The Adventures of Highwind

We spent Sunday night on anchor just up the creek in Solomon’s and pulled into the marina on Monday morning. Since it was Indigenous People’s Day/Columbus Day, I had the day off; however I’d forgotten to block off my calendar, so I spent the day doing interviews and 4 loads of laundry…fun! I’d managed to schedule an appointment with another orthopedic doctor for Tuesday morning that happened to be within walking distance of Spring Cove Marina where we’d be staying. Armed with my full medical records from Boston, and a CD of my MRI images, I headed over to the appointment and was able to get a cortisone injection for my shoulder. This has helped a little, but not completely and I’m still working on my PT exercises.

That evening, we met up with Jan and Jim (David’s aunt and uncle) for a lovely outdoor dinner. Unfortunately, I completely forgot to take a group photo, but I did get a great sunset shot as we were arriving at the restaurant.

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On Tuesday morning, we headed to Sandy Point and set up on anchor. We knew a rain storm was approaching, so we planned to be here for several days until that abated enough for us to keep heading south. Thus ensued a couple of relatively boring and quiet dreary days. The sun came out again by Saturday and after a lazy morning, we headed out to refuel at Ingram Bay Marina. Their fuel pumps were very slow flow, and we were pretty empty, so we were there for about an hour refueling! We spent the rest of the afternoon heading towards Norfolk and ended up chasing the sunset to an anchorage spot just north of the city and dockyards.

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We woke up early this morning (Sunday) because we needed to get all the way through Norfolk to the Great Bridge Lock for 11:30am. Norfolk is the world’s largest naval base and since we forgot to take photos last time, we set up the GoPro on the bow and took a timelapse video of our morning cruise, in addition to some photos along the way. It’s a bit of a crazy experience going through miles and miles of boatyards filled with massive ships.

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You might recall that as we came north, we came through the Great Dismal Swamp, which sounded much more romantic than it turned out to be. We’d decided that we’d never do that again (too many sunken obstacles), so going South, we are going the alternate route via Coinjock. South of Norfolk we turned left and headed towards the Great Bridge Lock. We timed the mornin g perfectly — topped off fuel with a Formula 1-worthy pit stop at Top Rack Marina, the cheapest fuel we’ll find for weeks, and pulled up to the lock right as they were opening the gates, and we entered with several other boats. The lock was only a drop of about 4 feet and then we were back in the ICW, which will take us all the way back to Florida over the next few months.

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A long uneventful afternoon got us all the way to Coinjock Marina, which apparently has some famous prime rib, which we will sample later tonight. We spent the last of the sunlight scrubbing a layer of salt off the boat, and are kicking back with drinks for the sunset.

We’re planning a fairly ambitious schedule for the week. Weather looks like it’s cooperating, so we’re trying to get all the way to Oriental by next weekend, 115nm from here. With a known target several days away, we can receive our ballots and vote, and get some velcro to finish fixing up our solar installation.

But meanwhile, prime rib.

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.

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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.

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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.

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We pulled in to Rowayton and this time around, our mooring went much smoother than last time, now knowing how to use the system. John and Joan were returning home on Sunday, but had graciously given us access to their house to do laundry and to borrow their car for running errands. I drove the dingy solo on Friday afternoon while David was finishing up work meetings to pick up packages that we’d had delivered and to get started on a load of laundry.

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Many of these included items for what are hopefully our last few boat-projects in a while. This included some cables for hardwiring our laptop chargers into the 12v system and the remaining solar panels for the roof.

The next day was our planned errand day, where we went to Costco, Total Wine and Stew Leonards, a grocery store that David has fond nostalgia for from growing up in this area (it has animatronic creatures singing throughout). It turns out that the owners, however, are not great people. This is something I myself have been struggling with over the past month or so as I am having a very hard time reconciling the increasingly obvious ugliness of JK Rowling’s views with, as anyone who knows me would attest, the incredibly special role Harry Potter has played in my life.

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That evening, I mentally prepared to assist David in a boat project that involved me crawling behind our toilet into the cavity in the swimstep and wriggling my way all the way across the entire beam of the boat and behind the watermaker to unscrew the rear thruster relay for replacement, since it appears to have died. The space is smaller than a coffin and very dirty, and involved holding tools at awkward angles above my head. I have great appreciation for all the other jobs on the boat that David does involving similar discomforts; this particular task fell to me since this particular space was not big enough to fit him!

After about 45 minutes, I had clipped several dozen zipties that were attached in places even more inconvenient than the relay, and we had everything free. David opened the relay and discovered a load of salt-corrosion, so we hoped that a replacement would be all that was needed to get the stern thruster working again. This experience actually turned out to be good practice for my MRI on Monday!

On Sunday evening, we gathered at John and Joan’s, and Paul, Nancy, Mike, Jen and Dan joined us for a socially distant outdoor family dinner (that’s David’s other aunt, uncle, and cousins). Jen and Dan live near Lake Champlain and we had been planning to visit them as we made our way North on the Loop. Coincidentally, they happened to be in Connecticut while we were passing through, so the timing worked great, and hopefully we’ll be able to visit them again next year when we actually Loop!

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On Monday, the time had finally come for me to have my MRI. This happened fairly uneventfully (discounting the somewhat traumatic experience of not really being looked at, placed on the bed, and immidiately transported backwards into the tube while one of the attendants said “about 30-35 minutes, don’t move” and then I was left alone).

We’d been keeping an eye on the weather as our 100+ mile New Jersey open water leg was upcoming and requires a good weather window. I also really wanted to try to swing at least one night in NY/Brooklyn so that I could meet, for the first time in-person, the founders of my company. The weather seemed to be lining up for a weekend run down the coast, so we headed out of Rowayton on Wednesday with plans to spend one night in Brooklyn.

I know I already wrote about the surreal and wonderful experience of driving through New York on our own boat, and this second time, now traveling south down the East River was no different. The city has such a distinctive skyline and the novelty of knowing that we are doing this literally in our own home had not yet worn off.

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We had organized to stay at a marina just south of the Brooklyn Bridge and were treated with an amazing view of the skyline visible right from the back of our boat. We hosted dinner with Nick, Steve and Lauren on the aft deck of the boat, with the windows open and had a lovely evening.

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We decided not to stay longer than one night as the marina was incredibly expensive (the most expensive marina we have stayed at to date) and most everything in the city is still closed. I hope that when we next pass through, we will be able to do more.

The weather window seemed to still be holding for the weekend, so we headed towards Sandy Hook to fill up with diesel and drop anchor for a couple of days. The wind was blowing pretty strongly, so we had a couple of extremely rocky/wavy nights, but when we woke up this morning, the sun was out and the winds had died down.

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We’re now cruising down the Joisey coast line, and unlike our trip north where we were in 6ft rollers all day, the water is smooth and it’s a beautiful day. Today’s leg will put us at over 3,000 nautical miles on our journey so far!

Weather windows are becoming few and far between at this point, so we had a windy ride to our next destination – Cuddyhunk. In hind-sight, we probably should have given this spot a miss considering it’s not that well protected. The wind prediction was moderate, but reality turned out to be far worse as we got there. The wind was blowing waves over the top of the breakwater, which required a nice sideways drift into the narrow and shallow channel entrance.

The winds were bad enough that the harbormaster was not comfortable with us docking in the marina where we had made a reservation and suggested we rope a piling in their piling mooring field. Due to my lack of coordination, and current shoulder situation, I got on the bow with the bow line and prepared to sort of bear-hug/throw the rope around the pylon as we approached. The winds were blowing so hard that it was very hard to control the boat and even with our docking radios on we had a slight miscommunication which resulted in the bow railing being pushed quite strongly into the piling (understatement….). We did eventually get the rope around, but due to a combination of extreme wind and a short line, I wasn’t pleased with the situation, and worried about damage to the anchor, or further damage to our now-bent bow railing.

There was a mooring buoy field also in the bay (not owned by the marina harbor master), and I managed to convince David that we’d be safer there. So we carefully cast off the piling and headed to the mooring field. Again, we had a bit of difficulty in the mooring field due to the wind, but were able to run a set of lines. The wind was blowing us so hard that our stern was almost touching the buoys behind us in our swing radius.

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That night, despite the winds, we were visited by the “Raw Bar” boat, so ordered some fresh oysters and clam chowder that was delivered to us a short while later – yum!

We headed out of Cuddyhunk for another rocky ride to Wickford and picked up one of their town mooring buoys just inside the breakwater (at high tide, when the break water was completely under water). This was another place we had visited on our way north, and found a winery with a wine tasting room in town. We knew we needed to stock up on wine, so we headed there as soon as we’d moored to do some more tasting! Since there was also a Walgreens in town, we also managed to get our flu shots.

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At this point, I started arranging to get an MRI in Norwalk, Connecticut, since we already had a couple of days scheduled there to see David’s family again. As it turned out, on one of my many calls to the insurance, I actually had been authorized for that same-day MRI…frustrating! I was able to get scheduled in Norwalk and after about 3 hours on the phone over 3 days, between Norwalk, Boston and Insurance, I was finally able to get a new appointment scheduled and authorized. Phew.

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After Wickford, we headed towards Mystic. This time, rather than going all the way up the river to the seaport museum, we made a reservation with Noank Boatyard near the mouth of the river. We stayed on a mooring buoy for a couple of nights here without even leaving the boat waiting for another weather window to get further west on the Long Island Sound. Both David and I have had extremely busy work weeks, with a lot of working late in the last couple of weeks, so our stay at Noank was relatively uneventful with not that much to write about!!

Another weather window presented itself for the ride to the Thimbles – another spot we’re revisiting. We dropped anchor with no problem (David doing most of the work himself while I was on a work call) and had another uneventful night, mostly filled with work.

Next we are on our way to Rowayton, back to the weird stern/bow mooring situation on Five Mile River – hopefully tying up this time will go much smoother since John is not able to help us out in his dingy this time…wish me luck!!

After leaving Handy Boat, we headed back to Isle of Shoals for a night. It was a beautiful weekend day, so we were a bit nervous that there would not be an available mooring buoy for us to pick up, since our arrival was late in the afternoon. If you recall, there are two yacht clubs with several moorings each here that are free and available to the public, with members of the yacht club taking precedence. The bay was quite full when we pulled in, but luckily we found an available buoy and set up for the evening. We were treated to a lovely sunset while we prepared dinner.

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About 3 months ago, I did something wonky to my shoulder and it had been hurting ever since. Being that we live on a boat, which means I’m always doing things with my arms, and after about 2 months of no improvement, I finally started doing some remote PT. After a couple of weeks of no further progress, it was recommended that I should try to get some imaging done. Turns out, when on the move, finding medical care is a logistical nightmare. We decided that Boston would be a good place to try, so we organized a marina in the middle of downtown and headed there on Sunday. As a side benefit, we had skipped Boston coming North, and I’d never visited before!

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We arrived in Boston on Sunday night and, following the recommendation of Anna and Aaron (David’s sister and her husband), who had lived in Boston, we headed in to town to sample Mike’s cannolis – which were apparently a local favourite. Aaron recommended that we go for the classic ricotta flavour, and specifically not to order the “weird green one”. Well, you can guess which David ordered! They turned out to be delicious, even David’s green mint one! We also booked reservations for dinner on Monday night at a michelin star restaurant that had outdoor dining, Oleana; another boon!

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On Monday morning, I woke up at the crack of dawn and enjoyed a lovely stroll trough the city to the hospital where I’d see a doctor. Boston is a very beautiful city and the architecture is very European. It was almost a surreal experience being in a big city, after being in small towns for so long. I could have spent a lot more time there, but unfortunately due to the weather turning bad pretty quickly, we could only stay for a short while…some day I hope to come back for longer!

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The doctor recommended that I get an MRI, and miraculously there was a same-day appointment available! Unfortunately, there were several snafus with insurance and communication, and it appeared that I would not be able to get the required authorization in such a short turnaround. So, we did not cancel our dinner reservations and I gave up hope on making recovery progress.

We biked to Oleana for an absolutely delicious dinner! David took all the pictures that night and unfortunately most of them drastically distort my face…thanks, love! I had to include this picture though, because I had their famed Baked Alaska for desert which was a masterpiece!

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The weather was turning pretty sharply to winter at this point, and we still had several more open water crossings before getting into more protected waters in the Long Island Sound. We tried to find new locations that we had not hit on the way North, but ultimately ended up back in Scituate for a couple of days riding out some strong winds and waiting for a clear day to get through the Cape Cod Canal. The ride to Scituate was pretty rough (and so were our next several legs of the trip), but after 2.5 months of being rocked daily by lobster boats that drive 10 feet away from our moored boat at full speed, the rough seas didn’t feel that bad to us.

It was around this time that the west coast was basically entirely on fire. The smoke even reached us all the way over here on the east coast, resulting in a few days with eerie orange sun.

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After Scituate, we had a long leg through the Cape Cod Canal (another rough day) and anchored in the bay just outside Marion, another place we had stopped on the way north. We stayed here only one night, looking to make our way to Wickford for the weekend.

We headed out from Tenants Harbor a couple of days later than we thought we would due to work schedules. Now that the Summer is nearing its end, we are starting to make our way back down south. Our next destination was Round Pond, where we struggled in the wind for some time to pick up a mooring buoy with Padebco Marine. David did some excellent maneuvering to save us from being blown into the rocks before I was finally able to grab the line from the bow. We only stayed one night here and didn’t get off the boat!

Next we headed back to Boothbay, where we anchored out – about 200 yards further out than we had previously…we were very isolated. John and Joan were also there, so we managed to grab dinner with them one night. The weather was predicted to be fairly bad (the remnants of Josephine heading north through Maine), so we decided to stay put for the weekend and have a couple of lazy days on the boat.

The winds were fairly heavy on Sunday and late morning, after we had just rolled out of bed, David heard someone yelling. He went outside and saw a trimaran heading towards us on a collision course! They had lost their center board and could not steer. Luckily we already had the dingy down and it was just tied up to the side of the boat, so we quickly threw on clothes and hopped in the dingy. We were able to hitch a line from their boat to the dingy and tow them back in to shore! Sadly we didn’t have the wherewithall to grab our cameras during this exciting rescue adventure, so we don’t have photo evidence!!

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Once the weather calmed down, we headed out towards Falmouth, just north of Portland. Our plan was to spend a couple of days on a mooring buoy at Handy Boat and then head into a slip in a marina in Portland for the long Labor Day weekend. We had also arranged for a canvas guy to sew velcro into the roof of the bimini as David had finally convinced me we needed to move the solar from the hard-top to the bimini out of the way of the shadow of our antennas and we’d be able to get more panels. The canvas guy would pick up the panels from us in Handy Boat and then drop them off to us in Portland.

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[David Edit] For the past several days, with the generator running, we could on and off smell a faint whiff of an oily/plasticy smell, so we’d known that something was up. I had ordered an infrared camera to check all electrical connections but it hadn’t arrived yet. Wednesday night, with the generator running, I noticed that the smell had suddenly gotten a lot worse, and dug into the electrical panel, where it seemed to be coming from. I found a completely melted and smoldering bus bar and spent the evening fixing it. Whatever idiot had set up the AC wiring before we owned the boat had crossed the neutral leads between bus bars, so the power draw through the charger was running through an extra ~60 feet of neutral lead, to/from the inverter, through an semi-isolation circuit, and back again — an additional 4.4 ohms of resistance. The wires had gotten hot enough to melt the plastic supporting the bus bar and it was only a matter of a couple hours before it would have melted into the wood below and probably started a fire. Lacking a spare third bus bar at the moment, I joined the neutrals of the inverter output with the input, and everything worked nicely again.

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On Friday morning, right after my first alarm went off, I felt a sudden jarring of the boat, that was not a normal boat-wake bump. I stumbled out of bed and went outside to see a sail boat perpendicular to Highwind. Turns out, he’d rammed into us. Luckily, one of the Handy Boat shuttles had been driving by and witnessed the action. He was able to point me in the direction of where contact had been made, and sure enough there was an imprint of the bow-sprit in our fiberglass. (The sailboat guy wasn’t saying a word). David had also woken up with my yelling, so he hopped in the Handy Boat shuttle and they and the sailboat headed in to the dock to exchange contact and insurance information.

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By this time, it had been 6 months since we’d both had haircuts – back in Florida at the beginning of our journey!! – so I decided to try to find a hairdresser in Portland that would come out to the boat, since we are still trying to avoid being inside places. After several emails, I was successful and arranged someone to come out on Friday afternoon. Since the damage from the sailboat impact wasn’t huge and Handy Boat was not going to be able to fix it in the afternoon, we decided to put a piece of Gorilla tape over the hole, head to Portland for the weekend and then head back north to Handy Boat on Tuesday to get it fixed.

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We had a lovely weekend bike-touring the city of Portland, which has a lot of Seattle Ballard/Freemont vibes. Saturday, we biked around town and did wine and beer tasting and visited a few distilleries, and ended the night with a great sushi dinner.

Sunday, we slept in (a little hung over), and in the afternoon dinghied across the bay over to Fort Gorges, an old harbor fort from the civil war era that is on a tiny island in the bay and now essentially abandoned. It was a neat spot and kinda spooky to walk around the decaying interior rooms in the pitch black, since the flashlights we brought turned out to not be great.

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Monday, we rode out to Portland Head lighthouse and walked around the park and grounds. The park also had another fort from the same era, on the other side of the bay from Fort Gorges. We even ran across what must be a Portland scooter collective, as they rolled out in cinematic ironic fashion, meep-meeping the whole way.

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After a great weekend, we headed back north to Handy Boat, where we learned that we’d need to be hauled out for one night for the repairs. The cleaned bimini canvas with new velcro attachments for the solar panels were delivered to Handy Boat also, so now we have a roof again, and will start assembling the new solar setup this week!

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Luckily the repairs were completed with no issues and we were dropped back into the water the next day. We’re now ready to start heading south again!

For those keeping track, Canada is still showing no signs of opening up to plague-ridden US citizens until next year sometime, so we’re going to be heading back down the coast to Florida for the winter, getting ready to head to the Bahamas to claim asylum when the civil war breaks out in November. If the country stays intact long enough, we’ll give the loop another shot in the spring, but for this year, we’re just east coast boaters.

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Our first destination after Hinkley’s was Buck’s Harbor. We had intended to anchor, but upon arriving in the small cove, we realized like most of Maine, that everything was taken up with either a mooring buoy field, or lobster pots, so we hooked onto a mooring and set up for the day. There was a small general store and restaurant within walking distance of the town, so I decided we’d do a quick provisioning and pick up some take-out, which turned out to be very delicious! Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures of this little outing, including the fact that I forgot to take off my lifejacket and was wearing it around the grocery store :).

The next morning, we decided to head toward Pulpit Harbor, but as soon as we had exited Buck’s and started to engage the throttle, something immediately went wrong. The throttle cable connector on the port engine had broken!! Unfortunately we didn’t have any spares of this part on pard, but David was able to rig up a quick fix while we slowly drifted in a large open expanse of water. We decided to change our destination to Camden and overnight order a replacement (and some spares) to Wayfarers. We headed slowly into the harbor and grabbed one of Wayfarers’ mooring buoys. As it turned out, John and Joan were also staying in Camden, so we ended up having them over to the boat for a happy hour that evening.

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The next morning, David was clicking refresh on the UPS page every 10 mins or so, tracking the delivery of our package. When we neared the delivery window time, he called in for a free lift to the dock to pick up the package. Upon arriving at the dock, nobody at Wayfarers had seen the package (nor signed for it, since it was signature required). The UPS delivery status showed as delivered. After a few calls, we heard a message from the driver – that he’d “left it on the dock”. LOL – there’s 100s of ft of dock at Wayfarer and the package was 3in square, let alone he was supposed to collect a signature. After lots of phone calls and waiting, we ultimately gave up and re-ordered the item overnight. Sadly, it was now Friday, meaning that the package would not arrive until Monday. Since we were sick of dealing with Wayfarer (remember we’d previously spent a week waiting for them to haul our boat), we decided to have the package delivered to a different marina – Tenants Harbor. One good thing to come out of our stay in Camden was that we borrowed the marina’s courtesy car to drive for a huge grocery run.

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John and Joan were heading to Dix Island for the weekend, which wasn’t too far from both Camden and Tenants, so we decided to join them. It turned out to be a beautiful anchorage. By the time we arrived there were already several other boats on anchor, and of course this being Maine, the whole space was also filled with lobster pots. We dropped anchor and set up for the weekend, though we were a little concerned about the proximity of lobster pots in our swing radius.

Dix Island has a very interesting history and is currently owned by a co-op of individuals who reside on the island with no electricity or infrastructure. The residents are nice enough to have marked a public path around the island (about a 1 mile walk). While on the walk, we ran into one of the residents, who graciously showed us her property which is one of the few remaining original structures on the island from where there used to be an active quarry. Her house used to be the maid’s quarters and the original house is now a ruin which houses her vegetable garden. She shared with us some of the history of the island and was very friendly.

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Later in the evening, we joined John and Joan on Starlight for a sunset happy hour.

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Sunday morning, we awoke to some fog and decided to hang around until later in the afternoon and hope that it would mostly burn off. Eventually it cleared enough and we headed out to Tenants Harbor. We’d been here earlier on our trip, but it had been so foggy that we hadn’t really even seen the Harbor -turns out it’s actually quite pretty!

David’s cousin, Kevin (who incidentally did the whole great loop ~6 years ago), was driving to Tenants to meet up with his parents and join them for a week of cruising. We all headed out to the Happy Clam, where it is apparently a de Regt family tradition to eat when at Tenants!

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Our package arrived on Monday morning, and was even delivered to Highwind by the harbor master via dinghy. David was able to replace the broken part and restore use to the throttle cable – yay! Now we’re just waiting for a time in our work schedules to get on the move again.

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Back once again to Hinkley’s and ready for our water maker install, we got tied up on their dock. Awaiting us was a cart load of boxes from Amazon and some items sent to us from Seattle, in addition to the water maker, since this was our first opportunity in over a month to have some items shipped to us. (I forgot to take a pic!).

David had already disconnected and moved the batteries, so when the mechanic came aboard, we were ready for him to get started on the install. Thus followed a week where the boat was a complete mess, with tools everywhere! Our bedroom was once again taken over, so we spent a few nights in the front berth.

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The install proceeded smoothly, right up until we were running the first cycle, when a bad fitting (from the factory) broke under a high pressure flow, resulting in salt water spraying all over the motherboard, completely frying it. Of course, this was on a Friday, so when David called the distributor for a replacement, we knew we were not going to be able to get it until Monday. In addition, despite this being very clearly a manufacturing issue, Spectra held firm to their position that they are not responsible for “water damage”, which meant the new motherboard would not be under warranty. (Insert angry emoji here).

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With little else to do, and the Hinkley’s dock not being suitable to stay on over the weekend (some winds were expected overnight), we decided to head to Valley Cove for the weekend, which was only 2 miles away. This was from a recommendation from some other loopers that we had met at Bar Harbor and had a socially distant conversation with on the dock.

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Valley Cove is just a little ways north into Somes Sound (where we holed up safely for Isaias) and was actually a very beautiful spot, possibly my favourite place since Roque Island. The landscape is very reminiscent of PacNW boating and there was no civilization visible from our anchorage spot. Luckily there was also several miles of Acadia National Park trails easily accessible from the beach, so on Sunday we hopped in the dingy aiming to do a short 1 mile loop. As we were dingying to the beach, we were hailed by a couple on a nearby sailboat, who turned out to be from Everett, WA! We chatted with them for a little while from the dingy and they pointed out a different hike along the shore. Once on land, we decided to check out this other hike, which actually was 5 miles, but afforded a fantastic view overlooking the mouth of Somes Sound.

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On Monday, we returned to Hinkley’s where the new motherboard was waiting for us. We tied up to a mooring and the mechanic returned for the swap. We finally got everything working and ran a successful cycle topping up our tanks. Having the water maker on board will mean that we can now go for longer on anchor without worrying about our water supplies (we hold only 70 gal), and we can take daily showers if we want!! Ahh, the life of luxury.

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As David was re-connecting the batteries, he accidentally touched the positive fuse with a negative battery cable, which blew the fuse, which we didn’t discover until the evening. Turns out, we did not have a spare on board! Luckily when we called in the morning, Hinkley’s had some spares, so we were able to get that fixed.

This morning, we finally cast away from Southwest Harbor and are now heading back south/west to explore some new areas of Maine.

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After a lovely week at Roque, we decided to start heading back west towards MDI where our appointment with Hinckley for the water maker install was coming up. We decided to stop in Jonesport on our way back, since I needed to do laundry. We reserved a mooring and upon arrival into the bay we tied up to a floating dock tied to a mooring buoy. Oddly, despite there being several available other buoys, there was a small sailboat tied up to one side of the dock. Regardless we got tied up and we immediately hopped in the dingy to take me to shore. This was important because their dingy dock dried up at low tide, so there was a small window for me to make it! I set up shop in the laundry room with my laptop for working and then proceeded to work my way through about 5 loads.

We decided to head back to Bar Harbor for the next weekend, in order to fill up with water and possibly get the bikes off the boat for another ride through a different part of Acadia National Park. This involved loading both of the bikes onto the dingy, which was no small feat!!

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We made it safely to shore and had a great ride through the park with a picnic for lunch. We even biked all the way up Cadillac Mountain for an amazing view down to Bar Harbor. As per usual, right as we were walking around the top of the mountain, a big fog bank was rolling in, obscuring 180 degrees of the view. Despite that, we still had a great view on the other side, and it was a beautiful day for a ride.

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The following Monday was our anniversary, so we decided to stay one more night in Bar Harbor so that we could go out to eat. We had a lovely lobster dinner and then wondered further into town to a cheesecake and wine tasting place for dessert.

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Tropical Storm Isaias was approaching and we knew that Bar Harbor would not be well enough protected from the winds, so we decided to head to Somes Sound, which is located in the center of Mount Desert Island and largely protected by hills all around. We tied up to a buoy, added our anchor bridle system for extra security, and prepped the boat by pulling in everything loose from the outside of the boat. We don’t have a wind meter, but we probably saw winds up to 35kts overnight. David stayed up late through most of the worst of it to ensure our survival.

Following the storm, we decided to head to Northeast Harbor to relax for a few days and possibly stay through the weekend where we might meet up with David’s aunt and uncle on their sail boat. We arrived in the Harbor and stopped at the marina for a pump out and to fill up with water. After hearing that their buoys were $40/night, we decided to check out an anchorage around the corner. That turned out to be mostly filled with lobster pots, so we called another place in the harbor. They had a buoy empty for us, but after a few minutes of driving up and down looking for an unoccupied yellow buoy, of which there were none, we radioed back for further directions – it turns out they were a little way outside of the harbor. We headed over and got tied up. Then a boat from the yacht club meets us and asks what our plans were. As it turns out, the buoys were only available for a few hours, not over night! So in the end, we headed back up into the harbor and moored with the main marina – after more confusion where they buoy number they gave to us turned out to be already occupied!

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John and Joan arrived on Saturday and we enjoyed a relatively lazy weekend hanging out, took a short hike up the nearby hill, and visited an amazing flower garden.

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We decided to stay put here until we needed to make our way the short distance back to Southwest Harbor and Hinkley’s.