The Adventures of Highwind

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

The lack of blog updates unfortunately reflects our reality — that we’ve just been in holding patterns for the last two weeks. Wayfarers kept delaying getting back to us with either a day when they could have a mechanic come on the boat or when we might schedule a haul out for a rather long shopping list of other work that needed to be done. We waited on the dock for an answer from them for two days, with them putting things off for 4 hours at a time. At least, on our last night on the dock, we walked in to town to eat at one of the lone outdoor dining restaurants and had a great meal surrounded by fog.

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We decided to spend one more day on a buoy in Camden because they were going to have time to send someone out to look at some stuff the next day, in theory. In the meantime, we had a diver come out to check out our props to see if we picked up a lobster pot line or something and that’s what was causing the vibration. No dice, so we were perplexed, but not terribly worried.

The next day, we decided to stop spending 50$ a day on a mooring buoy when we could go nearby and anchor for free, and they still hadn’t committed to a day for any work to be done. We set up on anchor in Dark Harbor across the way from another boat yard, and after one more full day of Wayfarer delaying, we got in contact with someone from this boat yard. They also said they might be able to squeeze us in before the weekend, so we prepared for that. The weather continued to be gloomy and we dealt with a moth infestation on the boat…fun times. (My nightmares continue to be haunted by the BAT-sized moth that I saw flapping around our dingy that night.)

Meanwhile, upon the advice of my dad, David decided to check the engine mounts to see if that might be causing our vibration. Lo and behold, two of the mounts were loose, so we tightened those down and hoped that would do the trick. It did end up curing much of the vibration, but we still have some smaller vibration on that side (which is probably what loosened the nuts in the first place), to be determined at a later date. We suspected that we had actually nicked the propellor on something back in the Dismal Swamp, since a really small vibration had started around that time, just not enough to worry us.

After several days of “we can fit you in tomorrow morning” and then “actually later this afternoon” from the Dark Harbor boat yard, and very few days to actually get somewhere for the holiday, on Thursday we finally gave up, pulled anchor, and headed towards Southwest Harbor on Mt Desert Island, where the internet told us there might be fireworks for the 4th.

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The route was about 30 miles, and since I had the day off from work, while David didn’t, I did most of the driving. Though the weather seemed ok when we pulled anchor, the fog quickly descended resulting in possibly the worst visibility we’ve ever had on the boat – maybe one boat-length in front of us (~50ft). Also, since we’re in Maine, lobster pots abound, so it was a pretty stressful ride, navigating around some small island clusters and a billion lobster pots. At one point in the cruise, through a narrow passage, we ended up in the middle of a mooring field, dodging moored lobster boats as well!

Luckily, there was no rain…until about 5 minutes before we had to dock, so I was getting lines and fenders ready in the pouring rain. As soon as we tied off the boat, the rain stopped though, so I guess that’s something :).

We decided to spend the night on the dock in the one marina in town in order to get some laundry done. We also treated ourselves to a full take-out lobster dinner including crab dip, plenty of sides and a mountain of steamed clams.

Since the weather actually looked like it might be nice for the holiday Friday, we decided to stay one more night on the dock so that we could get the bikes down and go for a ride. The blue skies finally came out a couple of hours after lunch and we decided to head towards Bar Harbor, the other big town on the island, riding along the outskirts of Acadia National Park.

Once we arrived in town, we realized we’d probably made a mistake, since the town was very busy with vacationers, less than half of whom were wearing masks. We decided to have a quick drink, but as it turned out, we were sitting on the patio right by the sidewalk with people walking only a few feet away from us the entire time. We decided to hightail it back to the boat, stopping for a quick detour into Acadia national park on the way home. Since it was getting dark, we didn’t go very far into the park and decided we’d return if possible on a dedicated ride.

The marina also had a courtesy car, which we used to do a grocery run and took a quick walk through the cute downtown where there was a tiny public library with a be-masked statue outside.

Meanwhile, we still needed work done on the boat, and we finally got in touch with a marine shop (Hinckley’s) that gave us some more certainty around a schedule – just across the bay from the marina. We grabbed one of their buoys for the weekend. The fog rolled in again on the actual 4th, so we had a lazy day on the boat reading/gaming. The actual city firework display turned out to be cancelled, but in the end, there were several people launching their own displays around us. Despite the fog, we could still see the colorful bursts, and sat up on the flybridge for a while curled up under a blanket enjoying the show.

On Monday, we were actually given a date for when a mechanic could come aboard to replace the raw water pump on the starboard engine – we were expected on their dock at 7am on Wednesday! The day rolled around and amazingly we had a mechanic aboard by 8am and the work was done by the early afternoon. We also discussed with them all the additional work we needed done (bottom painting, fiberglass repair on the stern, investigation of a voltage drop in our bow thruster, drilling a through-hole for later installation of a water maker) and scheduled to be hauled out on Thursday.

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We are now on the hard and have people under and inside the boat taking care of things. After 4 months on the water, it is a very strange feeling to be on the boat while it is completely stable!! One of the annoying parts of living in a boat while it’s on the hard is that you cannot use any sinks, since those go straight out the side of the boat (and in this case would go onto someone’s head!). We did look into staying in a hotel, but they are all closed due to COVID. Hinckley’s usually do not allow people to live aboard, but they made an exception for us and have given us access to their shower and laundry room. The team here is incredibly helpful, friendly, and have been doing good work. It’s pricier than other shops around, but they’re incredibly responsive, and have a good team.

The afternoon weather cleared up enough for me to pull out the pole – for the first time in about 4 weeks. We decided to bike to an outdoor dining restaurant for dinner (actually the one above the marina we stayed at earlier), but by the time we finished dinner the fog had come back!

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We’re going to be on the hard through the middle of next week, so hopefully we’ll get some more biking in after Tropical Storm Fay passes through tonight and tomorrow.

Now that we have reached Maine, we have been able to slow down our break-neck pace to rush northwards and have generally been staying in places for a couple of days at a time. It has been nice to be a bit lazy. Snow Island was a great stop – we were the only boat anchored around the island and we were only disturbed by a few lobster boats coming out to check their pots.

After Snow Island, we headed to Booth Bay and dropped anchor in the middle of the harbor. The weather was predicting to be moderate for the first night and then the wind was supposed to pick up for the next two days. We decided to stay on anchor and then see about moving to a mooring buoy for the next few days if we’d need it. The was a lobster wharf/restaurant on one side of the bay, so we headed over for dinner. We shared lobster roll and fresh haddock (which you can’t see in the picture because I devoured it before I thought to take a photo!).

The night was rocky, but it turned out that we were pretty well protected in the bay, so we ended up staying on anchor there for a few nights, rather than moving to a buoy about 200 yards to the side. The weather remained pretty nice for our stay there and we even had a good sunset one night.

The town on the other side of the bay had a free dingy dock, which we used when we did a grocery run and also on our last night for a meal at a mediterranean restaurant overlooking the bay (outdoor patio) that was absolutely delicious!

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When it came time to roll out of Booth Bay, the fog had again crept in and we spent the entire cruise to Port Clyde, our next destination, with only double digits of visibility in front of us. This makes dodging the lobster pots even harder to do!

We dropped the anchor at Port Clyde and spent one night in the fog before we decided to move on.

When we arrived into Tenants Harbor, we knew we needed a pump out and that there would be a mobile floating one somewhere in the middle of the bay. We figured we’d have to meander around through the fog until we came across it, but luckily it was right in front of us when we pulled in. This one was manually operated, and apparently I drew the short straw…

Arriving in Tenants Harbor, we needed to refill with water, but as we approached the marina we saw that the dock was full. Luckily there was a couple on a 35ft boat, so we asked if we could tie alongside them in order to fill up and they obliged. As a thank you, I cleaned off an enormous bird poop from the back of their boat. Apparently it was just my day to get poopy :).

We picked up a mooring buoy off the marina and spent 2 days in on-and-off fog. The primary attraction of this place was a restaurant called the Happy Clam, which we had been instructed we needed to visit in order to be truly part of the de Regt sailing clan. Sadly they were closed on Monday and Tuesday nights, so we weren’t able to make it out.

David tried flying the drone to see how high the fog went, but let’s just say it went higher than the FAA allows drone flights and leave it at that. On the way down, some sensors in the drone freaked out and David had to do a fast catch that cut up his finger a bit. We had to go ashore and do a full re-calibration on solid ground before it would want to fly again. I even learned how to hand-launch-and-catch the drone!

In the evening, we played a virtual escape room game with Matthew. It was pretty hard and took us an hour and a half to solve!

We pulled out of Tenants Harbor in – you guessed it – more fog. Our next destination was Camden. For this leg as it was a very high tide, and many of them were sitting slightly under the surface of the water.

Somewhere on the short trip, we picked up a vibration, so when we arrived and tied up to the dock at Wayfarer Marine (our first dock in several weeks!!!), we wanted to figure out what was wrong. For a couple of hours in the middle of the day, the fog burned off enough for me to hop in the water to see if I could see if anything was wrapped around the prop. Let me tell you – I’m already somewhat skittish about “the unknown” below me when swimming, so it was super freaky to try to dive below the boat. The water was about 60 degrees, so not terrible, and it took me a little while to get the courage to dive down and look at the props. I didn’t see anything obvious, so we’re a little concerned.

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We are waiting for the Wayfarer folks to give us an assessment on a few things we’d like to get taken care of on the boat, so we’re not sure yet how long we’ll be staying here. But so far both a diver and the main project coordinator have been delaying us for an extra day, so we’ll see how long we’re stuck here waiting…

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.

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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 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.

We headed out from Rowayton on Tuesday morning, before work, heading east. For the next month or so, every bit of travel will have to be undone to get back to the main loop, so now we’re off on a really long side trip. We’d spent a bunch of time hearing stories from John/Joan about the trip to/from Maine, and Joan wrote us up a great doc with a bunch of their favorite spots. They tend to cruise longer days at 7kts, and, on weekdays, we tend to cruise short morning trips at 14kts, so their daily “hops” tend to match ours pretty well.

Our first stop was a small archipelago ~40nm away called The Thimbles. They’re all private islands, owned by rich folks who mostly put big houses on them. So, we parked right in the center of their islands and ran our generator on and off for 2 days.

The weather was bad on Wednesday, so we just stayed in place, and in the afternoon snuck in a quick dinghy tour of the islands while it rained on us and 2-3 foot swells threw us around when we ventured out of the protected center bit. It was a cool spot, with some neat islands that reminded us of some of our more tropical trips in the past.

Thursday, we headed over to Mystic, where there’s a ship restoration company plus museum that I’d remembered from living here as a kid. The entrance to the city has a bridge that you have to wait for, which only opens at 40 minutes past the hour, but there was a protest going on even in this tiny town right next to the bridge, so at least we got to watch that and honk as we went through.

While the museum buildings are closed due to C19, the grounds are all open, and you can wander around the top deck of several ships. Staying in their marina, they let you have the run of the grounds after hours, so it’s pretty cool to wander around with no one to bug you. There’s several large period-correct old ships around, undergoing restoration (just ignore that several of them have camouflaged radar domes hiding up in the masts), and while I’m not as much of a historical navy buff as my dad, it’s still hard to not be inspired looking at what mariners used to have to work with.

Mystic also had a nice restaurant with outdoor seating that we walked over for, and managed to sneak in a great meal in between rainy periods. We could get used to this outdoor eating everywhere for restaurants thing.

The next day, in the early afternoon, we walked around the museum while it was open, to chat with some of the volunteers about the ships. Weather was predicted to be fairly bad overnight, so we were going to be cheap and head to an anchorage just outside of Mystic to ride it out. Walking back to our boat to head out, the dockmaster caught us and offered us a good enough deal to stick around for another night that we took it, and the windy night was much easier attached to a dock.

In the morning, we crossed into Rhode Island, topped off on some cheap diesel at Point Judith, and headed into Narragansett Bay. As we left CT, we were heading into somewhat unknown territory with regards to quarantine periods. Some parts of RI had just announced that quarantine requirements were rescinded, but other parts were more unclear. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine had all not said anything about rescinding their requirements yet. So, we had no idea whether we’d be able to get diesel, groceries, or even water once we started into the other states. So, we’re in a mode where we want to keep all of our supplies as topped off as possible in case we do get stuck in a partial or even full 14 day quarantine period along the way.

We stopped for the night at Wickford, another favorite of John/Joan’s, and picked up a town mooring buoy just inside the breakwater. We were going to dinghy into town and try to get some dinner and a drink, but a weather warning popped up saying that a thunderstorm had changed direction and was moving into the area at 90kts, with up to 0.75 inch hailstones possible. So, instead we hunkered down on the boat on the buoy for the night. Fortunately, while it rained and blew like crazy for a short period, the storm didn’t really turn out to be that bad, and the sun even peeked out for a nice sunset after it moved on.

Later in the evening, unfortunately I noticed that the fridge didn’t feel very cold, and some quick temperature readings with a cheapo infrared thermometer confirmed that the fridge was at nearly 50 degrees. We poked around and apparently the cooling plate at the top had made nearly a solid inch of snow, with a quarter inch sheet of ice underneath the drip tray, all of which was nicely insulating the rest of the fridge from the cold generation. Looking like the situation was a little past a normal defrost, we chipped away at the ice and snow for a while, filling our kitchen sink with the results. We’d noticed that it was starting to smell a little bit in there, and this explained why. So, we unfortunately threw away a bunch of meat and dairy before it killed us, and went to bed.

After a lazy morning, the weather was looking good, and so I called around and found a hardware store with a fridge thermometer, so we dinghied into town and made a day of it. We ate lobster sandwiches at a restaurant on the water, walked out to the hardware store and picked up some stuff, and even stopped at a wine tasting room doing outdoor tastings, where we ended up restocking our wine supply a bit.

In fact, we lost track of time doing the wine tasting, and had to scurry back to the boat to head out. We were planning on taking advantage of an evening weather window to make it most of the way up Buzzard Bay to the town of Marion, but we definitely cut it a bit close, with the sun dropping below the horizon with us still 10 minutes out from the anchorage. We pulled into a wide open anchorage to the south of the town with some lingering light reflecting from the clouds, dropped a pile of chain, and called it a day.

In the morning, when we can see something, we’ll pull further into the town’s proper anchorage, behind an island, as the weather is supposed to get nastier in the afternoon/evening, so we’ll want to be protected. From there, we wait for another weather window to finish out Buzzard Bay and head through the Cape Cod Canal into, well, Cape Cod.

John and Joan offered us amazing hospitality over the last week and we have really enjoyed spending the week in Rowayton. We borrowed Joan’s car to do a couple of provisioning runs including topping off our propane tanks for the stove and BBQ. Driving a car after 3 months was weird! Since we were moored on the bow and stern buoys, we had a short dingy ride every day to get into town up the Five Mile River past quintessential east coast architecture houses. The weather this week was fabulous (finally!!) and I even spent the better part of Friday afternoon working from the back deck and waving at the boaters passing by.

Open-air outdoor dining had just been allowed in Connecticut, so we took the opportunity to eat at a restaurant just down the street from John and Joan – our first dining out experience in several months! This restaurant had a cute patio where half the tables had been roped off to account for social distancing, and we wore masks whenever the servers came to our table and removed them only for eating.

Since some packages that we were expecting were delayed and we knew we would be extending our stay into the following week, we decided to go for a weekend overnight to Oyster Bay, just across the Long Island Sound and invited John aboard to see if we could convince him to come to the dark side (power boating) :). We had a fantastic short trip and the weather continued to hold, so David even brought out the inflatable toys and drank a margarita off the back of the boat.

Our final package arrived and we determined that Monday would be our last night in Rowayton. We have spent the last two nights with David’s family watching the developing news of the protests sweeping across the country. David and I are very aware of the privileges of our lives, and not just that we are in a position to be on this adventure this year (regardless of how it has been affected by the global pandemic). We are horrified by what has happened and is happening in our country and we stand in solidarity with those who believe in equal rights and justice for all.

Our 5 day stay in Delaware City waiting out tropical storm Arthur was uneventful, which is all one can hope of a week with a predicted storm. We pulled out Gloomhaven (board game) again, and otherwise spent the time working, relaxing and doing laundry. David also decided to install the fixed monitor stand on the desk so that in rough water we would not need to stow his monitor as we had been doing. This was the longest time we had stayed in one place since arriving on the boat back in February.

We also needed to do a lot of planning as our next legs of the trip would take us into our first open water on the east coast, and our first passage on the ocean in Highwind. The ideal plan for us would be to head from Delaware City down the Delaware River and around to Cape May for the night. This trip needed to be timed with the tides to ride favorable currents. Ideally the next leg of the trip would be 120 nautical miles from Cape May all the way up to Sandy Hook. This would have us ‘skip’ the entire New Jersey shore and avoid any passage up the New Jersey Intercoastal Waterway, which is controlled only to 4ft from Cape May to Atlantic City and then only 6ft to Sandy Hook. Even though this is protected water, we draw 4ft, so that first stint is a non-starter for us, and after our trip up the Dismal Swamp, we aren’t eager to spend much time in 6ft either. Since both of these legs were going to be over 4 hour cruises we knew that we needed to wait for a weekend. Since they are both in open water, we knew we did not want to be doing them in any kind of appreciable wind.

While Arthur was drawing to a close, we were keeping a close eye on the weather reports from Delaware City, looking for our chance. We started noticing a bit of a gap in the weather up the southern NJ coast centered around early Saturday, but then increasing winds for the rest of the 10 day forecast making the coast trip a nonstarter. As it got closer, the weather forecast firmed up with Saturday morning having nearly zero wind, not awful ocean swells from the SE, and Friday was at least passable to get down to Cape May. David had Friday off work, which helped, so we locked in the tentative plan, with lots of escape hatches if we ran into surprising conditions. Whatever ended up happening, if we didn’t make it all the way to Sandy Hook by Saturday afternoon, we’d be stuck in place for another 7+ days.

Friday morning, we cast off from Delaware City near the middle of the day (timed according to the tides) and began the journey to Cape May. The weather wasn’t great (with some intermittent rain), but the good news was that the wind was minimal. However, we spent pretty much the entire trip (5ish hours) going into head-on rapid chop, some of the worst waters we’ve been on to-date, the waves regularly splashing all the way up to our flybridge windows. At one point the nose dipped so violently that our anchor chain break popped free, so I had to don a lifejacket and head out onto the bow to fix it, while being sprayed in the face with salt water repeatedly. Once we got into the Cape May canal, the water was calm and we pulled in to our marina with no problems.

That evening we checked the weather reports again, and everything was still pointing to the next day being our only viable option for the journey north, with winds predicted 0-5kts and predicted 1-1.3m waves from the SE for most of the day. We planned to wake up at dawn, 5:30 in the morning (oh-dark-thirty, as my parents say), and immediately head out into the Atlantic Ocean for the first time since we started on this trip.

At 5:30, it was pouring with rain, but there was little wind, so we cast off and headed out of Cape May. The water was as predicted – large rollers evenly spaced coming at us from the beam. So while the day before had been a lot of up and down from the head-on waves, this trip was a lot of side-to-side rolling. For the first couple of hours of the day, it absolutely poured with rain and there was thunder and lightening in the distance. We were nervous enough about things that we grabbed the dingy key, portable radio, and the flares to keep nearby in case we got rolled over and somehow got the dinghy loose!

In order to make it all the way in one trip, we knew that we would need to plane for some of the trip, but for the morning, we needed to stay at displacement speeds, as planing with the beam waves was dangerously rocky. Our bug-out plan in case we did not feel we should go further was to duck in at Atlantic City. We could then take the rest of the trip up the NJICW (going on a rising tide for the deepest possible water) up to Manasquan, and then figure out a time to do the last 25 miles in open water later in the week (hopefully). However, eventually the rain stopped, and the conditions, while real crappy, were not dangerously bad. After 5 hours of that, we passed by Atlantic City and turned to port by about 10 degrees, so the seas were not straight on the beam, and the conditions greatly improved. We shortly thereafter were able to keep the boat safely up on plane without having to manually steer, and our ETA dramatically dropped.

After a couple hours of planing, we knew that, even if the waves turned worse and we had to stop planing, we would be able to make it to Sandy Hook with an hour or two of sunlight to spare. We actually ended up managed to stay planing all the way up. As we got further north and slowly turned further and further to port, the waves kept going more and more aft, making it safer and comfier as the day went on. We ended up getting into Sandy Hook early enough in the evening to fill up on diesel before settling in for the night on anchor.

The next morning, we would be heading north from Sandy Hook, up the East River past Manhatten and into the Long Island Sound where we would tie up in Rowayton, Connecticut to spend some time with David’s aunt and uncle. Our original Loop plan had us spending several days in New York City, but obviously now is not the time to be a tourist in NYC, so we are cruising on by and hoping that on the way south things might be open enough that it makes sense to stop.

It was a surreal and amazing experience to be driving our boat past such a recognizable skyline. We had no trouble navigating the New York City harbour, which in more normal times must have 5x the number of boats that we saw. We pulled in close to the Statue of Liberty and took a couple of selfies from the bow. Since the skies were pretty grey and it was quite windy, we decided not to drop the dingy to get the “money shot” of Highwind with the Statue in the background (we’ll give it another shot on the way south). We then headed under the Brooklyn Bridge and through Hell’s Gate (a section of water near the entrance to Long Island Sound that is best navigated at slack tide).

About half way up our passage on the Long Island Sound, the clouds finally burned off and we were greeted in Connecticut by amazing blue skies and a warm welcome from John, Joan and Brian (David’s cousin). John had secured a mooring spot for us at the mouth of the river where they live and luckily John and Brian had come out in their dingy to help us get moored since this was a “bow and stern buoy” type mooring. This is where you have to hook up both your bow and stern to two mooring buoys that are connected by a line. What I didn’t realize is that you do not use your own lines (like we do for traditional mooring buoys), but instead there is a “pennant” line that is already connected to the buoy that you are supposed to pick up and tie to your boat; all while making sure that you do not drive over the line connecting the buoys, so that it doesn’t get caught in your propellers. Unfortunately, there was a decently strong current pushing us right into/over the line! After a bit of a struggle, we finally got tied up and were able to drop the dingy and head further up the river where John had secured us a spot to tie our dingy for the night, just across the street from their house.

We had socially distant “streettails” with some of their neighbors and a delicious home cooked (that I didn’t have to cook!!) meal. Also, I didn’t have to do the dishes!! For Memorial Day, we had streettails again, this time with David’s other uncle and aunt and cousin – Paul, Nancy and Mike, plus a phone cameo with David’s cousin Jen.

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We are planning to stay here probably for the next week and properly re-provision the boat for heading north up to Maine. Also to come up with a plan, since John and Joan are coastal experts up here, and we know essentially nothing about these waters, since they’re not part of the Great Loop.

Late last week, my laptop had broken and decided to stop charging, so I’d been stuck using my desktop (a bit power-hungry when on anchor…)  Being on a moving boat, with repair shops all closed due to Coronavirus, there’s essentially no way to get a laptop repaired and back in my hands in a reasonable amount of time. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to just pick up a new Macbook, and whenever I can manage to finish a swap with Apple to get the old one repaired, we can sell it.  This forced us to make some awkward timing decisions, which were already awkward due to the upcoming tropical storm Arthur.

The next major segment of our journey involves two big hops: from the C+D Canal, you get dumped out onto the Delaware River/Bay, which is a pretty big “river” with a large tidal swing. From the exit to the canal, it’s about 65 miles out to Cape May, which is the southern tip of New Jersey, where the river meets the Atlantic Ocean. So, you have to time that to go with the tide or you have a long day ahead of you.

Once you get to Cape May, you have two choices to get north: the New Jersey ICW, or going up the “outside” and running the open Ocean the whole way up. The ICW has been incredibly poorly-maintained, so even with a 4 foot draft like we have, it sounds like a questionable journey at this point, worse so than the Dismal Swamp. However, the outside run is a solid 125 miles up to Sandy Hook. So, that’s a long day. You can theoretically break it up by stopping in Atlantic City, but even that involves a bit of ICW.

So, having day jobs, you can imagine that we’re trying to plan these two hops for a weekend — one day to get out to Cape May, and then a day (or two) to bomb all the way up NJ to Sandy Hook, and then it’s smooth short-hop sailing through NYC to CT. We knew were going to miss the window of the 16-17th weekend for this, since we didn’t want to hurry our way through the Chesapeake. However, tropical storm Arthur is spinning up and is planning to make the middle of this week rather lively, which isn’t leaving us with a lot of options.

When push came to shove, we decided to receive the new laptop in Delaware City, which is just north of the east end of the C+D canal, on the Delaware River, on Monday morning (the soonest it could get shipped). So, after a nice day and night hanging out in the Chesapeake City anchorage, we headed the rest of the way through the canal (which was very boring), and put in at the Delaware City Marina, where we filled up with diesel for the upcoming big legs, emptied the holding tank, and had a lovely 6-foot-away brunch with some friends of ours who live in Philly and drove down to see us.

This morning, when the laptop arrived, we had to make a call on a plan, and the weather forecast had taken a bit of a turn for the worse. Tuesday through Saturday was now forecast to be windy and/or rainy, solid. We asked nicely and the marina owner gave us a discounted weekly rate to spend the week here, so we’re going to just wait out the storm. If all goes well, over the Memorial Day weekend, we’ll hopefully jump down to Cape May on either Saturday or Sunday (depending on weather), and then bomb all the way up New Jersey on Sunday and/or Monday. So, our next update will hopefully be an all clear report from the anchorage inside the nook at Sandy Hook next week. Or some adventure stories about why we’re not there. One way or the other…

The next day, our friend Peter joined us for the week. He had been out east on a work trip when everything locked down, and he ended up just staying with his mom outside of DC while things blew over. Two months later, he was still there, and desired rescue. They’d been really good about quarantining, and essentially hadn’t left the house the whole time, so we felt safe having him aboard. Ask us in a few days if that was a good decision or if we’re struggling to breathe. His mom dropped him off at the boat in the afternoon, bid him a sad goodbye, and he moved into the front bedroom (or, as we had been treating it, the quarantine-changing-room and pantry.)

The restaurant right at the marina was actually quite excellent, and it was raining on and off, so we were feeling pretty lazy. So, we had a great takeout meal, followed by a nice evening playing games and planning out a rough sketch of the week.

We’d planned out spending a couple nights on the Miles River, on the east side of the Chesapeake. There’s a bunch of various little rivers/inlets feeding it, all with various anchorages. As will be the theme of the week, though, we had some pretty stiff winds expected for the next couple nights, so we found a nice east-facing anchorage (we were expecting a westerly wind) at Long Haul Creek, and set up shop for the night.

It was a pretty little spot that we’d found on Navionics. The anchorage we were aiming at, however, was super shallow (it’s further up the inlet straight into the above picture), so we backed out to the center of the bay there and set up shop for the night. The wind turned out to not be so bad, and we had a pretty calm evening and overnight here. I set the anchor alarm up on a super tight circle (since we didn’t have much drifting room until hitting docks and shallows), so some overnight current changes made for some quick wake-up-and-assess moments, but they all turned out to be okay.

The next day, we went a little bit north into a more open bay by Drum Point, expecting to spend the night there. It turned out to not be that pretty, but the anchor set up well and we had tons of wide open room to circle around and/or drag in the expected wind that night, so we were excited about an uninterrupted evening of sleep. Unfortunately, after setting up anchor and getting to work, we quickly discovered that the cell reception there was useless. Phones had zero reception, and the giant antenna was able to get just enough to hold audio calls, but really not enough to do much else. We struggled for a couple hours until we had a break in meetings in the afternoon to head to another spot.

That turned out to be a giant mistake. The wind was expected to pick up overnight, but it came a little early. Re-entering the main channel, we immediately were in the worst seas of our boating lives. 4+ foot irregular waves with 6 foot randoms, directly from the beam (right into the side of the boat — the worst angle for a boat to take waves from), forcing us to go back and forth at alternating 45/135 degree angles to the waves (causes much less rocking and instability than taking them directly from the side). Waves were regularly bouncing off the hull and splashing over the roof of the bimini (~15 feet off the ground). Hannah and Peter tied down everything they could, but one big rogue wave swept us badly and tossed pretty much everything from the kitchen shelving onto the floor. Amazingly, nothing broke, and the wood floor just has a few battle dings. We had to eat that pineapple pretty soon after that, though…

We were originally headed for an anchorage just southwest of the Kent Narrows bridge, to avoid the wind, but after a couple hours of battling the terrible seas, we were pretty drained and didn’t want a crappy anchoring session followed by a long stressful night of shallow windy madness in the anchorage (there’s a pattern of everything being shallow and narrow on the Chesapeake). We decided to call a couple marinas right at the narrows, and one had an opening, Harris Point Marina, so we took them up on it.

The narrows township area blocked a bunch of the wind, and we got a lucky gap just as we went to anchor, but the marina was the tightest/shallowest/scariest we’ve ever entered as well. The depth alarm was constantly tagging less than 3 feet under the middle of the boat the whole way to our slip, and we had to back into the slip because it was less than one boat length between the slip entrance and a muddy shore, so you couldn’t turn around, and if you had the props facing the shore you’d run aground (since boats are deepest at the back side). The slip was only about one foot wider than the boat, so I basically backed the boat kinda into the slip and then Hannah and Peter helped bounce us the rest of the way back to the dock. We quickly got lines on everything, and then cheered and broke into the liquor. That was a hell of a day.

Peter actually grew up in the area, so he had bits of local knowledge. When he realized where we were going to spend the night, he got super excited, because there was a restaurant that he and his mom used to love going to once in a while, the Harris Crab House. So, of course, we got takeout, and Peter, with a bottomless stomach, decided to get pretty much everything on the menu, so we ate like kings for the evening.

The next day, the winds had died down and we were expecting a few days of calm weather to enjoy. After sleeping in, we headed not too far north to a nice-looking spot at Hart’s Point. It’s a little inlet with a marina inside, and a shallow spot with several anchorages marked on Navionics with good reviews. We set up at one of the anchorages with a bunch of reviews, and didn’t really think too hard about it, but as the sun went down realized that, on the north end of our anchor swing, we were pretty near the middle of the channel. Fortunately, only two boats came by all evening, but we felt a little bad about it. Lesson learned.

We’d found a nice looking spot on the Sassafras River for the next day, so we wandered up there in the morning. We had another fun incident of checking internet like a half mile from our anchorage spot, it looking good, setting up anchor, and realizing the internet is unworkably bad. We then moved north 3/4 of a mile and had great internet. At least that anchorage was also solid, with plenty of swing room, and still quite a pretty spot, so it worked out.

We ended up spending two nights here, because it was way better than our original plan’s next spot looked like it would be. We had a great sunset dinghy ride way up the river to Fredericktown together, saw lots of wildlife, and by and large had a lovely couple of days there with mild weather.

All good things come to an end, and we headed up to Chesapeake City for our last night as a group. There’s a man-made canal that connects the Chesapeake Bay with the Delaware River, the C+D Canal. About 1/3 of the way down the canal is this little “city”, which is one of those moment-in-time places. Cute little 2 by 2 block “downtown” area, big grassy park with open mic gazebo by the water, ice cream shop, the works. There’s a free first-come-first-serve dock for a few boats, with a 24-hour limit, so we spent one night there, and got a delicious take-out meal at the Inn on the water, which was definitely the happening place to be on a Friday night. Boats coming in and out all night, chock full of people partying. It was a bit different from the people working the Inn, who all had masks, and had the most pristine organization we’d yet seen for distancing, one way people-movement, and order pickup.

In the evening, after dinner, I did my usual engine checks, and noticed some coolant leaking under the starboard motor. Some quick checks later, and I found that it was actually the exact same failure as we’d had on the port motor several weeks prior, a leaking coolant water pump. Fortunately, I’d gotten two new ones when the last one failed (since things tend to fail in pairs), so I had one ready to go. Peter was a champ and helped me out with the change for several hours. It all went fairly uneventfully.

In the morning, Peter took an Uber to the airport and headed home, and we moved to the center of the inlet to the anchorage to spend one more night there.