Here There Be Mermaids!

I’ve been very pleased with the route planning I’ve been doing so far, if I do say so myself. I have some pretty sophisticated weather apps on my tablet, along with navigation software, tide tables, etc. I spend a significant amount of time going over all this stuff prior to heading out, so we know what to expect, or even if we go anywhere at all that day. We are fair weather sailors, and do not enjoy rough or scary passages. We do this also so we can let our “official” emergency contacts (two of our kids) know when to expect us to check in, our intended route, and when to consider us “overdue” and call the Coast Guard. Many of you reading this might know me as a guy who is laid back almost to a fault, but on this matter, I am almost OCD about the safety of Kate, Gabrielle, and my own skin.

Up here in New England, and to a lesser extent, along the Eastern Seaboard one thing that requires planning for is tides. Back along the Texas coast, a six inch tidal range is the usual. Meh. Up here ten to twelve feet is common. That’s a lot of water moving in and out of an area, and it creates significant currents that you can either take advantage of, or else they’ll take advantage of you.

Here’s a clip of tidal effects in The Race, a narrow passage between Block Island and Long Island Sound:

A minute or so after I put my camera away, it got REALLY dramatic, with huge boils and eddies all around the boat. It wasn’t dangerous, and we had planned around the tide tables so we were getting a big assist from a 4 knot current. I was feeling quite proud of my plans at that point.

You know what comes next, right? If you thought of the saying, “Man plans, God laughs”, you win.

The wind was not cooperating, at least not in the way that the forecast had said. It was not blowing from where it was supposed to, and it was becoming very difficult to lay to our course for Port Jefferson, rolly and uncomfortable. We decided to head for an alternate port (I had planned for that!) (God: “HAHAHA!”).

There is another saying used by sailors- “No matter how well you plan your route, sooner or later you’re gonna get caught out in some real nasty stuff.” And so it was that day. The wind came around to right on our nose, and began to howl. The rains that had been forecast for overnight/early tomorrow decided they couldn’t wait and started early. The wind built the seas up, right on the nose, and so we were pounding and hobby-horsing our way into them, some of them big enough to throw solid water over our decks. It slowed our progress considerably, so much so that we were still out when the tide changed and the favorable current we started out with turned against us. We were making good about two and a half to three knots to our destination that was miles and miles away.

I noticed that the bilge pump was cycling on WAY more often than it should, so I went below and had a look. Oh joy! Discovered new leaks in deck fittings, so that when those waves broke over the bow, I could see pulses of seawater running down the inside of the hull. And what was that noise is it the transmission oh god if the transmission goes we’re in serious trouble and what was that did I just hear thunder and what if the steering cable breaks… and so on for thirteen hours.

OK, I’m turning this into a war story, and that’s not my point. We made it to New Haven just before dark, grabbed a mooring, and watched the weather clear up. There was even a nice sunset. Checked for damage the next day and found none, enjoyed New Haven for a couple of days, and today had one of those most perfect sailing days to Port Washington. The point of all this is one more sailor’s aphorism:

“SMOOTH SEAS NEVER MADE A SKILLFUL SAILOR”. We don’t grow, inside or out, without adversity. Our boundaries are not stretched, nor our minds expanded without having to willfully push up against a hard thing or a scary situation.

So our skill set has been expanded, if nothing else but in tolerating an extremely unpleasant time, and that in itself is no small thing. Kate did an exemplary job that day- in some ways better than me, as I was letting mechanical ghosts scare me badly. She was the rock for me that day.

Tomorrow we tackle transiting New York City. There’s a tricky situation with the tides on East River, just past Riker’s Island, a narrow spot called Hell Gate. (There’s a name to inspire confidence!)

But I’ve been planning for it…

So begins “Moby Dick”, in my opinion the greatest work of American fictional literature ever produced. (OK, “Huckleberry Finn” is it’s equal, but that’s where I draw the line.)

In 1841, Herman Melville quit his job as a schoolmaster in upstate New York, made his way east to Massachusetts, and sailed down the Acushnet River into New Bedford, where he signed on to a two year whaling voyage. He sailed halfway around the world, jumped ship in the South Pacific, consorted with Polynesian islanders for a few years, made his way to Hawaii, came back to New Bedford and wrote “Moby Dick”, not half a mile from where I sit writing this blog at our mooring off Pope’s Island. I feel like I’m making a pilgrimage.

I just love this place. The historical photographs of New Bedford’s harbor during the peak of whaling show a forest of wooden masts, and almost uncountable barrels of whale oil being offloaded.

Although the ships are built of steel nowadays, and they harvest scallops and groundfish instead of whales, it is not much different :

This is fishing on an industrial scale- the largest commercial fishery in North America, big ships, coming and going at all hours; shipyards working three shifts a day, the banging and groaning of metalwork broadcast over the harbor, welding and hammering and grinding going on 24/7; giant ice plants, where fishing boats pull up to load tons of ice before going out to harvest; processing plants where the harvest is cut and packed… I could live here. I love the smell of it.

The center of town (where Melville would have signed onto his voyage) is designated “The New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park”; the buildings are beautifully preserved, the streets are still paved with cobblestone, and if you squint your eyes just right, you can be looking at the eighteenth or nineteenth century- but walk around the block, and there is a modern dragger, offloading scallops by the shovelful into a diesel powered refrigerated truck.

In the heart of that Historical Park is the New Bedford Whaling Museum. We got there late in the day, and saw pretty much everything there was too see, but I would have liked to linger, to pore over the different exhibits, for hours longer than we had. Even though our visit was short, it answered a question I didn’t even know I had.

I’ve noticed a big Portuguese influence while we’ve been up here (New England in general, and New Bedford in particular). Without ever explicitly asking the question of why that might be, I got the answer to it today, and funny enough, in Melville’s own words: (from “Moby Dick”, Chapter 27)- “No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasant of those rocky shores.” Azores is Portuguese, and there was a HUGE blending of cultures between the Azorians and the New Englanders back in the 18th and 19th centuries. The entire third floor of the Whaling Museum was dedicated to the Azorian/Portuguese influence on Yankee whaling in particular, and New England in general. It’s built into the culture here now, much like Hispanic culture in Texas, or French/Creole in Louisiana (although on a smaller scale than those examples). Anyway, the Portuguese chorizo in my seafood stew the other day was a REALLY nice touch.

Speaking of food: One of my favorite chapters in Moby Dick is “Chowder” (Ch. 15), wherein Ishmael and Queequeg partake of some particularly fine clam chowder at Cousin Hosea Hussey’s “Try Pots Inn”. I had it in mind that I HAD to have clam chowder in New Bedford, and so I did. Unfortunately, the dining establishment we chose (highly recommended!) was not up to Cousin Hosea’s standards, and the chowders as presented to us were less than exemplary. Ah well. I know my way around the galley, and can whip up some of my own before we leave New England. It’s a pity we couldn’t have tried the Try Pots.

Just to let y’all know that the latest forecast for Salem and Massachusetts’ North Shore looks good. Computer models continue to forecast the storm to move farther east, out into the Atlantic, as each batch is run. This is the latest forecast for tomorrow morning:

While this looks pretty similar to the map I posted four days ago, it is a larger scale map- it covers a larger area. The storm’s center is much farther East than than in the previous map.

And the wind is only expected to be around 15 knots. There has been a regatta planned for here this weekend, and they almost canceled it, but nah, they are going ahead with it. It’s doubtful we will even get much, if any, rain.

The best part of all this is that Sunday’s forecast shows really good conditions for us to continue South. We will get an early start and sail past Boston Harbor and down Cape Cod Bay. We have a slip reserved in a little marina at the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal (there are no moorings or anchorage nearby), where we will wait for the tide to turn Monday morning so we get a free ride down the Canal.

The tidal difference between Cape Cod Bay and Buzzard’s Bay (on the South end) makes it such that four times a day, the Canal flow changes direction, and depending on the moon and sun, it can flow up to 5 knots either way! We have checked the tide tables and planned our departure for Monday morning, and we can expect about 4 ½ – 4 ¾ knots. Add our regular cruising speed of 6 knots, and we could be topping out at over 10 MILES PER HOUR in the Canal! WHEEE!

I’m almost dizzy at the prospect!

I got a text message from a friend yesterday as we were having our glorious sail across the Gulf of Maine (and I’ll leave it to someone smarter than me to explain how we have a better data connection on our devices when we’re 5 miles offshore than when we are sitting in a harbor within sight of a city). My buddy was texting about Hurricane Dorian forecasts, and were we concerned? At the time, the last track I’d seen showed Dorian veering off into the North Atlantic well before it came near New England, and I told him I wasn’t worried. I’m still not worried, and I’ll get into the why of that in a minute, because I want to ease folks’ minds about our situation (Hi Mom!). But first…

This is a big, bad hurricane. It’s going to cause a lot of damage. Puerto Rico and the Virgins were spared because it was just starting to blow up when in crossed over them, but the Bahamas have been smashed. We have some good friends who recently bought a house and a boat in Grand Bahama. We just heard from them that the house and boat are both gone. We have some other friends who own a 1/6th share in a boat in Great Abaco- haven’t heard from them yet, but we just read a report that there are no boats left floating in Great Abaco, so it’s doubtful theirs has survived. Having gone through this ourselves two years ago, I feel sick for them. It’s horrible.

So when we settled in to Isles of Shoals last night, I checked the latest weather data. I have some pretty sophisticated weather apps on my iPad, and I’m getting pretty good at using them to plan passages. I was surprised to see how close Dorian is forecast to pass us. Here’s a picture (this is the forecast time of closest approach/highest winds, Saturday at 2 am):

This is a lot closer than I expected this thing to pass. That’s right off the coast of Cape Cod- Nantucket is going to have a pretty nasty Friday night. But notice the notes I’ve added. We will be safely tucked into Salem Harbor when this thing blows by- see the cross-hairs at the end of the arrow? The other arrow points to the expected wind strength in the cross-hair. It’s only 29 knots, from the North. Go get in your car and drive 30 mph down the street and stick your arm out the window. It’s not that bad.

And more, here is a view of Salem Harbor:

We will be safely tied up to a mooring somewhere in the blue oval. See the yellow arrows? That’s the North wind- see how little water it passes over before it gets to us? That means the waves and chop will not have room to develop. We’ll probably get tossed around a bit, but probably no more than when a lobster boat passes by and kicks up a big wake. We are pretty used to that now.

We will have favorable winds tomorrow to sail from Isles of Shoals to Salem (Tuesday). We will hunker down there until this thing passes (Saturday). Waiting for a weather window. The long range forecasts show favorable winds to cross Cape Cod Bay from Salem to the Cape Cod Canal on Sunday, so that’s the tentative plan. Tentative because of three things:

1. A Saturday forecast is five days out. It will change, for better or worse.
2. It’s a forecast, not a guarantee.
3. Cape Cod Bay could still be quite rough after all this goes by. Again, the forecasts will become clearer and more accurate as time passes.

We will keep you posted!

We are, at this moment, on a mooring in Isle of Shoals, right on the border between Maine and New Hampshire- in fact, our boat is moored in New Hampshire, and the boat next to us, with whom we could converse without raising our voices, is in Maine. The state line runs between us. So we have officially left Maine, even if only by a few feet.

I’ve been looking back over the posts I’ve written over the last six weeks, during our “Summer Cruise in Maine”, and noticed that I have, unwittingly, gone down the same worn path that other sailor types do- relating the disasters and hard times over the good.

There is a famous (among sailing folk) couple named Lin and Larry Pardey. They built a small wooden sailboat back in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and took off, circumnavigated the world a few times, and wrote about it, along with many “how to” articles in magazines, etc. They are famous because they know what they are doing and free with their advice.

In one essay, Lin Pardey wrote about how she came to notice that whenever she related her sailing experience to anyone else, whether it was her family back home, or other sailors in an anchorage, the first thing that was brought up was… the hard stuff- the disasters:

“Oh my god, we were hove to for three days in a Force 8 gale”…

“It must have been the wave action on the boat that stirred up and dislodged the crud in the bottom of the fuel tanks that blocked our fuel filters and killed the engine just as we were motoring into a tight channel”…

“So there we were, eight miles off of the Dead Head Light, and the fog socked in so thick we couldn’t see the bow of the boat. That’s when we discovered that the radar was on the fritz”…

And so on- you get the idea. Of course, sailors aren’t the only ones who are susceptible to this. I think it is a part of human nature. Consider these:

“Jeez, I tried to leave the office early enough, but I couldn’t beat the traffic- I was stuck for HOURS on <the Turnpike/the Interstate/Mopac>!”

“I can’t believe that a place like this can’t provide adequate WiFi for their customers”…

And so on. Maybe it’s some sort of evolutionary adaptation to ensure group cohesion and tribal identity- shared adversity? I have no idea, but it’s a pretty common thing, and I realized that I’ve tended towards the same thing on this blog. Oh sure, I’ve made a big deal out of the #%!! lobster pots, hopefully to humorous effect (although I am SO glad we are past them now), but when I look back over these posts, I realized that I’ve emphasized a lot of the negative, at the expense of the other end of the spectrum. Maybe we are compelled to share what scares us.

I’m paraphrasing here, because I don’t have her book in front of me, but Lin Pardey wrote something like, “I don’t know why I don’t lead off with stories about the GOOD times, when everything goes right, and it is all just perfect.”

So rather than tell you about any more lobster pot buoys, here is how our day went today: We woke up when the sun peeked into our window, made coffee, stretched, and then got to work moving the boat. Anchor up (no fretting, no fuss), and on our way. Motored out of the harbor in Portland (what a beautiful city!), past a few of Maine’s famous lighthouses, and in an hour, rounded Cape Elizabeth and pointed the boat towards our destination, the Isle of Shoals.

Very soon, the wind began to build, from the perfect direction for us to set sail and get on a beam reach (which is Gabrielle’s favorite point of sail), and stay on the same course for eight solid hours. The autopilot worked flawlessly- Kate passed time knitting the blanket she’s making for the new grand-daughter, I fussed (in a good way) with boat stuff… It was a glorious day of sailing.

We rounded into the harbor at Isle of Shoals to find plenty of free moorings available (on a holiday weekend!), picked one up, and settled back to watch the sunset. Went down into the galley and whipped up a batch of Carne Guisada that was better than you can get in any restaurant…

OK, yes, today was pretty perfect. I guess if I had to complain, I could tell you about the boat full of drunken yahoos who were nearby when we came in, with their stereo cranked up to 11, and playing “Sweet Home Alabama” several times an hour- but they left when the sun went down. We’ll be waiting out the weather here as it’s supposed to get snotty tomorrow, but we’ve got boat chores to do, and books to read, and love to make.

And VERY few lobster pots.

After writing the previous post about “Time Keeping”, it seemed prudent to pay attention to our timetable for the next leg of our journey.

We made it to Bar Harbor, which was as far north (or “down-east”) as we ever expected to go, and now we are on our way back. It has been a wonderful trip, and we’ve enjoyed it. The people have been marvelous, the scenery spectacular, the seafood has been delicious. As odd as this might sound, we have Hurricane Harvey to thank for bending our lifeline this direction, because we never would have cruised New England had he not come ashore on top of our previous boat, O Be Joyful.

Having said that, I will also say that I will be happy if I never see another #%*! lobster pot buoy for the rest of my life. As we crossed over from Penobscot Bay (full of them!) to Sheepscot Bay (relatively few of them), I could feel the stress draining away, my tension relaxing, and my shoulders dropping from my earlobes back down to a normal level. Also, it’s too damn cold up here. In my mind, sailing should involve coconut palm trees along the shore, and I’ve yet to see one of them.

We knew that turning back would be difficult, in terms of weather- the prevailing winds here are from the southwest, and that is exactly the direction we need to go. Sailboats can handle SOME upwind work, but ours is built more for comfort than speed, and does not handle upwind work well. Actually, the boat does OK, but not the people onboard- it’s rough and unpleasant.

So, the next part of our lives is going to be waiting for ‘weather windows’ in order to make our way south without rattling the teeth out of our heads. And therein lies the problem. We sat down yesterday with navigational charts and calendars to do some serious route planning. The results were… sobering.

For those who don’t know, we want to have Gabrielle safely tucked into an anchorage in Culebra, Puerto Rico, by December 20 of this year. We set this up last year— !!! What a great idea!!!, we’ll have a family reunion in Puerto Rico for Christmas!!! There’s nothing wrong that idea, per se- the problem is that it runs counter to one of the Prime Directives of Sailboat Cruising- “Never Make A Schedule That You HAVE To Follow”.

We have over 2600 miles of ocean to traverse. And 113 days to do it. I’ll wait while you do the math, because I’ve done it several times now, and the answer still makes me want to cry. If you did just pull out your calculator and check that, you might be thinking, “What’s the problem, 23 miles a day doesn’t sound so bad.”

And, no, it wouldn’t be, if you could count on 23 miles every single day. But it’s the waiting on weather windows that makes me…anxious about this. Unless we commit to doing some overnight trips, 50-60 miles is our (upper) daily limit. And given that we might have to wait three or even more days for a favorable weather window (if we’re lucky!) for a one day run, that makes the math… ugly.

We have both discussed the probability of having to make a 24-48 hour passage at some point. And we haven’t ruled it out- if the weather window shows that it is the right thing to do, we’ll do it. I have made such passages before- over 30 years ago. But Kate has never done anything like that, and so we’re both feeling about like she was with the anchoring thing a few weeks ago. I know we can do it, but we’re both clenching our teeth about it.

So we are Girding Our Loins for the next phase of this adventure, and accepting any positive input for the duration. And although some of you might know this about us if you know us well, I want to declare this for those might not know us- we have two guiding principles to this trip, and our lives in general:

1. We will keep doing this as long as it is fun, and when it stops being fun, we will do something else.
2. The Universe/Source/Vortex (some might call it God) will provide for everything we need to continue our journey. If that sounds too airy-fairy or woo-woo for you, just know that we have 125 combined years of experience that shows this is true. That’s good enough for us.

Our navigation software has an option in the Settings, “Play Ship’s Bells”. Of course I clicked it on, because it is a salty, boaty affectation, and I’m all about that stuff. It has gone from being an affectation to something that is quite useful. I like having a sound signal for the time, without having to look at a timepiece.

Ships Bells are how time was kept onboard ship in the old days. A ship’s day actually runs from noon to noon- it officially started with the captain or other officer (the sailing master, or maybe one of the mates) taking the noon sight with a sextant- this marked the sun’s highest point in the sky for the ships location, and with some calculation, gave them their latitude. The captain would shoot his noon sight, determine the latitude, and then give the order to “Sound Ship’s Noon” (four bells). The time was kept for the rest of the day with a sand hour-glass.

Of course, this was all before the advent of synchronized clocks and standard times, atomic clocks and Universal Time Coordinate. It has always been fascinating to me that every sailing ship was keeping their own time, living in their own discrete little “time bubble”, based on their astronomical sights.

The 24 hour day is split into six parts of four hours. Noon is “four bells”, one pm is “one bell”, two pm is “two bells”, and so on. Once the four pm “four bells sounded, the cycle would start over- five pm was “one bell”, six pm = “two bells” and so on.

On the hour, the actual sound of a “bell” was a double strike of the clapper. Cick here for an example of One Bells (and never mind that the title says it is Two Chimes, that is wrong):

ShipBellTwoChimes

On the half hour, the double strike is followed by a single strike of the clapper, so 2:30 would sound like “ding ding, ding ding <pause> ding”.

So our navigation software, running on the laptop just below the companionway hatch, is set to play Ships Bells, and it has become a comforting sound as we sail. A couple of days ago we were getting thrashed by the weather on Penobscot Bay, and it was nice to hear the hours and half-hours rung out- a reminder that time was passing and we would eventually be back in harbor , not getting bounced and blown around like rag-dolls.

And so while here in Boothbay Harbor, which is one of the saltiest places in salty old Maine, I was tickled to experience this pretty little church across the harbor:

Like most churches with a bell tower, they chime out the hours and half hours. But do they do a Westminster Chime, or even more boring, just chime out the hours, one through twelve. No, they do not.

Yep, here in salty old Boothbay, this church chimes out Ships Bells.

She was having trouble holding back the tears- her throat was so tight it was difficult for her to get the words out, but she choked her way through it: “When we get to Puerto Rico, we’re going to have to figure out if we continue on with this. I don’t think I’m cut out for this anymore. “

He was having trouble himself- he was stunned at the way- and how quickly- things had gone from a lovely day on the water to a nightmare. His first thought was, “Why wait until Puerto Rico? If this is how it’s going to be, let’s just pull the plug on this when we get back to Salem.”

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Anchoring had become traumatic. Headsets on, communications good, everything going well until it was time to pay out the chain and set the hook on the bottom. The old manual windlass was touchy, and would either release the chain in a blinding rush and loud clatter, or once the brake was applied, would clamp down on the chain with a loud slam, which invariably jammed the clutch so that it would take effort, in the form of smacking the cogs on the roller with the handle, until the whole cycle repeated: rush, clatter, slam, jam. The stress of it was more than she could bear- every time, her anxiety would overtop her threshold and she would experience a meltdown. She was not handling anchoring well.

As they worked their way into the next anchorage, he made the decision to handle the windlass work himself this time. The wind was light, there was no other boat traffic, it would be a good opportunity for her to practice handling the helm to hold station while he dropped the anchor. No point in them putting themselves in that stressful situation again. But then, in order to give her agency and choice in how the boat was run, he asked her how she wanted to handle the anchoring. To her credit (and his surprise), she chose to do the task that frightened her the most- she had been studying up on technique over the last few days in a quiet cove, and felt more confident. He was proud of her.

It did not take long for him to regret his offering the choice. He slowly brought the boat into the anchorage, as they kept in touch over their headsets. The boat was inching forward slowly in idle, they were calmly discussing various spots to set the anchor, but in the intimacy of the headset, he could hear the tension in her voice, her anxiety rising. Her breath began to quicken. Soon she was panting as if she was in a marathon.

He realized that at some point between the commitment to an anchorage spot, and the release of the chain, they had ceased being partners in the operation, that she was now hostage to something beyond her control- there was nothing he could do to help her. Every suggestion he offered was rebuffed, every attempt to appeal to calm reason was met with an angry retort. Her breathing, amplified in his headset, became rushed and ragged, out of control.

The anchor was not biting into the bottom as it should. She had to haul the chain back in, but it piled up and became stuck in the chain locker beneath the forepeak, which required her to run back, go below and forward to knock down the pile of chain, and then back up to the windlass to pull in the rest of the chain. She cursed the whole way.

On the second try, the anchor dug in. The chain was payed out, an anchor watch set on the chartplotter. He sat in the cockpit for a half hour, watching to make sure they weren’t dragging, while she went below to calm down. When he finally came down, she made her pronouncement about Puerto Rico.

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The next few days were icy. They walked on eggshells around one another. At some point, he told her what he had thought about not waiting for Puerto Rico, that if it was this bad, they should end it sooner than later. They both sat with that for another couple of days, the thought of it festering between them.

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They both dreaded what came next. It had been a pleasant enough sail to the next cove. They had pushed past (or maybe just ignored) the anguish and actually enjoyed the sailing, but it was late in the day and that meant it was time to anchor.

“I’ll handle the windlass today,” he told her. “I don’t want you to put yourself through that stress anymore.” He left unsaid that he did not want to go through another meltdown himself.

She looked away, paused, and then said, “No. I’ll do it.”

He was conflicted. “Are you sure about that? Because there’s no point in making yourself miserable with this. You can practice steering the boat while I drop the chain. It’s OK.”

“No,” she said, “I have to do this. I’ve thought about it over and over, and I… I just have to do this.”

He took a deep breath, and reluctantly agreed.

Headsets on, they talked over how it would go. Part of her anxiety was in placing the anchor in the right spot, so that mooring balls, lobster pot buoys, or for that matter, other boats, would not bump into them during the night. Their new plan was that they would cruise through the anchorage and assess the possibilities, again and again if necessary. They would not make their final approach until she was satisfied that there was sufficient clearance.

“OK, here’s the spot. We’re in 28 feet of water, are you ready to let the chain run?”

She let out a nervous sigh, “Yeah, tell me when.”

“OK, let it go!”

She twisted the clutch off, and the chain, as usual, stuck. She worked at it, eventually having to bang it with the handle, until it broke free. The chain rattled out loudly- he could hear it in his headset from her microphone, along with her rapid breathing. He started to steel himself for her panic- and it never came.

She cranked down on the clutch just slowly enough that the chain slowed rather than jammed. She was able to call out the marks on the chain, “FIRST MARK, 25 FEET!”. A half minute later, “SECOND MARK, 50 FEET!”

He was at the wheel, grinning, and spoke into his headset, “Babe, you are doing great! Stop the chain when you’re at 125 feet!”

A few seconds later, “THERE IT IS, 125 FEET!” The clutch slammed shut, the chain stopped, and she asked, “What do I do now?”

He laughed, and said, “Nothing Babe. You just anchored the boat!”

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Authors note: This narrative is pretty much exactly as it happened. I started writing it before its resolution, and I truly did not know how it might end. I am SO proud of Kate for pushing through her fear and making this breakthrough.

And by the way, when we anchored tonight, it went flawlessly- she’s a pro!

We bought a pair of these headsets before we left, knowing they would come in handy. Well known among the well-heeled biker set (you’ve seen ’em, the dude driving, his partner sitting behind, cruising down the interstate chatting between themselves over the rumble of their Harley), they have since been marketed to cruising sailors as “Marriage Savers”.

Whoever came up with that phrase was a marketing genius. There is much to do on a sailboat that requires communication between the person driving the boat and the person who is handling the other task, be it letting out and setting the anchor, hoisting the sail, threading your way through a tricky passage, or in the case of sailing in Maine, standing on the pointy front end of the boat (the “bow”), spotting and calling out all those #%$*&!! lobster pot buoys.

Back when I was first bitten with the sailing bug, and studying up on how to do it, there was much written about the importance of developing a system of hand signals to communicate between helm and crew. Things like “Point right for Starboard”, “Point left for Port”, “Cross forearms above head for Full Stop”, “Shake fist vigorously for “I signaled STOP GODDAMMIT!” and the good ol’ “Raise both middle fingers for *&#$*%^!!!”. I’m sure that some couples have mastered the first few of these examples, but I am equally certain that they are very few and very far between. I make this assertion not only from first hand experience, but from witnessing the tribulations of others. For instance:

Spend a Sunday afternoon at the boardwalk in Kemah, Tx, watching the boats coming back in from a day of sailing Galveston Bay. Follow them around the point into the marina, and watch them pull into their slips. For every couple that effortlessly guides their vessel home without a hitch, there will be others (several? many?, depends on which Sunday) who end up screaming at each other, cursing, and crying. There may be no crying in baseball, but in Kemah on a Sunday afternoon, there will be some.

We heard a story from the night watchman at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina about the previous owner of our first boat, “O Be Joyful”- he watched us loading stuff aboard and commented, “Oh, you bought this boat from that lawyer-type fella?”

I didn’t know anything about the previous owner, having handled the whole transaction through a broker, and told the man so.

“Oh, jeez, that guy was an asshole,” he replied. “`He would come down here with his wife and kids to go sailing, and before they got out of the slip, he was screaming at her, and by the time they got out of the slip and headed for the channel, she and the kids would be barricaded down below in the cabin. When they got back in the evening, he was still screaming on deck, and the wife and kids were still down below. Yep, he was a real asshole.”

Well, I have an aversion to having night watchmen anywhere on the planet call me an asshole, so I decided we needed the headsets. And they have worked marvelously. The few times (two, maybe three at most) that we needed them and did not have them on, there were some tense moments, and you could say that harsh words were exchanged between us, the mitigating factor being that over the wind and the chugging of the 50 horsepower diesel engine, those harsh words didn’t have quite the impact- in fact, neither party was privy to what the other had said. All good.

Since then, we have made it a standing rule that ANY task requiring one of us at the helm and another one forward, “PUT ON THE HEADSETS!” And the difference is just amazing- to be in a tense situation, and yet be able to calmly, almost serenely, murmer, “No, sorry, I meant the OTHER starboard!”

Hey, I’m ambidextrous- I’ve always had trouble with directions…

Back in Salem, Tom H. from the boatyard told us “Oh, you’re gonna LOVE sailing Maine. There’s only two things about Maine sailing that are less than perfect. Lobster pots and fog.” Tom was a profane man, and on lobster pots and fog, he laced his speech with plenty of profanity, which I have edited out for general consumption, but I understood everything he said (“I know all the words…”) and generally agreed with it.

I’ve already recounted our adventure with lobster pots, and we have cursed them roundly as we have made our way here. Actually, it’s more a matter of just getting used to the fact that you have to be hypervigilant as you sail, to keep from running them down. We’ve gotten used to them.

Fog is another thing altogether. We’ve been lucky so far, there not being a whole lot of the stuff to deal with. But this last week in Bar Harbor the weather changed, and it’s been foggy for days on end. And I don’t mind telling you, the thought of sailing in that stuff just terrifies me.

We made a point of getting a new radar transmitter when we left Texas, so our radar unit would work (it does), but reading a radar image is a learned skill, and we’re pretty green at this, so, yeah, we’ve got radar, but hmmm, not really sure it is that much help.

So while we are here in Bar Harbor, we’ve been watching the fog roll in and out, daily. As long as we’re solidly anchored, it’s not so bad- kinda pretty in a way. It flows in and you can’t see the boat anchored next to you, and then it lifts, and the town and islands nearby come back into view, and then it socks in again…

Tom H. said, “The thing about Maine fog is, if you think you’re just gonna wait for it to lift before you go sailing, you might never get to go sailing.” But we must be living right, because we were ready to leave Bar Harbor today*, and guess what- no fog. Also no wind, so we just motored back to Southwest Harbor.

We may still have to deal with foggy sailing, but for now, we have dodged the bullet.

*We would have left if it had been foggy, but wouldn’t have liked it, and would probably have invented some new words.