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

Sailing to Portland ME USA

After a peaceful night anchored off Coleman Cove we woke to a still but sunny morning.  We had planned to anchor off Portland for a couple of nights whilst we took our EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating RadioBeacon) to a servicing agent to have the battery changed but the forecast for the next night and day was for strong northeasterly winds and there are no anchorages off Portland that offer protection from strong winds, let along strong northeasterlies.  Given that we had already made arrangements with the service agent to do the work, we decided that the best thing would be to take BV into a marina for a couple of nights.

So, having done a bit of research (and gulped at the cost of marina berths in the area!) we motored the 7½nm through the islands towards Portland. [Ed: So not really a ‘Sailing to Portland’ Blog entry at all!]

It’s a beautiful area and it was a lovely day.  In fact it was hard to believe that the wind would actually blow as forecast that night.

Northwestern end of Peaks Island

We spent the hour or so of the transit delighting in the scenery, enjoying the attractive houses (and turning our noses up at some of the less attractive ones) and keeping a sharp look-out for the speedy ferries plying their route between the islands.  It was great fun.

Portland ahead

Fort Gorges at the entrance to Portland Harbour

We wanted to get fuel and had decided that if we needed to take out a small mortgage for a couple of nights in a marina we wanted to be in the centre of town for getting ashore and seeing the sights.  We also needed to be able to get to the airport easily so that we could pick up the hire car that we had booked.  Nicky had called DiMillo’s Marina to try to make arrangements for a berth but our mobile phone signal was poor and we said that we would call on the radio when we were closer.

Portland waterfront with DiMillo’s Marina in the centre and M5 moored to the left

As we entered Portland Harbour we spotted M5 (formerly Mirabella V), the largest single-masted sailing yacht in the world.  Close to her mooring was DiMillo’s Marina so we called them up on the radio.  Things did not go as planned.  Their fuel berth was closed due to an ‘incident’ and, as a follow-on to the ‘incident’, they had no marina berths available.

Moored up in Sunset Marina, South Portland

We asked if they could recommend another fuel dock and we ended up taking on fuel and water at Sunset Marina on the South Portland (opposite) side of the harbour.  Sunset Marina was also able to let us have a berth for 2 nights, so we took them up on that (amazingly, even more expensive than DiMillo’s Marina on the Portland side of the harbour!) and started to work out the logistics of how we would get to the airport to pick up our hire car from somewhere that felt rather in the middle of nowhere.

Portland, Maine, USA

Coleman Cove Great Chebeague Island ME USA

Passing Franklin Island at the outer end of St George River

We left the delightfully named Maple Juice Cove today, Saturday 22 September at 0935hrs.  The plan was to break the passage to Portland over 2 days, but we were making such good progress that we just kept on sailing.

That seemed to be a particularly good idea because the forecast for Sunday had little wind so it was a case of sail the route today or motor it tomorrow.

Coleman Cove

We didn’t want to go straight into the main harbour at Portland because it is supposed to be quite a rolly anchorage due to the amount of boat traffic, so instead we scouted around in the islands to the north and found a suitable spot to anchor in Coleman Cove beside Chebeague Island (great name!).

 Coleman Cove, Chebeague Island

We dropped anchor at 1730hrs for what is just an overnight stop. Tomorrow we will move into Portland Harbour run some errands whilst on Monday we have a hire car booked to take our EPIRB (emergency beacon) to a service centre for its 5-yearly routine test and to have a new battery fitted.

Coleman Cove, Great Chebeague Island, ME, USA

Maple Juice Cove ME USA

We are whizzing along so fast that we haven’t had time to have fun and write up all of the blog entries.  We’ll get there, but it will be using the system of working on one new (so you know roughly where we are) and one from a few days [weeks?!!] ago.  Keep looking back over the September list on the right and you’ll see the new ones appearing.

We had planned to depart Duck Harbour at about 0930 so that we reached a tidal gate at the bottom of the St George River, 30nm down the coast, no earlier than slack water as the tide began to flood into the river.  Delaying our departure to pull SY Stella Marisoff the rocks was no great worry as far as the tidal gate was concerned – arriving later we would just have more tide to assist us up river. But there was always the question of sunset, should our passage be a particularly slow one.  However, we had calculated the timings based on a speed of 6 knots. The wind turned out to be much more helpful and with full sails set we bowled along at over 7 knots.

 

The extra speed meant that we made up the lost time and had a fabulous sail.  As always in Maine, there were a lot of lobster pot markers to dodge (hence the desire to safely tucked up at anchor before nightfall) but even with the resulting erratic course, we made excellent progress.  There were a few other yachts also enjoying the conditions which prompted lots of friendly waving as they went past us.

Maple Juice Cove

And then we arrived at the entrance to the St George River exactly on time which meant that we had the first of the flood tide to help us on our way up for the last 6 or so miles to our overnight anchorage, Maple Juice Cove.  We had picked this location partly because of the unusual name but, more importantly, because it looked to offer excellent shelter from the southwest through to the northwest.  Almost as soon as we had anchored the wind started to rise.  The forecast had predicted 35-40 knot winds offshore overnight, hence our decision to find a good sheltered anchorage (staying in Duck Harbour for the night was definitely out of the question!).  With lots of anchor chain laid out and the anchor firmly embedded in mud, Maple Juice Cove worked out brilliantly as a strong wind bolt hole.

Maple Juice Cove, ME, USA

Duck Harbour ME USA

Dawn in Somes Harbour

It felt like a very early start on Thursday 20 September, but it was actually quite a reasonable 0705, when we started the engine and noted, with considerable pleasure, that the alternator was charging the domestic batteries at 30A.  A far more satisfactory state of affairs than after the previous couple of starts when, if we were lucky, the batteries were getting just 3A.  Clearly the previous day’s alternator change had been the right thing to do.  The early start was to allow us to carry the tide west for the maximum possible time for our 30-odd mile journey to Isle au Haut, the tide having started going westwards at about dawn.

Departing Somes Harbour

But by the time we got the anchor up we were feeling positively tardy as 2 of the other 3 transient yachts in the anchorage had raised anchor and got away ahead of us.  Still, we weren’t the last to leave and it wasn’t a race……., really?

Valley Peak, one of the hills we had climbed the previous day

It was a somewhat overcast morning but much brighter than the previous day when we had been out walking.  As we left Somes Sound we admired the scenery from sea-level and enjoyed trying to identify the hills we had climbed the day before.

SY Rebecca on a mooring close to Southwest Harbour

Having motored out of Somes Sound and past the beautiful SY Rebecca, we set full sail somewhere off Southwest Harbour and sailed gently through the shallow passage between Mount Desert Island and Great Cranberry Island, enjoying views of places we had seen from the bus the day before.  From time to time the wind failed and so, to keep up speed we ran the engine but once we were clear of the islands we were able to run downwind to Isle au Haut with the genoa poled out.  We didn’t make blistering speeds but, with the tide under us, we made a good enough pace and arrived off Duck Harbour, towards the southwest tip of Isle au Haut at around 1300.

Duck Harbour

Duck Harbour is a small inlet and the pilot book warns that in high summer it is very busy with yachts, so much so that you may need to anchor fore and aft or risk colliding with other yachts as your boat swings.  In late September, however, we found it to be empty……………except for the infernal lobster pot bobbers.  We arrived at low water, convenient for gauging swinging room towards the rocks, and immediately discounted going any further into the inlet than the ferry dock. Outside the jetty we found a gap in the pot bobbers in around 8m of water, which would become about 10.5m by high tide.  Happily, the bobbers were sufficiently well spaced to permit us to lay out 40m of chain and the gap we had found was also sufficiently well displaced from the shore to allow us to swing on that 40m of chain without colliding with the rocky shore. The planets had aligned.

Isle au Haut (pronounced like Idaho but with an ‘L’ rather than a ‘D’) is part of Acadia National Park, so after a swift lunch we inflated the dinghy and went ashore to make best use of our National Park permit (and to try to get a picture of BV in the inlet).  We left the dinghy on the inside of the ferry dock, as instructed by the signs, and walked up to the National Park welcome sign where we found sketch maps of the island and its footpaths and an information board warning us about ticks and Lyme’s Disease.

Duck Harbour Mountain with views down on Duck Harbour and BV

We followed the sketch map up the inlet and then found the marked trail to the top of Duck Harbour Mountain [Ed: Mountain?  It’s only a couple of hundred feet high!].  From here we had a lovely view down on BV at the edge of the inlet and views along the coast towards the north.

Woodland paths and fun scrambles – a great walk

We could have gone straight back down from there but we were enjoying the walk so much that we thought we should carry on to Squeaker Cove on the eastern side of the southwest tip of the island, which then led into our walking around that headland and back to Duck Harbour via the bottom end of the island’s west coast.  It was great walking; a trail across a mixture of woodland tracks and bedrock with some fun scrambles thrown in for good measure.  And we saw another woodpecker busy tracking down bugs and saw a couple of surprisingly unafraid rabbits too.

Route across the bedrock

In all, the route took us a little over two hours and in that time we met just 10 people in 3 groups.   In comparison to the number of people we saw on Mount Desert Island on either of the 2 days we walked there the place was empty.

The final part of the route brought us back to Duck Harbour via the coastline, where we met a group of 6 people, based, we think, from the campsite close to where we had gone ashore, going the opposite way.  Given the light levels at the time that we saw them we didn’t think that we would have cared to have been going away from ‘civilisation’ but maybe they turned back again soon after we saw them.  We had a quick look at the lean-to huts with sleeping platforms in the campsite before we returned to the jetty and BV.  It all looked rather attractive but there was nowhere to hide from the mosquitoes and the shelters all had one side fully open, so you had to hope that the one you had been allocated was not open to the day’s prevailing wind (and rain).

Sunset from the Duck Harbour jetty

We admired the sunset from the jetty and then retired back aboard BV and hid from both the mosquitoes and the chilly air, a luxury not afforded the campers ashore.  We were in the middle of preparing dinner when we heard a voice outside. Nicky assumed that it was someone in the campsite, perhaps singing too loudly, but I thought that it was closer than that, and so it was.  Much closer. Several hundred metres closer.  In fact, about half a metre off out port side! It turned out that Stella Maris, a ~30ft sailing yacht, had had engine failure and had sailed into Duck Harbour just after sunset, ghosting alongside us with the very last puffs of the dying evening breeze.  Could they come alongside us whilst they sorted out the problem?  Well, of course.  We put out fenders (lots as they appeared to have none), helped them with their line (yes, line, not lines) and left them to it.  Half an hour or so later they said that they had sorted out the problem sufficiently to move in further under their own steam and anchor.  As an aside they said that they were planning an 8 hour walk the next day.

SY Stella Maris drifted from the middle of the harbour off the jetty onto the area close to the rocks shown by the pink arrow (top).  The underwater rocks she lodged on were like the boulders on the shore (bottom L).  Having moved her off the rocks, we leftStella Maris secured to the ferry/dinghy pontoon (bottom R)

At 0930 the following morning we had just got the engine going prior to raising the anchor when I realised that Stella Maris was no longer at anchor where she had been, a little further up the inlet from the jetty, but was drifting inexorably towards the shore.  We sounded the foghorn, hailed them using the radio’s loudhailer function and called them on the VHF radio, but to no avail.  So we switched off the engine and got the dinghy ready to launch (not a fast procedure).  Part way through this evolution the US Coastguard piped up on the radio wanting to know what was going on.  Nicky explained the situation as quickly as she reasonably could and then, as the questions continued, told them that we were really rather busy and that we would get back to them in about half an hour with an update once we had got the boat off the rocks.  They took the hint.

By the time we got to Stella Maris she was pretty firmly lodged on the rocks but, happily, the tide was rising [Ed: which is the most likely reason that she had dragged her anchor, particularly as the anchor cable was virtually vertical, even in the relatively shallow water close to the shore].  I secured our dinghy alongside Stella Maris’ starboard quarter with the aim of using our dinghy as a tug to move the yacht away from the shore.  Nicky jumped on board and rolled away all of the half-furled genoa to reduce windage.  With the dinghy on the starboard quarter I could make no progress in moving the yacht off the shore and towing from the bow, of course, had no effect.  So I tried pushing the bow off the shore, which did work, but we had to work pretty quickly to tie the dinghy alongside to motor Stella Marisclear once I had pushed her off the rocks.  But we succeeded, only to find that Stella Maris’ wheel had been locked and Nicky couldn’t work out how to unlock the wheel.  Nightmare! It looked as if we would end up being drifted into BV.  But then Nicky found the autopilot clutch lever and unlocked the steering system and, with her steering the yacht and our dinghy providing the motive force, we got Stella Maris alongside the jetty where an interested group of campers, attracted by the noise of the loud hailer, helped us to secure her.  And then they mentioned that the ferry would be wanting that side of the dock in an hour and a half………..So we used their manpower to help us manhandle the yacht around to the dinghy side of the pontoon where we secured her with the 2 fenders and one mooring line that we could find, supplemented by some anchor cable and a halyard.

Interestingly, we got back to BV about half an hour after Nicky had hung up the radio on the Coastguard, so she was ‘on time’ when she reported back to them.  After another session of ’20 Questions’ we finished prepping BV for sea and headed off about an hour late on our original timing.  But that was no particular problem.  We had planned to depart Duck Harbour at around 0930 so that we reached the bottom of the St George River, 30nm further down the coast, no earlier than slack water as the tide began to flood into the river. Delaying our departure to pull SY Stella Maris off the rocks just meant that we might arrive later than planned and so would have more tide to assist us up river (though we might also have some tide against us for the last part of the passage along the coast).  But we were heading up the St George River, to a nice, safe, well-protected anchorage because of a forecast strong southwesterly that coming night.  We could only hope that the crew of Stella Maris were not planning to remain in Duck Harbour, which is open to all points west and which was likely to become rather unpleasant over the next 24 hours or so.

Duck Harbour, ME, USA

Somes Sound ME USA

One of the reasons that we had come to Somes Harbour, apart from the fact that it is a lovely area, was so that we were somewhere well protected when the tail-end of Hurricane Florence hit the area.  The forecasters had been predicting northeasterly winds of up to 25kts gusting to 40kts overnight Tuesday 18/Wednesday 19 September and, whilst we did experience some breeze in Somes Harbour, it was nothing like that strong. Quite what it was like off Bar Harbour, where we had been previously and which is very open to the northeast, it was impossible to tell (perhaps the wind was just not as strong as forecast), but as a hurricane hole Somes Harbour did us proud.  By morning the batteries were suitably depleted for a test of the new alternator.  We fired up the engine and immediately saw that the batteries were being charged at 40 Amps.  Excellent – problem fixed!

Excellent dinghy dock in Somes Harbour

It was a dull and drizzly grey morning. Our planned walk was looking less than entirely appealing but it seemed a shame to just sit on board moping.  So we took the dinghy across to the dinghy dock to catch the bus towards Southwest Harbour.  Had it been a sunny day, we’d have got off just a stop or 2 down the road but with the cloud sitting firmly on the hills, and the bus ride free with our National Park permits, we decided to sightsee by bus and stay on to the end of the line and then come back again, by which time we hoped the cloud would have lifted.  [Ed: in the summer there is a more frequent bus service in this area of the Park and we could have just waited for the next bus through but in September the service is reduced and so the only way to do a later run to where we wanted to walk was to do the round-trip on the mid-morning bus.]

The bus ride was great fun and we had an interesting peer at parts of the island we would not otherwise have visited, as well as ogling at some of the largest RVs/trailers we had ever seen when the bus did a pick up in a campsite.  In addition to being astounded by the size of the ‘camping’ vehicles (they were more the size of articulated lorries), we were amazed to see that they were all fully plumbed into fully domestic-style utilities at the campground – 110V high current electricity (air conditioning capable), cable TV and internet and full water and sewage facilities.  Hardly camping, more a home from home.

View south from the top of Acadia Mountain

By the time we got back to the bottom of Acadia Mountain (another few hundred foot high ‘mountain’) the cloud was lifting so we got off the bus and took some exercise.  We found this a very different area to that which we had walked in two days before.  To start with we saw far fewer people out, which might well have been related to the weather but was probably also due to the area being that bit further from the Park entrance and Bar Harbour.  The trails in this area of the Park are also a lot more wooded so, though there are large areas where you walk over the granite bedrock, we also spent a lot of time surrounded by trees walking on softer ground.  All in all it was another lovely area for walking (we can quite understand why the Park is so popular) and, by the time we got to the top of Acadia Mountain the cloud had lifted sufficiently for us to get views as well. Bonus!

View down into Somes Sound from the area of Valley Peak

As the day progressed the cloud lifted further, the sun came out and the views improved immeasurably.  With fun walking, and no great thinking required as the trails are so well marked, we strode along the trails, ogling the views and delighting in the patches of autumnal fall colours.

View south from south of the summit of St Sauveur Mountain

It was a glorious day and we were so glad that we had made the effort to get out and about despite the drizzly start.

Woodpecker at work!

As we walked the final half mile or so back to the bus-stop Nicky heard a woodpecker.  And, sure enough, there up a tree, hammering hard and throwing large sections of the bark out behind him was a woodpecker.  Neither of us had seen a woodpecker at work before and we watched, fascinated, for several minutes.

Somesville

We caught the bus back to Somesville and spent a few minutes walking along the bank of one of the streams that leads into Somes Harbour.  A little further down (just behind where I was standing when I took the photo above) for many years there was a mill.  The miller had dammed the stream to enable his milling operation but this had blocked the stream for the alwein which, like salmon, return to the same river/stream to spawn.  Relatively recently, the Park authorities have installed a fish ladder around the dam. This allows the fish to get upriver to spawn, enhancing their survival rate and improving the health of the stream in the process.

And so, with that, we returned to BV. The following morning we planned to move on to Isle au Haut to visit a detached section of the Acadia National Park and, we hoped, have another good walk there before leaving the area for this season.

Somes Sound, Maine, USA