Portland ME USA

Our ‘hire car’ for the afternoon

So, having got a marina berth (eye-wateringly expensive) in South Portland, we decided that we needed to make best use of it by getting over to and exploring Portland as soon as possible. Whilst Nicky put together some lunch, I started to unroll the dinghy so that we could pop over to the public dinghy dock on the other side of the harbour.  I hadn’t got too far into the job when Wendy and Ken on MY Serenity, moored on the hammerhead of our pontoon, came over and said that my job looked far too much like hard work, would we like to borrow their dinghy?  Let me think about that for a nanosecond…..oh, yes please!

We left the dinghy at the public dinghy dock and immediately stepped into a world of quayside apartments, ferries and tripper boats.  The quays, reaching out into the river, are quite close together, dark, built on pilings and with surprisingly tall buildings on top of them.  Even with today’s clean water and clean air, it’s easy to imagine the industrial city of yesteryear as you look out across the narrow waterways between the quays.

Further inshore, the previous industrial heritage is clear to see.  Brick, warehouse style buildings line narrow alleys and on the larger streets there are statement buildings made of stone, with elaborate facades and copper roofs; business utility and monied wealth all on show.  And despite it being a late Sunday afternoon, Portland was busy. There were lots of people about enjoying themselves and there were bands playing (good) live music in the streets. And we saw the standard souvenir shops that line the streets of a holiday destination but we saw plenty of good-looking bars and restaurants too.

The piers are all built on wooden pilings – would you buy and apartment in the brick building supported
just on wooden pilings? Oh, and by the way, whilst the dock you can see is a yacht broker’s dock,
the dock on the other side of that building is where a large number of the lobster boats moor and there
 are lobster pots piled up on the dockside underneath the apartment balconies.  Would you still buy an apartment here?  Seemed to us to be a brave move for a bricks and mortar investment

Local fresh oysters and steamed clams

We looked at the wooden-piled docks and thought about the weight of buildings, cars, people and tarmac on the piers on them and decided that eating oysters and steamed clams at J’s seafood restaurant (recommended to us by Wendy) was the best way to not think about the structural engineering masterpieces on display.  It was a good move because the oysters and steamed clams were very good – far, far better than the fried ones we had tried at Eastport and Cape Charle Harbour.  So good, in fact, that we are now ‘steamed clams converts’ and want to try to do them ourselves…

Watching the sunset from Sunset Marina

But we needed to get the dinghy back to Wendy and Ken and Portland has a 2-hour limit on mooring at the dinghy dock [Ed: which we bust slightly but it was out of season!].  So we returned to Sunset Marina in time to invite Wendy and Ken on board to say thank you for the loan of their ‘car’, whilst we all enjoyed the reason the marina has its name.  And having swapped future plans with them, and shown them the inside of a sailing yacht, we enjoyed drinks with them and our other neighbours on the pontoon.  It was a very convivial evening shared with likeminded nautical folk - great fun shared with lovely people.

Monday 24 September was all about getting our EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating RadioBeacon) serviced. This is an emergency beacon that, when activated, transmits its position via satellites to land-based listening stations and which also, on a separate frequency, can be homed in on by rescue aircraft.  GME (the Australian manufacturers of our beacon) have only 3 ‘North American’    service centres: one in Panama, one in California and one just outside Portland, ME.  The battery last 6 years and ours needed to be changed in April 2019, at which point we planned to be in the Caribbean, heading north.  Whilst we were losing 6 months of battery life, it seemed sensible to get the battery change done whilst we passed a service agent rather than wait until the following year and then have the difficulty of sending the item off by post, and (somehow) having it returned to us.

Having arranged to hire a car from Portland Airport, we needed to make a prompt start on the Monday morning to catch a bus from close to the marina to Portland city centre and, from there, to the airport.  Maybe we could have done it by Uber, but signing up for that got rather difficult and, besides, we quite like using buses.  From the airport we had an hour’s drive through lovely scenery to the service centre, an office in the basement of a house a long way up a gravel drive somewhere off a small road.  Though the surroundings weren’t what we had initially expected, the service we received was entirely professional and, within an hour, Clara had tested our EPIRB to check the circuitry and transmission capability, changed the battery and the case, pressure tested everything and then confirmed it to be waterproof.  It passed all OK and she printed the test sheets and certification to prove it. All good for another 6 years.

Aside: we eventually found out about the ‘incident’ at DiMillo’s Marina.  M5 had been berthed alongside the fuel dock when the wind had blown strongly from the north.  The stresses on the dock had been such that several of the pilings had broken and M5 had ended up with her bow pointing almost directly across the river rather than being nicely moored up parallel to the flow of the river.  Subsequently, at some stage, she had been moved to the berth on which we had seen her and the yachts moored on the inshore side of DiMillo’s fuel dock moved to onto other berths so that the fuel dock could be re-piled and rebuilt. Hence, after all that overnight drama, there was no space when we called up in the morning asking for a berth.

Portland, Maine, USA