’s is 14 feet long, Dianna’s 12½ feet. The weight of each is just over 30 pounds. We recognize the ­advantages of inflatable boards for carrying aboard a cruising boat, and for voyages farther afield we might choose them. For short sails in coastal waters, though, we prefer the livelier performance of our rigid boards — and not having to inflate and deflate them between excursions. Our other equipment consists of carbon-­fiber paddles, leashes tethering the boards to our ankles, life ­jackets and kayak booties.

For clothing, we often just wear whatever we have been wearing on deck: bathing suits or jeans, T-shirts or fleece jackets, whatever the weather calls for. Knock on wood, we very rarely fall in. (In winter, paddleboarding from the beach while West Wind rests in a Maine shed, we wear drysuits.) Our staying upright ­largely ­results from confining our paddleboarding to relatively calm days with minimal waves and keeping a close eye on depth in shallow water. Lobster-boat wakes can be a particular hazard in Maine. If they look too big for us to remain standing and paddle through with the bow into the waves, we drop to our knees.

Launching and ­retrieving the boards is easy on West Wind. Our lifeline gates are well aft and wide. The toe rail is aluminum, much better than a varnished wooden toe rail at tolerating sliding the boards over it. For a wooden rail, however, it would not be hard to make a padded protective piece over which boards could slide.

There are two disadvantages, neither serious, that we find in having paddleboards on deck while cruising coastal waters. We lash them far enough aft so that visibility forward is not affected. Depending on the helmsman’s ­position, whether standing or sitting and whether amidships, to windward or ­leeward, the boards can interfere with visibility in the ­sector from about 45 degrees off the bow to nearly amidships. Just as a helmsman needs to peer around a low-cut jib that restricts visibility, so he or she needs to shift position and look over the board frequently if dangers may be obscured. The second effect of having the boards on deck is that their windage can increase the boat’s blowing back and forth at anchor. Generally, this is no problem, but if high winds are forecast, we sometimes move the boards aft alongside the cockpit to get the windage aft and thereby steady the boat.

Getting adequate exercise while cruising is crucial to us, for both our physical and mental health. The Maine coast is blessed with an array of lands with wonderful trails open to the public, including mainland and island properties of Acadia National Park, Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the state park system, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the ­Nature Conservancy and local land trusts. We anchor off and enjoy the hikes through forests and grassy meadows and along rocky shorelines. Rowing our pea pod has been another superb way to have a workout, discovering nooks and crannies in innumerable bays and archipelagos. And then we added paddleboarding. Like cross-country ­skiing and swimming, it provides low-impact, full-body exercise, and is especially excellent for the body’s core.

For Dianna, loving to break a good sweat, paddling hard often replaces or augments running. One year, frequent paddling once greatly speeded her recovery from a broken ankle and knee.

The fact that paddling brings us so close to nature, as in our venture into the ­Englishman River, does as much good for our psyche as the balancing and the pulling on the paddle does for our muscles. The scenery and the birds are a constant presence. Paddling also draws one to what is under the water. Standing 5 to 6 feet above the surface of clear water enables a very good view of what is below — rockweed, eelgrass, crabs, starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars and a host of other forms of marine life. In tropical waters, we have done a great deal of snorkeling. Paddleboarding provides a viewing experience reminiscent of that. Carrying a mask and snorkel on the paddleboard and going into the water occasionally, even in Maine, is an enjoyable option in warm weather.

Seals, curious creatures, ­often pop their whiskery snouts up to watch us paddle by. One morning brought three porpoises streaming along to cross Dianna’s wake and dive close under the board. A different day saw her slip off her board to swim with them as they chased ­mackerel. River otters are other mammals of coastal Maine waters we’ve encountered on rare but exciting occasions.

On stand-up paddleboards we have closely explored the best of Maine’s coastal sailing destinations, discovering jewels above and below the ­water. Paddling has added a yet more intimate connection to this magnificent coast. We return from our cruising feeling more fit physically and mentally, bonded with the coastal ecosystem that sustains us.

Ben and Dianna Emory are longtime sailors from Salisbury Cove and Brooklin, Maine. Each has a book being published by Seapoint Books in May 2018. Ben has written Sailor for the Wild — on Maine, Conservation and Boats. Dianna has written Bonding with Nature — Responding to Life’s Challenges and the Aging Process.

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One of the rewards of surviving a New England winter is being around for the day in late March when the wind dies and the sun gives a hint that the beast may finally be at bay. Another is a trip to Portland, Maine, for the Maine Boatbuilders Show, an annual celebration of boats, craftsmanship and the watery world we play in.

The 2018 show — number 31 for those who are counting — took place for the second year at the Portland Sports Complex, located just off the Maine Turnpike and a few miles removed from the waterfront and downtown. The venue lacks some of the charm of Portland Yacht Services’ old locomotive factory, but then again, the roof doesn’t leak and there’s plenty of free parking.

It’s a unique event and attracts people from all corners of the marine industry, from first-rate shipyards to mom-and-pop shops that sell kits to build your own canoe or kayak. The hall is filled with motorboats, skiffs, rowing craft, dinghies and sailboats. In one corner, there’s a seminar stage set up. In another, bronze artifacts from boats gone by are on display. I think “eclectic” sums it up.

Show organizer Phin Sprague, who runs Portland Yacht Services with his wife, Joanna, is a guy who’s filled with ideas about bringing people together, as the show does every spring. This year, he spoke at length about the need to get a new generation of sailors and powerboaters jazzed about being on the water, and the best way to do it, he vows, is to get them out in small boats that they can handle on their own.

In a note to attendees of this year’s “gathering of the clan,” as Phin puts it, he writes: “Because time is not our friend, I am concentrating on what in retrospect has become an important part of the fabric of the continuum of the marine industry. The next generations. In my view the Maine Boat Builders Show needs to do more to promote the next generations both new opportunities for careers and to help new businesses find success. There is truly something profound about ‘at first you have to row a small boat.’ This translates to support of programs to get young people introduced to the water. It translates to support of further education both ashore and in boats. It translates to support of industry standards and quality. And finally, it translates into providing nascent startups with effective visibility and access to critical markets. A big charge but I am reminded that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.”

This year, the bites of elephant included courses for marine surveyors, a Cruising Club of America gam, The Maine High School Troubleshooting Competition, and a number of seminars for sailors and powerboaters.

And then there was Phin’s latest mission, the Maine Small Craft Celebration, to be held September 22 to 23 at the new home of the Portland Shipyard and Portland Yacht Services on the Fore River. If he and the coalition of Down East maritime groups he’s marshaling pull it off, it will be a festive weekend filled with food, music, craft beer and, of course, boats.

Notes Phin, “We hope that this would be an event that would attract boating enthusiasts and it would have sufficient joy and excellence that adults would be inclined to make a bonding weekend out of the opportunity and bring their children or grandchildren to an event that produces dreams and value for all.”

Stay tuned.

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The line of wind at the edge of the harbor as we dodged lobster pots on our way out of Camden, Maine, looked like it had been painted on the water with black ink. Immediately, we were in 20 to 30 knots on the nose.

Sea Dragon, my ride for the just-beginning roughly 735-nautical-mile passage to Bermuda, was made for these conditions, and worse. The 72-foot steel expedition yacht had been built for the around-the-world Global Challenge race, and is now run by the adventure charter outfit Pangaea Exploration. “She really boogies upwind in 25 to 30 knots,” skipper Eric Loss told me. I didn’t doubt it. When I first saw Sea Dragon on the dock, I thought, What a beast. This boat can handle some abuse. The extensive safety briefings before we set out only deepened the impression.

We were a crew of seven, which made Sea Dragon, which has berths for 16, feel quite roomy. And we were in good hands. Our captain did a solo circumnavigation after college and had been sailing Sea Dragon for the past four years. First mate and medic Shanley McEntee also had extensive offshore experience, including skippering Sea Dragon for Pangaea’s annual all-female expeditions. Deckhand Tom McMahon was aboard Sea Dragon while on “vacation” from his normal job — teaching people to sail as an International Yacht and Maritime Training instructor in Croatia. The rest of us were active passengers: along for the ride and hoping to pick up some skills between Maine and Bermuda while standing watches and participating in all shipboard activities. Pei Huang, a college mate with the captain at Bowdoin, had once joined him for a charter vacation in the Caribbean. Pei’s wife, Lauren Keenan, grew up around boats and sailed in college. This was the third expedition aboard Sea Dragon for retired English professor Steve Lansky, and he was hoping to gain some sea stories to weave into a climate-change-based science-fiction novel he was writing in which the lead characters sail to Cuba. And then there was me, a lifelong sailor who had recently spent more time tickling a keyboard than tying bowlines. I was excited to get back out to sea.

We raised the main with a double reef, and then the yankee jib. As soon as the sails were trimmed I could see what Eric had meant by “boogie.” At the helm, I could feel the power as we punched through the considerable swell. But for all the fun of going fast — 10 to 12 knots, most of the time — it was not a comfortable ride. The mid-October wind was cold, and Penobscot Bay was bumpy. The forecast was for it to stay that way for a couple of days, followed by some light air, followed by a tropical something that we hoped wouldn’t actually materialize. I had started taking Stugeron the day before, just in case.

Pei was the first victim of the disorganized motion, followed shortly by Lauren. A bit later Eric came up the companionway and announced, “I’m feeling a bit pukey,” in the same chipper voice he might have used to say, “Today is my birthday!” He then turned to the leeward rail, threw up and added, “Well, that’s better,” before hosing down the side deck and ducking back below. He later told me it was the first time he’d been seasick in his four years aboard Sea Dragon. We were all miserable.

Shanley heated tomato soup and handed up mugs for dinner so no one would have to eat below. It was a good move because we were blasting and banging along at a pretty good clip. If we kept it up, we would cover half the distance to Bermuda in just two days. Could we handle two whole days of this? I mentally calculated how long I could stay on deck before I’d need to go below to use the head. If I threw up, was it possible I could go longer without having to pee?

Just as darkness fell, we lunged off a wave and Steve was thrown from his seat on the windward side of the cockpit and landed hard on the leeward settee. “Tacking!” Shanley yelled and immediately hove to.

What happened next were the steps you always hear about in sail-training courses. Shanley handed me the wheel and did an initial check with Steve to assess the severity of his condition. Eric came up and helped get Steve below so they could get him out of his layers to check out his ribs and back, which were causing him pain. Tom came on deck to keep me company. Shanley got on the satphone with the on-call doctor from Medical Support Offshore Limited, a shoreside service that Pangaea Exploration subscribes to. Together with the doctor on the phone and input from Steve, the decision was made to turn back to Camden. We’d only been sailing half the day and would be back at the dock around midnight.

Noone ever wants to turn back to port, but Eric, Shanley and Tom made the prudent choice. When we left Camden, seven had seemed like a good number of crew, but with so many of us seasick, some to the point of ­incapacitation, I was struck by how quickly we felt shorthanded. And given the uncertainty of Steve’s condition — was it possible he had broken a rib? — there was really no discussion needed.

I’ll admit I was relieved to hear the news. Despite my watch ending a few hours before, I had been avoiding going below to sleep because I didn’t think I’d be able to hold down my few bites of dinner. I was worried about Steve, but more so daunted by the conditions.

And then we were flying along with the wind and waves on our port quarter, heading back to Camden. The four hours it took — half the time we’d spent banging uphill — were the kind of sailing I daydream about. It felt like a different ocean, a different planet from what we’d been in all afternoon. The full supermoon occasionally peeked through the clouds and lit up the sky and sparkled off the water. By the time we were back in the bay, the clouds had cleared enough that we didn’t need to use lights to dodge lobster pots.

Ashore, Eric and Shanley took Steve to the hospital to get checked out. Knowing that my family would be watching the boat’s tracker online, I went up to the marina’s customer lounge to send them an update. I already had an email waiting for me. “Looks like you’re making good time, back to Maine,” my dad wrote. My mom had called my husband, Nate, to alert him we’d stopped and then turned back. Nate looked at the track and conjectured that it must not be a major emergency since we hadn’t pulled into Matinicus Island, the closest land to our turnaround spot. I shot off a quick note that we were safe, and then passed out in my bunk.

I awoke to find everyone back at the boat. Steve was bruised and sore, but luckily nothing was broken. We talked over our options and decided to do a coastal cruise to Rhode Island. Our weather window to Bermuda had closed, with a dubious-looking depression forming in our path. We spent the day regrouping, hiking and exploring Camden. When we met back up for dinner everyone was feeling human again and excited for our tour of New England — even Steve, who was clearly hurting but putting on one hell of a brave face. The general plan was to sail south, stopping for the night in Portland, Maine; Gloucester and Woods Hole, Massachusetts; and then either Newport or Block Island, Rhode Island.

We were happy to find the wind on our beam at about 16 knots when we made our way back out of Camden on Tuesday morning. Weaving, once again, through lobster pots, we passed a slew of small, pine-covered islands that we all agreed “looked very Maine.” Midday, the fog rolled in thick and we agreed that the weather was also “very Maine.” We caught a pot under sail, and Eric had to dive in to free us; after that, we kept three people on pot watch at all times. It was peaceful being up at the bow, peering into the soupy air.

I went below to make dinner as we neared Cliff Island, near Portland, our anchorage for the night. I was grateful for the warmth of the galley after getting soaked by the fog. It was cozy eating around Sea Dragon‘s saloon table and talking sailing.

We had brilliant sailing in 15 to 20 knots on Wednesday under yankee jib, staysail and main with a single reef. The seas were moderate: better than they had been on our first day out, but I still didn’t want to hang out below too long. For the first time all week, we had bright sun, and the boost in morale was noticeable.

It was hot as we struck the sails at the mouth of the harbor in Gloucester. Everyone stripped down out of their layers to T-shirts and tank tops. Shanley had arranged for us to tie alongside a barge at the marine railway, and we had beautiful light as we squared everything away.

A previous mate from Sea Dragon, Andy Rogan, now works for a whale-research group called Ocean Alliance (whale.org), and we walked over to see its offices in the old Gloucester paint factory. They’re doing some really cool things with SnotBots, drones with petri dishes that fly over spouting whales. It was incredible to hear how they could collect DNA from the whales without ever touching them.

We found a restaurant that was having a half-price offseason special, and were amazed at how strong beer seemed after the dehydrating effects of a long day in the sun. On our way back to the boat, we got a bit of a jolt when we realized just how far the tide had gone out. The route down to the barge entailed a rickety, rusted ladder of questionable integrity. I can only imagine what was going through Steve’s mind, sore as he was. Luckily, we all made it down without mishaps.

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Eleanor Merrill is Cruising World’s Managing Editor. Click here for Part 2 of this story.

The post Coastal Boogie, Part 1 appeared first on Cruising World.

Click here for Part 1 of this story.

Thursday our southerly route had us on a beam reach in small but sloppy seas and 18 knots of wind. When we made it to the Cape Cod Canal, Pei, whose stomach had still not fully settled, was particularly excited to reach flat water.

Entering Buzzard’s Bay from the canal, the breeze piped up to the mid-20s with gusts in the low 30s, but we were out of the ocean swells. I’ve heard people talk about champagne sailing, and for the short dash from the canal to Woods Hole, just under an hour, I got to experience it. Close-reaching in 23 knots, we were gliding across the water doing 11. It was absolutely beautiful! Pei was at the wheel, with Eric coaching him on what to do with the channel markers and how to find the right amount of heel. I found a new favorite spot to wedge myself, to leeward of the instrument panel just behind the traveler and forward of the aft cockpit.

Then, just like that, we were dropping sails to anchor in Hadley Harbor, across the channel from Woods Hole. It was still blowing in the 20s, so we decided not to try to launch the dinghy or go for a swim. Now in our fifth night aboard Sea Dragon, we finally felt like we were in the groove of living and working as a crew. At dinner, the mood was congenial, the banter, lively. Today, I thought. Today is why I love sailing.

Friday we were expecting to wake up to rain but the squalls had gone through overnight and it was sunny, clear and the wind had died to almost nothing. Shanley, Eric, Pei, Lauren and I jumped in. The water was brisk for the pre-breakfast dip, but not nearly as cold as we had all psyched ourselves up for. We got out, lathered with a bit of Dr. Bronner’s soap and then jumped back in. It felt colder the second time! We rinsed with the freshwater hose and drip-dried in the cockpit while finishing coffees and teas. Steve made an incredible round of tangerine-and-mango smoothies.

Conditions for our passage to Block Island on Friday were calm, so we rigged up the ship’s manta trawl on a bridle to tow behind the boat. Eric told us about the science Pangaea Exploration conducts. The bulk of the research the ship has done involves collecting water samples and trawling for micro- and nano-plastics in the North Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic and South Pacific gyres. He told us that plastic debris is swept by the currents into the major low-pressure areas of the oceans, and these areas therefore have a greater density of plastic than elsewhere. Over time, the plastic floating in the water column (most commonly within about a foot of the surface) is degraded by UV rays from the sun and breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces.

Shanley, who studied environmental science and policy in college, said that the trash found in the North Atlantic is primarily fishing gear — buoys, nets and fenders — while in the North Pacific it’s mostly domestic waste: refrigerators, food wrappers and shoes. The manta trawl that Sea Dragon tows is a funnel-shaped net that has a really fine mesh at the end to collect plastic fragments. She showed us glass tubes filled with plastic debris they had collected on some of their voyages.

Since we wouldn’t be sending samples from this particular trawl to a lab for analysis, we towed the gear from Sea Dragon‘s stern, but for precise readings the trawl is usually rigged on the end of a spinnaker pole to escape the turbulence of the boat’s wake. Even though we weren’t transiting one of the great oceanic gyres, our half-hour trawl gathered a handful of visible white, green and blue plastic bits, along with several jellyfish and a few pieces of seaweed.

Approaching Block Island, Shanley called the harbor master, who advised we head for New Harbor, also known as Great Salt Pond, because it would be better protected than Old Harbor from the gale we were anticipating. At 1700, the weather was getting more serious, with heavy rain, poor visibility and increasing gusts. We struck the main and added extra sail ties, and bagged up the staysail and stowed it below before we tied up to the dock in New Harbor at 1730. We found ourselves next to a crew filming a teen thriller on a fishing boat. Ours were the only two boats in the harbor.

The crew rigged extra dock lines, fenders and chafe gear because the barometer had dropped 11 millibars over the previous night and then another 12 during the day. Wind was on its way!

Weather kept us pinned on Block Island for a day. At dawn the harbor was deserted except for the teen-thriller crew, who were drinking whiskey and jumping off the dock. They had wrapped up filming sometime in the early hours and had been celebrating since. They reappeared a few hours later, looking like the dead and begging for seasickness medications for their ferry ride home.

The wind built throughout the day as we explored town, the island’s petting zoo and the library. We played a rousing game of darts at the Yellow Kittens bar and then braved the blustery 20-minute walk back to the boat. Pei had bought a game called In a Pickle for 25 cents at the library, and we played it over dinner.

Sunday morning, we got up with the intention of leaving around lunchtime to take advantage of the high tide. A few of us walked out to the breakwater to check the conditions and were greeted by gnarly chop and wind still in the 20s. The lowest sounder reading we’d seen on our way into the harbor had been a little over 3 feet under the 11-foot-deep keel; these swells were definitely more than 3 feet. Sea Dragon wouldn’t be going anywhere on the noon tide.

Upon returning to the boat, Eric relayed the conditions and the decision to stay put for another day. The delay cost us three crewmembers, whom we hugged goodbye as they left for the ferry.

Eric, Shanley, Tom and I spent one more day hiking around Block Island, and watched the sunset with hot toddies on the porch of the Spring House hotel.

A walk to the breakwater Monday morning revealed good enough conditions for us to make the jump over to Newport. The wind had dropped to the high teens, and the swell had calmed considerably. Bearing off toward Narragansett Bay as we rounded the northern end of the island, we were making over 8 knots under jib alone. Did I mention this boat was fast? We were on a mooring in Newport by noon.

So, we didn’t make it to Bermuda. But we had a fantastic coastal cruise. All in all, it had been one hell of a boogie.

Pangaea Exploration runs expeditions focused on marine exploration, education and conservation aboard Sea Dragon, a Challenge 72, all over the world. Sailors can book individual legs, or groups can sign up for specialized voyages focused on scientific research, filmmaking or sail training. Sea Dragon is a versatile platform for scientists and has often been used for studying marine debris, collecting water samples and conducting wide-ranging dive missions. Upcoming trips include an exploration of northwestern Africa, a transatlantic from the Canaries to the Caribbean, and some extended voyaging into the heart of the Pacific. Find out more at panexplore.com.

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Eleanor Merrill is CW‘s managing editor.

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