Sailing Baby Blue

Tomorrow we will leave the place we've called home all summer on our first overnight trip on the big ocean via teeny tiny sailboat. Are we nervous? Probably. The plan is to sail out of Penobscot Bay to Monhegan Island, and from there South across the Gulf of Maine to Provincetown on Cape Cod. It's about 130 miles, and we're guessing it will take us 30 hours or so. Once we're out in the middle of the gulf, there's really no turning back toward land as it will be faster to just keep going. The wind is forecast out of the Northeast with low seas. A good time to go. I asked Jon a few days ago if he was nervous and he answered, casually enough, in the negative. At that time I was decidedly very nervous. Now, I'm just ready to get this part over with and no other emotions are making themselves known. Once we're in Cape Cod we'll be back to day trips all the way to Florida. No more overnights.  Though we could spend another year working on the boa...

Two weeks ago we drove back to New York to attend Jon's friend's wedding in Troy. Before we left we stopped by Camden during the Windjammer Festival to check out the wooden schooner built over 18 years by one of our new friends. It was a privilege to go aboard such a remarkably crafted boat and soak up more advice from a couple who has traveled the Intracoastal Waterway. The wedding on the following day was a ridiculously good time. It was nice to have a reason to ditch our usual grubby clothes in favor of our finest and spoil ourselves with food and drink. As evidenced by the fact that Jon danced with me for at least five songs, one of us may have had too much fun. We had said that we would stay in New York until all of our packages arrived, but it ended up taking longer for me to finish sewing our rather experimental mast ladder. At about 12 hours behind the machine, I had a really good excuse to get addicted to Game of Thrones. It was tempting to change our ...

I don't know, maybe I've said this before, but this boating thing is expensive. Boats are kind of like weddings that way. If any ordinary item is to be used on a boat (or in a wedding) it is suddenly twice as expensive as it would otherwise be. Our bank account has been bleeding like it has been shot full of bullet holes since we left Denver, and we really need to get that down to the slow trickle of a paper cut if we want to avoid working for awhile. Which, if you've talked to me in the last few years, you know I do. Not so thrilled about these fetching $70 boots becoming the most expensive pair of shoes I've ever owned.   Yeah, like the guy in the $500 suit is gonna stand out in a rainstorm steering the boat. Come on! While we didn't doubt the truth of the adage - a boat is a hole in the water into which money is thrown - our other problem is living more or less in the same manner we did when we actually had a little trifle called income . While it i...

    The blue line is a very loose representation of our route on our latest two week trip toward Bar Harbor and back. We took our time sailing the whole way there, spending nine days in five different ports to get to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. We enjoyed ourselves there for three nights and then with the exception of a couple hours, motored all the way back over two days. When we pulled into Bar Harbor there were surprisingly few sailboats around and we were the only one at anchor in the harbor, right in front of some fancy hotel. On our way into the dock we were hailed by new friends, John and Nina from New Brunswick, on their boat Whisky Run. They were celebrating Nina's birthday and graciously invited us to join them in drinking their beer. Jon had just been saying that despite tendencies to the contrary, he wouldn't mind doing some socializing. We were beginning to feel a little isolated with so few other people living on their boats where...

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...