Sailing Baby Blue

Jon keeps saying, "We've seen so many cool things already." So here is   a list of stuff we've seen in Maine. Some of the numbers are less accurate than others. 0 confirmed sharks (but 1 alleged) 1 green snake 2 bald eagles 3 nature preserves 4 day long anarchist/hippie island gathering 5 drunken fisherman 6 lighthouses 7 million lobster pots 8 cormorants swimming 9 puffins floating 10 calling loons 11 porpoise families 12 seal faces and a ship freshly wrecked on some rocks. And now for some photos:  Indian Head Lighthouse A cemetery in the middle of the woods on near Castine, ME.  Look, a seal face. Storminess.  Duck Harbor, Isle au Haut Full moon...Smith Cove, Castine

We officially renamed our boat and after much prodding by Ashley, I am finally writing a post. The boat formerly known as Reprise, and before that Witchcraft , and even before that Savannah , is now Baby Blue . Ashley had quite a list of possible name choices but after much debate and trying out a few, this is the one that stuck.   While much of the canvas on the boat and our sail covers are light blue, the real inspiration for the name came from the Bob Dylan song of a similar title and even though I liked Rolling Stone it didn't seem appropriate for something that we hope will stay afloat. Though we are not very superstitious, and somewhere I have read that it is not bad luck to rename a boat as long as it was not named after a woman, we felt there should be some form of renaming ceremony. So when the new decals arrived we made a point to clean the boat thoroughly inside and out and picked up a bottle of champagne. After the old name was scraped off and the new one st...

In the last couple of weeks we've experienced many firsts. We had our first visitors in Jon's family, our first overnight guest and crew member in Jon's brother, Luke, and a few trial by fire first attempts at skills we've only read about. Remarkably, some of our firsts have turned out quite well, such as our first time coming alongside and tying up to a stranger's vessel when the dock was overcrowded (known as rafting up), and pumping out our holding tank which done improperly could result in a very, very foul mess. Most importantly we ventured away from our comfortable and secure mooring with the help of our third crew member, and were able to take in the beauty of a few quiet anchorages. Anchoring being one of our new-found skills, we were pleased that we didn't even drag in the middle of the night or get our lines caught in our own propeller.   Despite an overwhelming, slightly paranoid sense of ourselves as amateurs - is that boater s...