David de Regt, Author at The Adventures of Highwind

New Water System

One of these faucets is about to be made obsolete…

I’m going to start breaking completed larger projects out from the travel blog posts so people can properly ignore the posts they don’t care about. 🙂

The moment we got our first boat, I got a bunch of advice from people about keeping bottled water for drinking, boiling water, putting a little under-sink filter in, and a variety of other things. Boat tank water is unsafe, don’t drink it! That seemed real crappy to me, so I found the SAFH2OUV unit online and ended up plumbing it in right after the water pump, so every tap and showerhead on the boat served filtered and uv-cleansed water. It worked great as long as we had the boat. Good-tasting water even when the marina has scary hoses, and don’t need anything more than emergency water supplies on hand in case of catastrophic water system failure away from a marina. Later on, on the loop, the water pump, a variable-flow unit, failed and we ended up getting a fixed-flow unit and accumulator, which was a huge improvement in livability over the v-flo unit.

On the new boat, I wanted the same ending experience as we had on the old one. This boat had a fixed-flow pump but no accumulator, so all taps and showerheads had constant pounding effects. It also just had a little questionable-quality filtered tap for drinking water at the kitchen sink, as the only “drinkable water” on the boat. So, I set about duplicating and improving on the old boat’s setup — I wanted to do approximately the same thing, but knew that the boat had more water pressure and volume than the last boat, so I wanted something with better flow and bigger filters than the last setup. The SAFH2OUV setup said it flowed 3GPM, but that was pretty optimistic based on our experience. The new boat’s water pump was a 6GPM unit and the water pipes were larger than the last boat’s, so I figured we should better-utilize it.

Look at all that room just asking for a filter, in the starboard engine bay next to the fresh water tank!

After a bunch of research, I contacted Purest Filters, who were close by to us in Stuart, gave them measurements of the area I could put filters in, and we agreed on a quite large 3-filter filter block and independent UV setup that I’d plumb together. We decided to do a sediment filter and then two carbon filters, so we can replace the second carbon filter with an iron filter or something based on awkward water in marinas we find along the way. I also ordered a Jabsco 1 gallon accumulator, the same unit I had on the last boat. It’s a good compromise between consistent water pressure/not running the water pump that often and physical space occupied.

Nalgene bottle at the top for size reference. They were … really really big.

A few weeks later, a couple enormous boxes show up, and I start trying to mount it, to quickly discover that it doesn’t fit. I get out the tape measure and find that it’s many inches larger in every dimension than what was advertised. Some annoyed emails and phone calls later, he ends up switching us down to a quite-a-bit-smaller unit that lists as supporting 6GPM, still with common filters for later replacements. We pack up the two enormous boxes and ship everything except the UV lamp back to him.

A couple weeks later, a much smaller box shows up. I measure everything up and find a reasonable pattern for installing things, and then go online to buy fittings, only to find that most of the Watts fittings for 1/2″ CTS are backordered everywhere for some reason. I put in some orders a week out and put the box in the corner of the skylounge, just where Hannah likes me keeping large boxes.

Finally all the fittings arrived and I started installing things, but neglected to read an important nuance of the UV installation and ended up not putting a spring inside the quartz vial before putting the lamp inside. As such, the lamp busted through the bottom of the quartz vial. Whoops. Ordered a new one of those on Amazon to the next marina. Box back upstairs.

The new quartz vial arrives, and the next boat over also has someone named David on it, and they grab the box from the package room, open it up, and remove the quartz vial from the protective sheath to look at it in confusion. Touching it with your hands gets oils on it that block UV, so once we got it back from them we had to rig up a skewer-based cleaning system and wait a couple days for it to dry out. Box back upstairs.

This evening, finally I was able to mount everything up, and, somehow, only got leaking from the a few NPT fittings that apparently required teflon tape. A few minutes of disassembly, taping, and reassembly later, and the whole system amazingly held pressure! Cleaned/secured everything with zip ties, and finally the eternal project is over, and we can stop exclusively using this annoying tiny spigot in the kitchen for our drinking water.

Looooong Month of Projects

What the salon has looked like for most of the last month…

We’ve been more than a little slow about a new post. I kept intending to make a post with some wrapped up projects, but it’s hilarious how many projects we’ve been progressing on in parallel, and just starting to wrap a bunch of them up this weekend. I’ve basically been either working, eating, sleeping, or projecting every waking hour for the last month, with a very few exceptions to go have some fun out and about with Hannah. I’m definitely excited to almost be through the meat of the list and soon being able to take a night off without feeling like I’m going to get screwed on shipping new parts.

I’ve been digging into projects, but Hannah’s been getting some decent pole time in between the seemingly endless windstorms

We bit off a huge list of stuff to get through while in Cocoa, knowing that this was going to be our only shot to get long-lead-time items shipped for basically another year, short of maybe shoving more crap into poor John and Joan’s garage while we work our way up the coast. With one week to go until our departure, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten through most stuff, and, more importantly, everything ordered ended up arriving in time!

All of the ground tackle (anchoring equipment) that came with the boat was undersized. Fine for calm weekends in the Bahamas, but on a boat of this size, riding out a substantial storm scared us. We ended up swapping out the anchor chain from 5/16″ to 3/8″ G43, which required also swapping out the windlass chainring. The anchor itself was also undersized, so we swapped out for a much bigger unit. We loved the Rocna we got on the last boat, but my research indicated that the Mantus was at least as good as the Rocna for everything, with some better holding characteristics in a few bottom conditions, so I ended up grabbing their 105 lb anchor. It comes in a flatpack box and requires assembling, which feels a little weird, but if it saves a couple hundred bucks on freight shipping, I’ll take it. After assembling everything and test deploying, we found out that the 3/8″ chain hilariously doesn’t quite smoothly run through our anchor lock, so we ended up having to upgrade that too. Finally, we decided to try these Imtra colored link centers for marking how much chain we’d put out instead of spray painting. We’ll let you know how they work out this spring.

The dinghy did end up coming back a few days after our last post, but it kicked off a whole bunch of work/rework. They had no idea what to do with the electronics I’d sent them and left everything in a half-finished state, so I had to take a long day and rework a bunch of the wiring, installing the NMEA 2000 stuff and other electronics. It’s possible that we got what we paid for, trying out the v1 version of a new dinghy company. Then our mounts on the swim step were very misaligned to the dinghy, which kicked off a long iteration cycle to re-drill a bunch of holes to get it sitting nicely in place. Then we have no idea how anyone ever “secured” a dinghy to this platform, since there’s only two tiny eyelets in very weird places, so we custom ordered some beefy SS ratchet straps and installed four beefy eyelets to keep our precious dinghy secure under the high seas we know we’ll encounter in the next several years.

Lots of the various panels on the boat were questionably wired up with modifications since it was created, and I’ve been fixing them one by one. The boat had two different stereos for three zones, with super wacky wiring, so I just consolidated everything to a single stereo that managed all three zones. Then we figured out that half the speakers on the boat were blown or also miswired. I had to diagnose and fix the wiring for all of the lights on the back of the boat. We had to contact the maker of our watermaker to figure out how to properly connect it to a NMEA 2000 network since it was wired up backwards and I couldn’t tell whether it was intentional or not. I added a bunch more lights to the office since it was set up as a bedroom before, which required a remarkable amount of tearing apart of things. The boat came with whale pumps for the showers, which required you manually managing a button mid shower for when you got tired of water being up to your ankles, so we quickly tired of it and switched out for shower boxes with float switches. Now our showers are delightfully not gross mini-baths.

The toilets came with an idiot light for when the holding tank was full, but no gauge, so I had to come up with a way to put external gauges on the tanks that I could view over the network, and ended up installing a little Maretron DSM410 NMEA 2000 monitoring screen. We installed a grill, which the boat never had before. New (non-broken) window covers finally came in for the bedroom (the previous owners ordered them in December), and we installed them today, so we can finally have proper blackout in the morning. We got the boat pumped out last week and were told that one side didn’t want to clear, so I jumped down into the hold and popped the vent tube off, and suddenly it pumped out. So then we got to spend a long afternoon removing the vent system and debugging — ended up hogging out the clogged vents while everything we own smelled like poop for the day. Lots and lots of little awkward and time-consuming projects that mostly required a bunch of research.

The biggest, and still ongoing, project has been the power system conversion. The boat had mostly original factory stuff, which was a very basic inverter and fairly limited house capacity (four 4D AGMs), with some other stuff really poorly hacked in over the years. I decided that the current system was basically throwaway for our purposes and to go absolutely bananas. I started by ordering a ridiculous amount of LiFePO4 batteries (30 kWh), which had a 6 week lead time from China. More absurdly, I decided that I wanted to try moving to a 48V house system, due to all of the ways it makes wiring simpler, increased charging speeds, increased conversion efficiency to AC, etc.

Once it’s all finished, I’m going to be writing an enormous post about it and all of its trials and tribulations, but for now, we’re up and running on a 48V house system, with 100% of our AC loads going through two Victron Quattro inverters. We’re alpha testing a new bidirectional DC-DC converter/charger from Wakespeed to power the 12V loads (the vast majority of the boat), so that will be an ongoing exercise. I can happily run multiple air conditioners on the boat overnight on battery power, which is both pretty sweet, and also wildly absurd. But mostly, without being ridiculous, we can both work on computers for days straight, even with no solar, before having to run the generator.

After forgetting about needing to do it for much of the month, we finally found a local vinyl fabricator who could make the transparent logos we needed, and they installed our first round of decals. We’re finally legal! (since we registered as Highwind, running around as Salty Paws was … questionable.)

Since I still had the St. Patty’s Day suit on the boat, I had to bust it out for zoom calls all day on Wednesday, and then we went out and got dinner and dessert in Cocoa for the evening

The last major project of the month has been getting a new radar tower for the boat. We needed a good spot to put all of the internet and wifi extending equipment, as well as a pile of other misc instruments, all of which need to be quickly removable to clear low bridges. After researching options, I talked to Seaview in January, and they actually had a really great custom fabrication wing. A few rounds of iteration later, we designed a hinged system that can hold everything we currently need, with a little room for expansion down the line, with ~5 weeks of lead time for the custom build.

This week, it showed up, packaged incredibly well, on a pallet that took a lot of sledgehammering to disassemble! Of course, like all of our other freight shipments, YRC literally dropped it on the street in front of the marina and drove away, so, you know, screw those guys. Prepping for the mast install, I’d been ordering parts for a while — metal plates, bolts, all of the electronics to go on the mast, etc. Hannah’s been carefully navigating a giant pile of boxes upstairs for weeks, and will be unbelievably excited for the pile to finally go away instead of invading her yoga space.

Today’s primary job was disassembling the old, smaller, hinged mast, and un-running all of the wires to the old Glomex TV antenna and Raymarine radar and GPS system. The old system used wires run straight through the roof instead of through the mast, so there were a lot of holes to dig out and later fill up with 4200. The mast itself was attached to a weird extended plate that turned out to be made out of fiberglass, and was very very securely glued to the roof, so removing it ended up taking a bunch of gel coat off with it. Oops. At least I finally ended up getting to use my new oscillating multitool, and damn is that a great toy.

After spending basically the whole day on it, we got the old system completely off, filled up the old holes with filler and sealed it all up with 4200 to dry overnight, measured up and drilled holes in all the appropriate layers and plates, and finally bolted up the new hinge base. There’s now a nice 2″ hole clear from inside the skylounge up into the hinged mast setup, and it’s bolted down with 1/2″ bolts with a foot square aluminum backing plate. And there’s a tube and a half of 4200 slowly drying around everything. I gotta say it was a weird feeling digging straight through the ceiling into the upstairs room with a 2″ hole saw. Tomorrow, if all goes well, we’ll get all of the electronics up on the new mast and wired into the dash and the router setup.

We have a bunch more smaller projects to finish up this week, but we’ve scheduled our departure from Cocoa for next Saturday, the 27th. So hopefully we’ll be heading north, and with any luck, the boat still drives. After how much crap I’ve changed this month, you never know.

Third Bedroom Office Conversion

We’ve been remiss in writing a new blog post. We’ll get on that. In the meantime, I wanted to share one of the bigger projects we’re already undertaking on the new boat.

The old working situation. Worked great, when only one of us was on a call at a time.

One of the primary criteria for a new boat (and motivating factors to, in fact, change boats) was to have separate/isolated spaces for us to be on video calls at the same time that are also climate-controlled/weather-protected. These days, we are often both on video calls 5+ hours a day each, which was presenting a stressful reality working next to each other on the last boat.

The Endeavour has a third small bedroom that has two bunks in an L shape and some storage. Our plan when we decided to buy the boat was to turn this into an office. We had bought a nice little desk for Hannah to use near the kitchen, and she immediately started working from there. I spent the first week on the boat working from the upstairs table on a laptop, which worked somewhat fine, but I’m also pretty loud, especially on video calls, so even upstairs, Hannah was getting complaints sounding like she was working with the TV on. Oops.

State of the bedroom as demolition just got started.

With a company holiday on Friday, it seemed like a good opportunity to start tearing apart the room and see what kinda challenge we were looking at here to make this the space we want it to be. It also started as an incredibly claustrophobic space with the bunks in there, so we were a little nervous about whether it’d open up enough to be a really comfortable place to spend 10+ hours a day. So while Hannah was on meetings all day, I started taking things apart.

Immediately, I ran into some … interesting design choices. The bed was a single solid piece of cored fiberglass with white veneer, that ran from under the window all the way to the hallway, between the washer/dryer cabinet and the storage cabinets above it. I freaked out a bit because it looked like something that could be structural/integral. It was only 48″ off the ground, which would have been extremely limiting to work around to build a desk under it. After taking apart the drawers and backing of the closet, I found basically all of the vertical pieces also fiberglassed into the floor/back wall, which also appeared that it could be structural in some way.

Fortunately, after digging apart more things, these concerns were satisfied, one by one. The bed turned out to be basically “hung” from the walls, with fiberglass rolls draping down from the walls and connecting to the top of the bed sheet. So no torsion could be reinforced by it, as it’s basically hanging (even though the resin makes it solid). Presumably this is the strongest way to let kids jump up and down on a bed. Similarly, the vertical panels ended up just being glassed in as kinda a lazy attachment mechanism — you could tear the extra surface layer off with your bare hands without much work. Think of it like taping things to the floor or back wall, with fiberglass. So, eventually, the basic structure yielded.

After the first problem yielded, it was on to the next one. The dryer vent ran along the wall on the underside of the bed, covered up by various trim pieces and carpeting in the back of the closet. Now it’s hanging out for all to see. I explored a bunch of options for what to do with this, but it looks like the real answer is going to be to change the whole routing and run it up along the ceiling, with a new dryer vent on the outside of the boat instead. That’s going to take a custom fiberglass repair person, so for now we have to just throw it back together, taking up as little space as possible. With that in mind, for now, we decided to keep 5 inches of the bed against the wall to be the support for the dryer hose, but take out everything else that we could.

After converting an inordinate quantity of fiberglass into dust with a jigsaw, we managed to get roughly the first cut we were looking for. Finally the space felt open and like it’d really work well, especially if we could get rid of the vent stuff someday. A nice open 56″ wide box to start thinking about putting a desk into. Finally, with all the cutting complete for now, I built some new support brackets for the vent covers, cut things down as small as I could, and tried to reassemble everything I could back into something resembling a finished space.

It’s definitely a little ghetto for now, but it’s good enough to pick up a cheap desk to work with for a while. I can spend time testing out the desk height and general space while find someone to move the vent hose, and then finish cutting the other pieces out and get someone to build a proper custom desk setup into the wall. My woodworking skills are nowhere near good enough to make an even vaguely professional setup in this space, so I’m not even going to try.

But at least we have a usable space now! And it looks very likely that we can keep the single bed and still have a great desk setup. More to come!

Key Largo and a New Boat

After our lovely new year’s eve on Key Biscayne, we had a pretty uneventful cruise over to the house on Key Largo. On advice from some other boaters the previous week, we took the Angelfish Creek cut through from Biscayne Bay out to the Hawk Channel.

First look at the tropical water of the Keys – such beautiful colours!

There’s very few passages through the Florida keys that have more than a few feet of depth, so you have to choose carefully and aim for high tide. After all of our careful planning, we never saw fewer than 5 feet under the keel through the passage, so maybe we didn’t need to be so careful, but better safe than sorry.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. The house is on what turned out to be a tiny tiny channel, and our boat blocks a distressing amount of it, so we have large fishing boats passing feet from our windows every morning full of charter customers. The house has some … interesting decor. But it’s a good place for us to hang out for the month with Hannah’s folks.

On Jan 4th, we got the final survey results back for the new boat, and everything looked good. We negotiated over a few things and signed some final agreements. A couple days later, we finalized insurance and the sale closed, and we find ourselves fleet owners again, but in the really undesired way. So now we can finally unveil our new boat.

We have purchased a 2008 Endeavour TrawlerCat 48. Endeavour is (well, was, really) a small boatmaker in Florida, which spent a little over a decade making sailboats from 1974-1986. After going bankrupt in the recession, it eventually got purchased by new owners who renamed it the Endeavour Catamaran Corporation and started producing cats. They made several models from 36 through 44 feet through the earlier years, and in 2008 started making the 48. The boat we just purchased actually turns out to be hull #1. From years in software design, I thought I was smart enough to never get the V1 of something, but here we are. Only 11 of the 48s were ever made, and the company ended up getting bought by ArrowCat several years ago. Shortly thereafter, the owner, Bob Vincent, passed away, and they haven’t produced any hulls ever since.

The few 48s out there are mostly with their original owners and rarely change hands. One of the 48 owners is a semi-retired boat broker and has basically kept track of every 48 owner and tries to connect them with interested buyers, so only one has actually ever made it to the public market. He’s how we ended up finding this one — since we had expressed interest in the middle of the summer in getting on the list, we got word that one was coming up for sale near where we were passing through, so the timing worked out for us to stop in and take a look.

It has several attributes that we’ve been looking to upgrade to:
* A structural “flybridge” area (second floor), for more comfortable weatherproof cruising
* More beam (width), but not enough that we will have trouble finding slips. The Endeavour cats are kinda mid-width. This boat has an 18 foot beam, which gives a bunch of extra room over our current boat. But many cats around this size have 22+ foot beams, which starts to be really difficult to fit in a marina.
* A third bedroom that we’ll convert into an office, so that we can have two isolated work spaces. Both Hannah and I tend to just be on zoom calls for the majority of every day, so we’re constantly jockeying for space and taking calls from a bed.
* Stability of a catamaran — just gets thrown around a lot less in rough seas
* Just more room, everywhere — the 48 has 850 sq ft of climate-controlled fiberglassed-in living space. Much bigger kitchen, bigger master bedroom, bigger flybridge, etc.
* Hydraulic dinghy lift — really easy in/out of the water to go for a jaunt.

We don’t really have any useful pictures right now, but if you want to see some video to see why we bought it, there’s a marketing video from 2013 on youtube.

We were originally planning on swapping boats mid-month so we could spend half of our stationary month on Key Largo outfitting the new boat. Unfortunately, after seeing the size of the canal outside the house, we canceled the plan. The Meridian is wide enough that we’re really close to blocking the channel for the biggest boats to get by, but the 4 more feet of the cat would really be aggressively blocking things. So we decided to just leave the cat in Stuart for the month and slowly get Highwind ready for sale, while also starting to plan out purchases for the new boat. It’s not a perfect solution, but these things rarely are. So we made one long day trip up to the boat right after the sale closed, took a ton of measurements, looked at some dinghies, and then left it to sit there for the rest of the month.

Anyway, after dealing with all of that, and deciding to just settle in, Key Largo has been lovely. It’s great to see Hannah’s parents after a year away, and spend the month hanging out. Hannah’s brother flies in for the middle 2 weeks of the month as well, so hopefully we all have a fun month and no one brings COVID to the party by accident. We’ve all been isolating as much as we can, but you never know.

The house has beautiful blue lights on the palm trees and under glow all along the dock, so it’s easy to see the huge amount of fish in the channel!

On our first full day in the Keys, we went to John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park for a picnic lunch. It was a little crowded, but we managed to find a picnic spot. It wasn’t super warm, so we didn’t swim – only waded in up to our knees.

Key Largo is pretty chill — a few fun outdoor restaurants, the usual grocery stores/chains, and a lot of boaters. We’ve largely been working all day then drinking beer and wine and hanging out on the porch all evening, every night. It’s a rough life. After 10 straight months on the move, it’s nice to just relax once in a while.

A few days after we arrived was Hannah’s birthday. Since it was mid-week, we celebrated with a home-cooked dinner and my parents sent a lovely bouquet of flowers.

After a lovely first week, Matthew arrived. Since we had taken the car up to Stuart to receive the keys for the new boat and take some measurements for ordering new parts for the internet setup, we picked him up from Miami airport on the way home and stopped for Cuban dinner. It was a little chilly and Hannah had to wear all the spare clothing we could find in the car!

The next day Matthew and Keith went on a fishing charter. They returned home with about a dozen fish – largely yellowtail and tuna. This resulted in Hannah and Matthew making several delicious home-made fish and chip nights and amazingly fresh sashimi appetizers!

Brent and Elizabeth sent us, via my parents to Hannah’s parents, a custom puzzle of a photo from last year’s Christmas holiday – the one we wrote about early on in this blog! We spent a lovely evening putting together the puzzle. Hannah wouldn’t let anyone look at the picture after we opened the box, which everyone complained about, but it actually made the completed result more satisfying! It was fun to spend the evening piecing together a photo of all the family, back when we could be together. Hopefully we’ll be able to reunite next year.

We started hatching a plan to potentially take Highwind out on her last hurrah to Key West, or possibly out to Dry Tortugas, if the weather cooperates. That will be Matthew’s last week at the house before he heads back to San Jose.

New Internet Setup

NOTE: This post has been left for posterity, but there’s an updated internet setup post for 2023. If you’re arriving here from a link, you probably want to skip to the newer stuff.

Warning: Nerdy informational post. Skip if you just want to hear boating stories.

We’ve been using the Cradlepoint, Rogue Wave, and WirEng setup for the last ~2 years on the boat, and while most of the time it’s been functional, we’ve basically constantly been fighting issues. The Cradlepoint requires manual intervention to switch between providers, the Rogue Wave basically never connects to marina wifi, and the WirEng antenna seems to not be very omnidirectional, so it changes signal drastically as we spin in anchorages. We’ve basically had nearly a year on the boat periodically apologizing during work calls for dropping seconds of audio periodically. During COVID, lots of people have bad internet, but at some point this is going to be a problem.

Knowing I wanted more antennas, as well as more solar, while we were in Maine this summer/fall, we had the bimini canvas modified to add velcro patches so we could move the solar panel setup over from the hardtop, freeing up tons of real estate for antennas, while also doubling our wattage. Since then, I’ve been on-and-off researching options for a couple months. I’ve been leaning toward switching over to a Peplink router, and had still been trying to decide how complicated of a setup to get, other antennas to try, etc., when Hannah ran across an article on SeaBits about his 2020 internet setup. He had a ton of details on his Peplink-based setup, and had tried a bunch of antennas. I exchanged a couple messages with him, posted a little on the Peplink forum, and after a bunch of research, hemming, and hawing, I decided to try a “cheap” version of his setup.

In the past, we had Verizon and AT&T SIM cards in the Cradlepoint that we’d switch between. I wanted to, instead, support at least both of those connections simultaneously, as well as possibly adding TMobile on top. Peplink has a whole slew of different routers available, supporting everything from a single CAT6 modem through to a 6500$ unit with four integrated CAT18 modems. I decided to hedge some of my bets and went with the MAX Transit Duo CAT12, which has two integrated CAT12 modems, for 1000$. The router also supports integrated WiFi-as-WAN, so you can pull in marina wifi and treat it just like another internet connection like the cell modems. It also has a single WAN port, allowing me the flexibility to add another single cell modem and use that as yet another connection to share, which I ended up using in the end.

I picked up two Poynting OMNI-402 2×2 MIMO LTE/3G antennas, which were the SeaBits suggestions, to support two CAT12 cellular modems. They don’t have quite as much posted gain as some non-MIMO antennas, but they effectively pack two fairly-high-gain antennas per unit, in a nice weatherproof package, with integrated cabling, so it should work even better than the GigaMIMO under 95+% of circumstances.

Next, I grabbed two Poynting OMNI-496 2.4/5 dual-band WiFi antennas. Again, these were the SeaBits suggestions. The Poynting antennas have a great marine mount, have sturdy weatherproof packaging, and very good omnidirectional characteristics. So even though they aren’t the best peak gain of all available options out there, in real-world usage they seem to hold up better than anything else.

The interesting revelation that SeaBits had that kicked me over the edge was that he actually mounts the router very close to the antennas, letting you use very short cables (less signal loss/noise). Then you run a CAT6 cable and power cable into the boat to a simple switch (Trendnet 8 port industrial) and wifi access point (AP One Rugged) to actually distribute the internet to devices inside the boat. Separating the purposes like this means that you don’t need to fish a bunch of 30 foot cables from the antennas way down into the boat, with a bunch of noisy crosstalk with other signal cables the whole way. So even though I have way more wires total in play now, the actual arrangement throughout the conduits of the boat is way simpler.

Fishing the four antennas through the hardtop was awkward, since Meridian really didn’t build the thing intending for you to send wires through it, but once we got all the cables through to the center of the hardtop, it was gloriously simple to hook everything up. The router is a nice compact little rectangle with sturdy connectors and a nice removable power junction block. I put everything together, and magically it worked right out of the box. Both cell connections worked simultaneously, and I connected right up to the wifi of our friends’ house we were staying outside, and started setting up all kinds of routing rules.

Four new Poynting residents across the back of the hardtop

Finally, a few days later, after validating that this setup was working well, I took our old MOFI4500 backup router, and hooked it into the WirEng GigaMIMO antenna that we hadn’t been using for the last week. After disabling wifi and a bunch of advanced settings, I stuffed a new TMobile unlimited SIM into it, plugged it into the WAN port of the Peplink, and immediately we were getting internet off all 5 sources (2 wifi, 3 cellular)! After testing this new setup, I hardmounted power to that as well, and now everything was nicely secured inside the hardtop.

Testing the final setup tonight from St. Augustine, I was able to pull 139 megabits down, with the laptop using wifi! And for days now, video calls have been rock solid, using the SpeedFusion Cloud redundancy setup, where it sends packets over multiple connections simultaneously and merges them in the cloud. For around 2300$ total, this setup is a huge step up from the old one, for less than half of the cost.

Charleston and the Election

Zeta ended up not being a big deal in the end. A couple days in the marina with a fair amount of wind, but nothing to write home about. So we hung out, chatted with our neighbors, and when the weekend came, headed south.

With a full weekend of calm weather ahead of us, but needing to be in Charleston the following weekend, we had some mileage to put behind us this week. My work week was also packed solid because of quarterly planning meetings, so we weren’t going to make much progress mid-week.

This area of the ICW starts to get quite tidal, with regular inlets and short rivers that lead out to the ocean, leading to lots of shoaling (underwater sand buildup spots) from all of the daily water exchange. As such, charts tend to be out of date within months, as shoals pop up out of nowhere, causing very shallow spots in the middle of the charted route. We’ve been reading alerts in the past on various sources (activecaptain, mostly) to know when to be cautious and make sure to go through near a high tide, but this summer found out about a set of tracks released by Bob423 that are regularly updated and can overlay into Navionics (and other apps) to give the latest safest water as proven by Bob and his community of other ICW travelers. Their community data is significantly more up to date than anything else we’ve found.

Bob423’s proposed alternate route (upper) through Lockwood’s Folly (old route dotted)

Setting out on Saturday, we knew that, just west of Southport, was a notorious spot called Lockwood’s Folly, which I’d been seeing alerts for the past couple months saying it’s super-rapidly shoaling, and down to around 4 feet deep along the currently-charted (and buoyed!) route. While we were in Southport waiting out Zeta, we saw Bob put out a message with an updated “beta” track that actually followed some deeper water (charted that way, anyway) far off course that he hadn’t tried before that he wanted someone to try out. We knew we’d be heading out early in the morning, near high tide, and with a forward-facing sonar we were in a good position to give it a go. We veered off course at the right place, and never saw less than 10 feet under our hull! We reported the data back to Bob, and I exported track and depth data out of BoatKit, which he sent off to the coast guard, and next week they’ll be re-setting the buoys for the new route!

After the excitement of beta testing Lockwood’s Folly, Saturday was otherwise a fairly mundane long journey through rural North Carolina, on an ICW that was mostly an endless series of neighborhoods. Late in the day, we entered South Carolina, and made a pit stop at Osprey Marina, the cheapest diesel around for a while, before we headed into the Waccamaw River. Checking out, the plexi wall around the cash register was emblazoned with a large “TRUMP 2020 MAKE LIBERALS CRY AGAIN” sticker, so we knew what kind of country we were in. Why anyone can comfortably have a worldview centered around others’ pain is beyond me, but that apparently describes slightly under half our country right now, sigh. We’ve been trying to keep a list of proudly-Trump-supporting businesses to avoid when we come back up in the Spring, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to find diesel south of Virginia if we hold fast to the list.

As the sun set, we entered the Waccamaw River, a very cool winding swamp-like river system with limited civilization nearby. On the way north, we had a couple very peaceful days on anchor here, and heading back south, we were disappointed that timing didn’t quite work out to spend more time here. But we still set up for the night on a nice little side river and had a peaceful (but warm) night among the wildlife noises.

Speaking of warm weather, we’ve been having absurdly warm weather for weeks now. We’ve had 3 summers so far this year: February in Florida, July in Maine, and now another in November in the Carolinas. The average for the area for this time of year is highs of 70 and overnight in the 40s, but we’ve had weeks of 80 degree humid weather, with only a single cold night that got into the 40s. As I’ve started getting emails from ski areas talking about getting ready to open in WA, I feel so utterly disconnected from that world right now.

Waking up in the morning to head out, we decided to pull anchor during the only 10 minute window that it monsooned, so my drowned rat crew was not super pleased.

We spent another uneventful day winding through the rest of the Waccamaw River and emerged into the “low country” of central South Carolina. We were originally planning on picking one of the few semi-sketchy anchorages along the river for the night, but the wind forecast kept increasing throughout the day, for the next couple days, so we decided instead to pull in at McClellanville Marina and wait out the wind for a couple days.

Before the overnight winds came, we did get a nice sunset at McClellanville

In the afternoon, I had noticed the starboard voltages periodically spiking higher than normal, but it didn’t seem awful enough to do anything drastic, and it would come and go. Unfortunately, when we went into the boat after tying up at McClellanville, the inside of the boat smelled like a hot springs — one of the starboard start batteries (Lifeline sealed AGM) apparently did not like the overvoltage and had started off-gassing hydrogen sulfide. So we frantically aired out the boat to keep from dying, set up fans in the aft cabin bedroom to run for a couple days, and slept in the front bedroom for the duration of our stay. I pulled the coil wire off of the alternator so it would stop generating when under way until I could get a replacement (one of the few things left that I don’t carry a spare for, since it’s not a terribly critical piece of equipment, believe it or not).

Tuesday, before work, we left the marina and headed ~7 miles down the ICW to Awendaw Creek, a well-known ICW anchorage, and a spot we stopped for a day on the way north in the spring, to basically spend the week. No weather of interest was forecast, and it put us around 38 NM to Charleston, which would be an easy trip to knock out Friday (which I had off work after the four days of planning meetings). So we hung out there, for 3 nights, while the expected election madness played itself out.

I tried to work with the one place in Charleston that could theoretically replace the voltage regulator on my alternator, but after 2 days of repeatedly calling and failing to get them to figure out whether or not they could actually fix it, I gave up and had a new higher-amperage alternator shipped from Seaboard Marine to the marina in Charleston to pick up in a couple days. I’ll have the broken one fixed up at some point in the future and then keep it around as a spare.

Several days of meetings and nights of great sunsets later, Friday rolled around, and we tootled on into Charleston to spend the weekend. The city was basically entirely shut down (early COVID times) on the way north, so we didn’t do much other than grocery shop the last time here, so we were excited to actually see some of the city this time around. We knew we’d be able to get food this time, which we were excited for, but after searching a bit for other outdoor activities to do, found that there’s a hojillion walking tours, which seemed like a perfect COVID activity. I researched several options, and found that one that seemed likely to be the most irreverent, and we signed up for a Saturday midday time slot.

The walking tour turned out to be excellent. The guy was a complete history dork and went into huge detail on the slave trade origins, the evolution of the city, and how all that still affects the composition of the city (and the state) to this day. It was both incredibly informative and entertaining. If you’re in Charleston, I highly recommend Oyster Point Walking Tours, they were excellent. Of particular highlight was, while he was talking about a church in front of us, the bells all started ringing, nowhere near a :00/:15/:30/etc. time border. We quickly realized that they had just called PA for Biden, and celebrations were starting to break out. Later that night, Hannah went out for an errand and saw celebrations downtown as well.

After the walking tour, we got an enormous and delicious tray of loaded fries, burgers, and drinks, and waddled back to the boat for the evening, not needing to eat again until the next day.

Today (Sunday) was, unfortunately, fairly gross out, with on and off rain and consistent heavy wind, so we are holed up on the boat to finish off the weekend. The alternator’s changed and we’re back in full running shape, as well. This week, we’ll head toward Beaufort or Savannah, depending on how weather holds up. We have yet another storm coming through, so we’re waiting to see how the forecasts solidify for Tropical Storm Eta before making final plans…

Fleeing Fall

It’s only been a week since the last post, but we’ve clicked off nearly a quarter of the east coast in that time. With how long we lingered up north, and fall rapidly approaching, the weather has been quickly degrading, with days of sustained winds making travel difficult. We made the decision to bust south as fast as possible for a bit until we find better weather again, likely once we get back on the ICW.

Our day on the Jersey coast was, fortunately, incredibly uneventful. A little wind picked up in the afternoon, but as ocean crossings go, it was about as peaceful as you can get. The days are rapidly shortening, so even though we started at dawn and conditions were perfect, there just weren’t enough hours of daylight to make it all the way up to Delaware City on the same day. We pulled into Cape May in the late afternoon, parked for the night at Utsch’s again, got takeout from the same restaurant as last time (which was also just as mediocre as last time, so I think we’ll pass next time through here), and chilled out for the evening.

Passing by Atlantic City with about as calm conditions as the Atlantic gets

In the morning, we picked up enough diesel to make sure we’d make it through to the Chesapeake and headed out again. It was significantly less calm than the Jersey crossing, but still just fine. It’s possible that a summer in Maine has altered our baseline for “bad conditions” a bit. We timed it to have the current with us the whole way, and when we headed into the C+D canal, got a nice 2kt push the whole way through. We stopped early at Chesapeake City, since we liked our stop here last time through, and spent a lovely afternoon in the sun. Hannah went for a run, I did some boat cleaning, and in the evening we hung out and caught some live music and drank in an outdoor “rum garden” that had opened up over the summer. It was a lovely way to end a weekend that we’d been dreading for months, knowing how the conditions were our last time through here.

On Monday, we resumed our standard routine — make a short hop of a couple hours some time during the day either in the morning or between afternoon meetings. We headed onto the Chesapeake proper and up the Sassafras river, our favorite spot from our last time up the coast. We went deeper into the river this time, since it was super pretty up in there, and there was the cheapest diesel around in Fredericktown, several miles up the river. Unfortunately, cell reception basically everywhere in between our anchorage from the spring and Fredericktown was unusable, so we had to stay at an uninspiring (but cheap) mooring in Fredericktown to be able to work for the day, after filling up with diesel.

Wind was predicted for most of the rest of the week, so in the morning we headed down to what looked like a pretty protected hidey-hole at Fairlee Creek. It looks/sounds like this place is party central on summer weekends, with outdoor tiki bars everywhere on the beaches and dozens and dozens of boats anchored in the shallow bay. This late in the season, it was essentially deserted, and we had a peaceful few days on anchor while the wind tore through the main Chesapeake. A few boats passed in and out for a night here and there, but at least one of the nights we were the only boat in the bay.

Hannah’s shoulder results finally came back in, so we had to make a plan to find a doctor to get a cortisone injection, and miraculously, there was an office walking distance from the Solomon’s marina, where we were planning on meeting up with Jan and Jim again, with an opening on the following Tuesday. So that became the new plan.

Friday, we emerged from our cocoon and crossed over to the west side of the Chesapeake, just north of Annapolis, to a random anchorage I found on ActiveCaptain. It turned out to literally be a tiny river surrounded by solid houses with docks, and we felt more than a little weird just dropping anchor basically in their back yard. However, by the time we got in, we both had meetings coming up, so we were pretty committed. We had a peaceful windless day and night there with kayakers looking oddly at us periodically. We even had a quite good dinner at a waterfront restaurant a short dinghy trip up the river from our “anchorage”.

Today (Saturday), we’re making most of the trip down to Solomon’s, stopping at Hudson Creek, which theoretically will nicely protect us from some overnight wind from the southwest, and the comments say will deliver a lovely sunset over the beach, if these clouds clear a bit (unlikely). I guess we’ll find out. The raindrops starting to fall aren’t a great sign, though.

Bar Harbor and Roque Island

Bar Harbor at sunset, with the “experience cruise” sailing ships coming in for the night

We ended up spending the whole week in Bar Harbor. The internet was good, the buoy was reasonably cheap, access to restaurants/supplies was excellent, and it’s really pretty there. In between the rainstorms, that is.

About half the nights, we dinghied into town and found dinner somewhere random. The first time we went in, just after a rainstorm, we found a place with a strong review on Yelp, and, after they quickly dried the water off the outdoor tables, had a lovely meal and cocktails. Dinghying through a pitch-black harbor full of lobster pots is an interesting experience.

This ship sailed past us several times a day while we were moored in Bar Harbor

Later in the week, with better weather, we tried several places that were totally booked out, and ended up just walking by a sidestreet that happened to have a Thai place on it. So we jumped over there and had a, well, intensely mediocre Thai meal, to be honest. But it was our first Thai meal since leaving Seattle, so we loved it anyway. We even had time to make it over to the grocery store and renew supplies before they closed for the night.

Fundamentally, the harbor and surrounding areas are super pretty. Even with the nonstop lobster boats who don’t seem to give the slightest bit of a shit about sending multi-foot wakes at you at all hours of the day, we’ll still be back.

Roque Island. Highwind is just left of center near the bottom.

For the weekend, we decided to head even further east to a well-known spot (up here) called Roque Island. It’s a large private island with a giant sandy beach just off the coast that forms a nice crescent cove protected from all the sides that the wind mostly comes from up here, so it was bound to be a popular anchorage. It was about 40 miles east of Bar Harbor, so we spent much of the day slowboating over there, dodging the densest collections of lobster pots that we’ve yet seen.

When we arrived on Saturday afternoon, there were already ~15 boats taking up the shallow areas of the anchorage. We have plenty of chain, and run the generator a lot, so we happily moved further offshore and anchored in 35 feet of water, well away from everyone. Weather was sour at this point, so we just stayed in for the night instead of going ashore. Sunday was no better, so we mostly just hung out for the weekend and enjoyed the peace and calm. Internet was passable, so we decided to hang out for a few days as people filtered out for the work week.

Mid week, we finally managed to get some good weather and a hole in our work schedules to coincide, and went ashore just before the sun dipped behind the trees and got a little sun in our faces. On the way back to Highwind we were hailed over by a couple on a boat and chatted for a bit about the great loop and some local anchorages to try out.

By Thursday, we were starting to run low on laundry (it’s been a while), so we decided to hop over to the nearby town of Jonesport, which had a rental mooring with access to laundry facilities. The dock was only accessible (i.e. “not high and dry”) near high tide, so Hannah spent the day ashore doing laundry and working from land. We need to top off on water somewhere nearby, then we’re good for another couple weeks.

The watermaker we ordered is completed and working its way up to Maine, so we’re tentatively scheduled to head back to Hinckley to get it installed on Aug 10th. This gives us another week and 2 weekends to hang out east here, then head back for the install, and then probably head back west to meet up with John/Joan.

Repairs and Acadia

Highwind is decidedly not in the water, at bottom center

We ended up spending a full week on the hard at Hinckley. They ordinarily don’t allow people to stay on the boat while it’s in their yard, but with all the hotels in the area closed, we didn’t have a lot of options, so they graciously let us stay there and use the restrooms/showers after hours for the week.

We saw several pretty sunsets while at Hinckley

While we were fixing some of the windows, we noticed some other windows having issues too and dug into those, and I decided to get a new sonar installed, which stretched out our time ashore a bit. But they did a great job, were super easy to work with, and in the end it wasn’t too much more expensive than going to a no-name shop in the middle of nowhere. You could tell the workers there genuinely had pride in doing good work, as well, which was reassuring as they were busy putting large new holes through the bottom of our boat. Stuff we had done:

Our bow thruster had continued to be doing poorly ever since coming to the east coast, and after replacing the motor unit. They came to the same conclusion that I did — it just needs a second 4/0 wire run, and to clean up some of the crappy factory wiring while they were in there. Our bow thruster now finally actually moves the boat around!
Adding a through-hull to be ready to install a watermaker. We’ve ordered a Spectra 340c (14 gallons/hour nominal) which will be here in a couple weeks to install. We’ll head back to Hinckley to have them install that when it shows up in the mail.
Raw water pump replacement — our other pump was leaking, and apparently requires you to own a bottle jack to jack the motor up to replace, which is a tool I don’t keep on board…
1000 hour service — we’d already done most of this preemptively at ~900 hours before starting the loop, but we had a couple last items as we passed through 1000 hours worth doing.
Bottom paint — the diver who checked our boat in CT was amused at our near complete lack of paint, so it was time to fix that.
Fiberglass repair on the transom — The previous owners had installed some fishing supply trays incredibly hackily, so they leaked into the boat. Patched it over fully and sealed it up.
Installed a Garmin PS51-TH forward-looking sonar — after months on shallow waterways with questionable charting, and looking like we’re going to be doing it for at least another couple years, I wanted some insurance.
Repaired several leaking windows — Meridian hacked the windows into the boat, didn’t use enough caulk or bedding, and many of them needed re-sealing from scratch. Good times.

The joys of boat ownership. 5 figures of repairs, and only 1 new toy to play with…

We were dropped back into the water on the 16th, and immediately headed over to Bunker’s Harbor, a little spot that sounded good on the ActiveCaptain entry, but in reality was barely wide enough to lay out enough chain to safely anchor in. As we tested the anchor, it jumped once then “set”, which led me to believe it was just catching on rocks at the bottom. With steeply shelving rocky sides, fishing boats waking the shit out of us all evening and night, and very poor cell reception, we weren’t thrilled with our choices. The next morning, we quickly retreated and headed back west to Winter Harbor on the other side of the peninsula, getting a buoy from the Winter Harbor Yacht club for the weekend.

We took advantage of their launch service (a little ferry boat that will take you to/from shore) to bring the bikes ashore and bike around for a gorgeous Saturday. Hannah ended up finding a winery+distillery that was ~15 miles inland, so we biked up to there and braved extensive mosquitos to find that they were something rather interesting — a fruit-based winery. But, unlike the fruit wines we have had in the past, these were actually dry and semi-dry wines based on fruit. Really wacky flavor profiles to have something that smelled and mostly tasted like a pinot, but was made from apples. They also had several interesting liquors, including a lovely rum. So, we ended up strapping a case of wine and spirits to one of the bikes to head home. We left the bikes on a bike rack out front of the yacht club, grabbed the batteries to charge, and headed back to the boat for the night.

Sunday, we wanted to bike over to the offshoot of Acadia NP that’s on this other peninsula and do a big loop ride around it. We had a lazy morning, headed to shore to grab the bikes, and found my bike’s rear wheel resting on the ground, completely deflated. Having never patched a bike tire in my life, it was time to learn how. Knowing this moment would someday come, I had a little tool bag with all the wrenches and allens needed to repair the bike, a small patch kit with plastic tire wrenches, and a tiny tire pump. The process turned out to be pretty simple. Being next to the ocean, once I pumped the tube back up a bit, I dunked it in the water and immediately found the pinhole leak. The super-cheapo Chinese stock tires on the bike gave no resistance to just being pushed back onto the rim with my hands, and we added a Mr Tuffy puncture resistant liner before reassembling. In not too long at all, we were off to the park.

We had a lovely day biking around the park, even though the trail up to the summit of the little “mountain” at the center of the park was closed. Some rangers interrogated us about our bikes and what class they were, which at the time I didn’t know. We later looked and found out they are class 2, which are not allowed off the paved roads in the park, so we couldn’t take an interesting-looking route through the center of the park. We consoled ourselves with ice cream just outside the exit of the park on the loop road, and the patch held up all day!

While we were far less concerned about dragging anchor and destroying our boat, the Internet wasn’t very usable in Winter Harbor either, with either AT&T or Verizon. As such, on Monday morning, we ended up heading back over to Bar Harbor (the tourist town we biked to on the 4th) for some reliable internet for working for the week, where both AT&T and Verizon have pretty strong signals, and set up permanent residence on one of the city’s mooring buoys.

Maine!

A pretty old schooner welcomed us to Portland, ME

Expecting heavy wind the next full day, in the morning, we decided to head into the Marion harbor and pick up a buoy with Barden’s Boatyard. We pulled up the anchor, went to wash it off, and … nothing. Apparently the washdown pump had decided it was a good time to give up the ghost. Noted. So we grabbed a buoy and started calling around for a spare part. No one nearby had one, so we gave up for the moment, since it’s not super critical that it works. While the day didn’t turn out to super windy, at least in the harbor, it did rain a bunch, so we just hunkered down on the boat and worked, never leaving the boat.

Tuesday morning was our anticipated (short) early morning weather window to make it through the canal and as far up the coast as possible. We were hoping to be able to make it over to Provincetown and spend a couple days anchored there, but the rest of the week looked really nasty (25+ kt winds basically continuous for ~48 hours), so we decided the plan would be to wuss out and go spend a few days in Scituate, another of John/Joan’s suggestions.

We woke up at 7am, and had a pretty uneventful drive up and through the canal. There was a huge mess of fishing boats right on the exit of the canal, which we were able to navigate around, but we heard boats going the other way complaining about it on the VHF all morning. We hit the canal right at peak eastwardly current (5 kts), and the canal has an absolute speed limit of 10 mph, so we literally had to idle through the canal (our idle speed is 4 kts) and still bumped through the limit a few times. There were even police boats patrolling the canal, so we didn’t try to push it.

Exiting onto Cape Cod, we turned northward and did something we haven’t done much in the last few months: set the autopilot for a heading and then stare at the horizon for a couple hours, periodically dodging lobster pots. I’d picked out a spot to grab diesel an hour or so short of Scituate, and as we entered the harbor, despite the charts showing lots of depth, I started getting scary depth alarms of 4 ft or less. Apparently, according to the person running the fuel dock, the harbor shoals regularly and they need to dredge it every few years. Like, maybe right now would be a good time, to avoid another code brown.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. We arrived in Scituate, called the suggested launch service, they directed us to a buoy mid-harbor, and we ended up hanging out there for 3 full days while the weather passed. And that was a good call, it turned out. It rained like hell on and off, blew like crazy for the predicted 2 days straight, and was generally uncomfortable, even nestled fairly deep in a harbor, much less if we’d been anywhere actually exposed. In the gaps in the rain, Hannah ran ashore and got a full load of laundry in, some grocery shopping, and picked up a new overpriced washdown pump from a local parts place. On the last night, we even had a great meal eating outdoors at a nice Italian restaurant in town, Riva. Sadly we forgot to take any pictures of our time in Scituate!

Friday was our next semi-weather-window. With this much unseasonal wind, we have to pick any vaguely decent window and go for it. I was planning on making a short early morning stop to Gloucester, but as we went to bed, the weather showed a longer hole of around 4 hours instead of 2, so we made a quick change and decided to try to go all the way to the Isles of Shoals. Our route would take us right by Gloucester anyway, in case the weather simulations were a lie (happens), so we could easily bail. We made it the next 20 miles up to the Isles of Shoals, with moderate chop, and grabbed a buoy.

The Isles of Shoals! We’re in that central harbor there.

The Isles of Shoals are the largest part of a small archipelago about 8 miles offshore from New Hampshire. It was originally a popular-ish harbor back in the 1600s, and has been on the downswing ever since. These days, a few of the islands have a few houses on them, and Star Island has a big conference center run by a religious cult that also lives on the island. There’s a little harbor protected from the ocean on 3 sides by a few islands and some artificial breakwaters that connect them. The harbor is usually a pretty decent tourist spot, with daily boat+walking tours from several companies out of Portsmouth (the nearest city in mainland NH), but with C19, everything’s shut down, and Star Island has a big “ISLAND CLOSED” sign on it.

The harbor, fortuitously, has several mooring buoys owned by a few yacht clubs, all of which are listed as, basically, “first come first serve for non-yacht-club members, and if a yacht club member asks you to leave, get off.” So, even with it being Friday midday, and an afternoon crowd of yachters heading in later on, we risked it, and grabbed a PYC buoy. We figured we’d drop anchor if we had to.

In the end, we got lucky and actually were able to stay on the buoy for 2 nights. The islands are gorgeous. We were treated to two lovely sunsets, lots of 70 degrees and clear sunny skies, we took a dinghy ride around in the ocean swells to check out the other islands, and generally had a great time. Finally some decent weather.

Sunday, with passable weather predicted, we decided to go the 50nm all the way to Portland, ME, to fill up on the cheapest diesel within hundreds of miles, and then see how the weather was doing. It was a pretty choppy morning all the way up, and required a lot of lobster pot dodging, but as we arrived in Portland, we were greeted by a really pretty harbor, ringed with old forts, and a bunch of sailboats out to enjoy the weather.

We stopped at DeMillo’s marina, and Hannah immediately ran off to the grocery store while I slowly filled up on diesel, gas for the dinghy, and fresh water, and emptied a couple weeks of accumulated recycling. I didn’t actually check the news for updates, but with the number of people walking around without masks and eating at restaurants, I assume Maine must have lifted any quarantine restrictions since we left Rowayton.

Stocked up for a week or so on the hook, we slow boated our way over to another John/Joan recommendation, Snow Island, 20nm east of Portland, thoroughly enjoying the scenery. Coastal Maine is so pretty. I haven’t been here in decades, and that was a mistake. Everywhere you go is picturesque islands with small cliffsides facing the ocean, waves breaking over rocks, and pretty houses overlooking everything. We even passed a 200 year old “shipwreck monument”, which is really just a hollow pyramid with supplies inside, so if you got shipwrecked nearby, you could go there and possibly not die from exposure. As the sun fell, we arrived, and dropped anchor in an empty bay, with 30 of our closest lobster pot friends.

We’ll see what our plan is from here — probably stay here for a couple days, enjoying the scenery. We’re trying to coordinate getting some work done on the boat by Wayfarer marine, so we’ll try to hook up with them early this week to get some preliminary estimates/dates, and plan our schedule from there.