The latest...

This one covers most of July:

After the wedding we showed a few relatives the boat and then moved to near Pleasure Bay where we anchored next to a yacht club's mooring field.  Aaron flew to Iowa for a few days to do a little consulting work (and eat Taco John's for the first time in a long time!) and Anna partied with the friendly yacht club members.  After a week or so there we went up the coast to Gloucester.

In Gloucester we rented a mooring ball from a yacht club for three nights.  We wanted to do some laundry and also Anna's aunt and uncle Lisa and Ray were meeting us there.  They were on a camping trip across the country for about a month and spent several days sightseeing with us.  We enjoyed a few places in Salem and around Gloucester, especially a cool castle built by Mr. Hammond (an inventor).  Some of the yacht club members invited us to join them on Sunday night for their supper of leftovers from the weekend so we ate very well that night.  Very nice people, including Tom Silva from This Old House (he knew a lot about Charleston, SC--where we purchased the boat and spent so much time).

We spent a few more nights anchored towards the south end of Gloucester Harbor.  One day we went to walk around the downtown part of Gloucester, and checked out the historic shipyard area.  We were just reading an interpretive sign when a guy we had seen working on a boat walked up to us and started talking to us.  He found out we were going to Maine and insisted that we needed the "Taft & Taft" guidebook (the authors' last name).  Zim Zimmerman is his name, and he had already sold his extra copy to someone and so was calling around to local stores to try to find a copy for us (even offered to have his wife pick one up on her way home from work 45 minutes away).  He gave us many tips for Maine and we look forward to finding him on our way south for another chat.

From Gloucester we headed north to Isles Of Shoals.  These are some scraggly islands with a small town on one of them.  They were scenic in a way.  There was no good place to anchor except those filled by mooring balls.  People had told us that in Maine people just use mooring balls and if the owner comes you find a different one.  We hadn't quite wrapped our heads around that yet and all of the certain colored ones in this harbor were taken already so we turned northwest and headed to Portsmouth.  Things didn't go that well there either.  We tried to anchor in the only nook we could find and the anchor drug across solid stone, funny how that sound so distinctly transmits up the chain.  So we paid for one of the town mooring balls.  I (Aaron) took the dinghy to shore and found two fancy restaurants full of weekend revelers--didn't really match my down mood after the day's defeats.  So then I took the dinghy a mile or two up the river (pounding through the chop of the 3 knot current) and tied up to the city dock.  The attendant said no need to pay since it was the end of the day so off I went exploring.  The mood downtown was much the same with weekend revelers so after a beer at the brewery I went back home.  Now maybe my impression was cursed ever since reading something like "it is hard to imagine a place more actively hostile to cruisers than Portsmouth" in the guidebook but this was a low point of the trip.

The next day we anchored in Stage Island harbor, a little bay just east of Kennebunkport.  The Sunday recreators were there in force when we arrived so our best option was to shoddily anchor in water that we knew would leave us high-and-dry if we were still there when the tide went out.  As the afternoon wore on the speedboats thinned and we moved a few hundred feet to deeper water.  It was a very peaceful spot.

Portland, ME is where we spent the next few nights.  We anchored in spot on the east end near a mooring field.  As we arrived a small storm system was passing through so it took some debate to convince Anna that it was going to be a nice comfortable spot in twenty minutes.  Aaron then went to downtown Portland to see what the dinghy options were.  The only option charged $20 per day, it was evening so I talked them down to $10, had a burrito at the food coop (groceries were atrociously priced there!), a PBR at a dive bar, and then went back to the boat.  The next day we went around on the north side of Portland and Anna shopped at Trader Joe's for a bunch of groceries and a few things at West Marine.  There is just a rip-rapped shoreline to pull the dinghy up to and we didn't want to leave it unattended there, hence the solitary shopping trip.

As we left Portland we sailed amongst the islands of Casco Bay and it was gorgeous.  Our first real taste of Maine, I would say.  We intended to make it to Booth Bay Harbor but we stopped a little short, in Five Islands Harbor.  The free mooring balls there did not have pendants on them (need those to tie to) so we went back a half mile to Harmon Harbor.  We had read that a guy in there encourages the use of his mooring ball so we were finally ready to try that whole "help yourself to a mooring ball in Maine" thing out.  And then the guy came out onto his porch and yelled at us to go ahead an use his mooring ball, that it was full of kelp but should be structurally solid.  The kelp situation was no joke--it was so thick on the pendant that I couldn't lift it up (limited not by my strength but by not wanting to break the boat hook :) ) to pass our line through the loop on the end of it.  I managed to loop our line under the pendant which held us until I could hack at the kelp a bit with the boat hook and then finally lift the correct part out.  After we settled in I dropped the dinghy and went up to the pendant to hack off all of the kelp--should be easier for the next person.

Harmon Harbor was so beautiful.  It was very quiet and well protected, and we would occasionally see seals poking their heads up.  They were present around the entrance especially, welcoming us and saying bye-bye!

The next day we arrived in Rockland which was our next big destination.  The Seven Seas Cruising Association was holding a gathering there and we arrived a day early.  So we did some laundry and explored the town.

Why don't we write about things in a more timely manner?  Good question!  This was written at the end of August and describes our travels from Atlantic City in June until Aaron's brother's wedding in early July.

We walked the boardwalk in Atlantic City one day with Teri and Britt from Sea Otter.  Then we waited a day or two for good weather and headed north.  Sea Otter headed straight for Cutty Hunk Island but we wanted to go through New York.  Their neighbor from the previous night was also going to New York (Mark on The Naked Truth) and as we left the inlet at Atlantic City we saw him a few miles ahead.  We eventually caught up to him and then led just in front of him up the remainder of New Jersey.  There was a one knot current against us the entire time.  Based on some graphics that we found online, this is a normal eddy that spins off of the gulf stream.

The selected anchorage for the night was around Sandy Hook and then south a couple miles.  During this south-bound leg Aaron spotted a whale.  Anna looked in time to see the tail.  We think it was a humpback whale which are known to be found in that area.  The anchorage was a bit rocky but compensated by the excitement of seeing the NYC skyline in the distance.

The next day we got a late start to time the tides/currents, something like 10:30am.  Mark left around then too but chose to motor at a slower pace so we didn't see him until the end of the day.  We went under the HUGE Verrazano-Narrows bridge and could see the Statue of Liberty ahead!  The harbor was pretty busy, mostly ferry traffic (no cargo ships).  We headed up the western side where the statue is and bounced around on the ferry wakes there for 20 minutes or so taking pictures of ourselves, the boat, and Louise, all with the statue in the background of course.  Then we headed across to the SW corner of Manhattan and followed it eastward into the East River.  This was where the tide planning really paid off.  The East River flows up to 5 knots in either direction and we had it favorable to us.  At one point we saw 11 knots speed over ground!  Seeing all of the iconic buildings was amazing, looking down the "concrete canyons" as we passed each street was cool, and Anna loved seeing Rikers Island (big fan of Law & Order).  It was all sooo awesome, totally worth going through NYC.

We anchored between two mooring fields on the west side of City Island.  Mark joined us there a couple hours later.  For some reason we had a craving for Chinese food so we picked Mark up in our dinghy and used one of the yacht clubs docks (Mark knew someone there).  We grabbed Chinese to go and ate in the cockpit of Marks boat, a pretty nice 40+ foot center cockpit Hunter.  He works from the boat, taking phone calls from people who want to ship cars and then setting them up with shipping services.

After our night there we had a pretty uneventful day to Port Jefferson (can't remember anything about the day 2 months later!).  We got fuel and water there.  The next day was the adventure with the rain that we actually did write about back then!

We continued eastward from there, past Fishers Island and Block Island.  As we passed Fishers Island we noticed North Dumpling Island with its lighthouse, solar panels, wind generator, and well-maintained look.  Apparently it is owned by the Segway guy!  It was on this stretch that we encountered our first real fog.  We could see it off in the distance for a while and then finally we were in it.  Visibility was probably still 1/4 mile so it didn't seem too dangerous and was mostly a "cool new experience".  We don't have radar but do transmit our location on AIS so any large commercial traffic would know where we are.  Everyone else is slow enough or very very dumb, so ultimately we felt pretty safe.  Eventually we found Sea Otter at Cutty Hunk Island (five miles from Martha's Vineyard) and spent the night there.

Passage through the Cape Cod Canal was on the agenda for the following day.  On the approach to the canal we remembered that one of our battens was twisted in the sail so put the sail up partways to remove and reinsert it.  We radioed Sea Otter to ensure them that we were not crazy.  A few minutes later they put their sail up…their engine was not being reliable so they wanted to have a ready backup in the narrow canal.  A good strategy, though I think we did read something later about it being prohibited to sail through the canal.  (As we have gained more sailing experience we now frequently have the sail up in canals for various reasons.)  At the end of the canal it became foggy again for a couple miles.  We continued up the coast and anchored in Plymouth Bay.  This was easily the most wavy anchorage that we have chosen.

And the next day we arrived in Boston!  It is a busy port and there were a lot of wakes.  We went into the main harbor in downtown Boston and anchored just outside of a mooring field, sort of the only place to anchor in the proper harbor itself.  It was a wavy spot during the day with ferries and water taxis rushing around all the time but the location was unbeatable.  We eventually found out a good place to take the dinghy and spent several days before Aaron's brother Eliot's wedding exploring downtown Boston.  One evening Laura & Brandon, Eve & Jameson, and Nick & Laci came out to check out the boat and have sundowners.  Aaron got a warning from the Coast Guard for going too fast on the last trip shuttling them back and forth from the dinghy dock.

During that past week or so we were in touch with the lady who was going to enjoy the boat for the long wedding weekend and watch Louise.  Negotiations with her fell through as she asked for us to cover more and more of her costs and she apparently would not derive any value from being on the boat (we thought it was an attractive offer to spend the 4th of July weekend in Boston on a boat!).  So we took the boat a few miles east, moored it at a yacht club, and took Louise to the family's rental house for the wedding weekend.  We had a great time!