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...

Since Penny is thoroughly enjoying her new life in Galway, NY, you will have to settle for an Ashley-Cam tour of our vessel. Here for your entertainment are three and a half minutes of appropriately wobbly footage of our new boat and some awesome narration.

  Ship's Log?? 7/16/14 2:10am   We were awakened by a sprinkling of rain increasing by the second into a downpour, accompanied by the loud crash of thunder and flash of lightning.   Unlike when we were at home, I can't imagine ever sleeping through an electrical storm. It seemed to have flown up on us so suddenly, and to be hovering directly above   as if God were about to smite us. The thunder sounded like it was coming from just above our mast and the lightning flashes were bright enough to hurt my eyes.     I wondered aloud what would happen if we were hit by lightning, which would seem quite likely had we not been surrounded by fifty other lightning rods on the water. I asked Jon if he had noticed whether or not we had some sort of grounding mechanism installed, and in typical Jon fashion he just smiled and said, "hopefully." I thought about the likelihood that someday we will be all alone on the water in the middle of a storm like this, a...

After two lessons and some practice picking up a mooring ball and docking the boat under power, we felt brave enough yesterday to raise the sails and take this beast out of its burrow. It went quite well. Only four things in the cabin went flying from their perches, and only one to its doom.   We didn't hit any rocks, lobster pots, or other potential hazards, and we both felt pretty comfortable. I guess it would be more accurate to say, Jon felt very comfortable sailing the boat. I felt mostly comfortable with my few practiced tasks but not so much steering under sail; that triumphant day has not yet arrived. But that is why we're getting joyous, wonderful, worth-every-penny lessons. We haven't been sleeping remarkably well because of the aforementioned rock and roll harbor. As a result I've been feeling a little bit like a zombie most days, but last night we both slept soundly through the night. In addition to the near constant side-to-side motion, the othe...

It doesn't seem as though only five days have passed since we moved onto the boat. The first two days were a little rough for both of us getting used to the rock and roll motion that prevails in our harbor, but now we're seasickness-free and it's the land that seems to move when we're walking around town. With the exception of my sewing machine and a pair of shoes or two, all of our belongings are now on board, and a few bags and boxes of odds and ends that came with the boat have been removed to make more room. We went through every nook and cranny to figure out where spare parts and tools were hiding, and then put most everything back along with our own additions. We're still working on making the best use of our limited space to make sure the important things we'll need regularly are within reach, and that everything stays put when we want to move the boat. It looked impossible at first but slowly our pile of stuff is disappearing into lockers and oth...