Month: August 2020

One of the best things about being a reader of bloggy things is you don’t have to live through the doldrums! We motored from the Isles of Shoals in New Hampshire to Cliff Island, Maine…and I (James) so wish it had taken as long to do as it took you to read just now. I don’t even know how many times on this blog I have said, “Sailboats motor like shit. That’s why they’re called sailboats.” Maybe never, maybe a thousand times, but guess what?!… We live on a sailboat! When we rounded Cape Elizabeth, I texted my friend Michael to let him know we were in the neighborhood and he launched with his brother and Sky (bro’s BFF) to meet us at Jewel Island, our pointed-to anchorage for the night. Because this is the sailor’s life, we ended up on Cliff Island instead. No room at the inn at Cocktail Cove. No skin off my nose (me being Dena), since it gave us the opportunity to try a place we’d never…quite…been. We’d been in a different little scallop in the shore, but spring is intense here. Michael and fam arrived and we rafted (What?!? Yes! That’s how much we like Michael!) and then James and Michael went to get Ashley and… I (Dena) watched James leave with a gentle bewilderment. Barring bathroom trips, how long had it been since we’d really been apart? Kate came to Chesapeake City on July 13th and we wandered off together. She and I came back with groceries and liquor, and James and I hadn’t been apart for more than a couple minutes since then. So yeah. It had been a month and also a perfect eternity! Without wage-slavery, our apart times had been all fairly short all the way back to 3 Mile[…]

Rounding Cape Ann has never been simple. This time, it was fog. A thick mess had us sitting tight until it lightened to about a quarter-mile visibility. We didn’t have anything to do, really, except raise the anchor (all 200′ in 30′ of water), so it was a patience game. Finally, we agreed that it was dissipating and we set off. The thinning reversed as we approached the breakwater, though. By the time we were well outside the harbor, we were swaddled like babies…hungry, angry babies. I (Dena) sounded the horn anytime a radar return or engine noise encroached on us and James wove between suspected lobstering or fishing boats. Like I (James) do. Lobster buoys appeared in the mist and, once we realized they weren’t distant boats, were useful for calibrating distances. It’s not easy without a horizon. I (Dena) took over on the hour (shift kiss!) and worked to do three things. 1) Stay on course, meaning watching the chartplotter. There wasn’t a single visual cue in sight. 2) Interpret the radar splotches and weave between invisible boats. 3) Get my (fucking) head out of the cockpit! The hardest one by far was 3. When the visual field gives you nothing and instruments do, that makes sense. Not all boats show up well on radar, though, and there was always the danger that I could come upon a low-sided wooden vessel from which an invisible person fished quietly… And then the fog lifted. Well, more properly, we left the Cape Ann weird-shit zone and entered open Atlantic waters. The wind began to drive us along better and better until we threaded our way between the Isles. The Isles of Shoals sound much scarier than we found them to be. There is no doubt that these rocky outgrowths of[…]

…Is one that doesn’t break anything, doesn’t kill anyone, and doesn’t drag our anchor. Isaias, for us, was one such hurricane. We perceived the danger early enough in the weather system to get to a secure gunkhole and prepare, so we did. Onset Harbor has the odd and wonderful characteristics of being both spacious and protected. The east side of Wickets Island is less than half-full of moorings, with a mud bottom that is fairly flat. The perfect place to put out aaaallllll the chain and still have lots of room in case anything goes wrong. Isaias had his start, like most pissed-off summertime low pressure systems, by dragging his ass up the Gulf Stream and putting some serious hurt on Cape Fear, of course! Have you ever seen the statistics on documented hurricanes hitting the continental United States? That’s where most of those pissed off motherfuckers go to party: Cape Hatteras or Cape Fear and more specifically, Southport, North Carolina. That’s where Isaias hit the dirt trail and got addicted to mud. That asshole and his tornado buddies left a trail of flooding and mobile-home carnage eighty miles wide all the way up the coasts of Virginia, Chesapeake Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and the Jersey Shore before spinning off inland for a date with a Canadian mud slide. What we got was the outskirts of town, the suburbs of annihilation, the infuriated, rag-tag remnants of the johnny-come-lately dregs of mass destruction otherwise known as T.S. Isaias. The cell in the bottom right-hand corner of that image above hit us full-on, and it started like this! The four other boats in the anchorage were all very well behaved (meaning far from us and each other) with the single exception of a local pro fisher. He actually tried, and failed, to singlehandly[…]