USA

Tuesday 17 July: Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Departure preparations.
Very peaceful sleep, quiet and no swell. Bliss! The wind that was supposed to come in, didn’t. Hm, maybe we got our forecast wrong.
We wake up to very thick fog, we can’t see more than a few meters away from the boat. Needless to say we have our heating on, and breakfast is served in the saloon again. Feels such a long time since we had breakfast in the cockpit.
A bit of a busy morning, rushing to prepare Cloudy Bay for our departure. As in leave her as safe as possible while we are away. And as pretty as possible, of course! The hull looks very yellow after we have been through the dirty rivers of St. Augustine and Savannah, and it has been bugging Glen. So he dinghies around the boat cleaning the rust stains from the deck drains and the yellow spots. Great job, now Cloudy Bay is (almost) picture perfect again.
Yesterday, when we fueled up, we noticed that Cloudy Bay would not go properly in reverse. So with the GoPro on the boat hook, we record the propeller to see what’s going on. When we download the footage, our suspicion is confirmed: there is a rope tangled around the prop. The rope cutter did its job though. Well, we did say it will be a miracle if we manage to motor through all the fishing floats without catching a rope around the prop. And we don’t believe in miracles.
Glen needs to snorkel under the boat and remove the rope. Sea temperature is only 19 celsius. He encourages himself “at least is not 13 degrees, like it was few days ago in Bar Harbor”. Out comes the full wet suit, which has never been used before. He jumps in armed with the diving knife, and few minutes later the offending rope is removed and the prop moves freely into reverse again. Phew, that could have triggered a nasty situation.
Now that he is in the cold sea anyway, Glen carries on, and cleans the hull on the water line. When he is positively chilled, he comes out for a hot shower convinced more than ever that we need to paint the blue lines with awgrip, for a better and shinier look.
When the fog lifts a bit, we identify the mooring buoy where Cloudy Bay will take her 3 weeks vacation from us, and we move her there. It belongs to Bristol Marine, and it’s the most reasonably priced we have found along Maine’s coast from Bar Harbor to Boston. Nice new soft mooring line too, the mooring buoys have just been serviced as Eric, the manager, tells us.
Once settled in this final parking position, we dinghy ashore to Bristol Marine Shipyard. The pontoons are undergoing serious renovation too. As we walk through the yard looking for Eric, we come across an amazing old wooden gaff-schooner which is being restored. Glen is instantly taken with the sight, as he has a soft spot for old wooden boats. This shipyard must be very good, as not anybody will sign up for such an intricate project.
We have a very nice chat to Eric, then we head off to town, to see what’s what. To our pleasant surprise, it’s all very pretty and much bigger than we expected. Beautiful houses, very colorful gardens, lots of arty shops, and quite a few inviting restaurants too. Hm, we must take our bikes out and cycle around here …. on a nicer day.
As we walk taking in the beauty of the place, we hear thunders. And soon after that we feel few spots of rain and start to feel a bit chilly. We take shelter in an ice cream shop, and eating an ice cream doesn’t exactly make us warmer. Oana has a rain coat on, but Glen only a T-shirt. So Oana runs to a nearby shop and buys a warm jacket for Glen. Now that certainly feels better. As we leave the parlor, it is really pouring with rain.
Back at the shipyard, we bump into Eric again, and we also meet Andy, the owner of the yard. We briefly discuss with him the list of jobs we would like to line up for Cloudy Bay in the fall, in one of his shipyards further south.
Eric gives us a tour of the restoration project we spotted earlier, Ernestina-Morrissey, with a bit of history of the boat and very interesting explanations on what they are doing and how. Such a massive job. The boat is from 1894, and it was built as a fishing boat. It was also an Arctic Explorer, then it had quite a bit of history bringing in migrants from Cape Verdean till 1960’s. It belongs to a conservation trust. At 115ft length it’s quite a ship. The timbers are huge. The planks of 200 year old Danish oak alone range from 5” to 3” thickness. Amazing to hear that thousands of this type of vessel were built, back in the day. This project is taking 3 years. Originally it only took them 5 months to built and sail away. Apparently, all along the water front would have been shipwrights, churning out wooden ships of all sorts.
By the time we reach the dinghy, we are so soaked that it doesn’t matter we sit on wet canvas and water up to our ankles. But Cloudy Bay’s heating quickly warms us up.
And we resume the preparation jobs, despite the rain: outboard off the dinghy and flushed, dinghy up on the deck, cockpit tent off, etc. We even remove the anchor and the bow sprit, so that we can have the mooring lines going over the rollers.
Then for the evening, Glen keeps himself very busy for hours with the EmpirBus, the remote switching electronic system that controls all the DC systems. One of the 7 distribution units, under the guests bed, has a problem. The boom lights are not working since February, and he is now determined to solve the issue. He changes one of the electronic board with a spare one, but boom light still doesn’t work. And when he changes the wires to an upper board, boom light is working, but the cutter furling stops working! So it’s pretty clear that the original board and the spare one we had, both have the same issue. They will have to be sent off to Trigenic in Sweden for repair. Glen likes the EmpirBus system, but as it is 90% electronically controlled, it also makes him very nervous!
Finally we crash into bed, with most jobs on our list done. Tomorrow we start the epic 30hour journey home to Bucharest.