Tuesday 14-August: Portland Maine
It rained all night and we woke up to thick fog and drizzle. Not the kind of weather to be any place other than inside, cozily with the heater on! So we spent the morning and afternoon editing the Charleston video and other admin work like purging our bursting bookshelf of unwanted documents and filing all the user manuals for all the various bits and pieces we recently purchased.
Oana, reunited with her phone that has sprung back to life after 4 weeks of no signal, is indulging on news from Bucharest and the latest round of protests against the blatantly corrupt government there.
The failure-of-the-day today is the Dyson V6 vacuum cleaner. The battery, fully charged, now only lasts 2 minutes. So it’s not only marine product that die on Cloudy Bay, high quality domestic products like Dyson are also jinxed on this yacht! That said, it could have something to do with us keeping the dyson in the engine room and regularly frying it at 60-70DegC when we are motoring hard!
Late afternoon the fog has lifted enough for us to actually see the shoreline 100m away. And the rain has stopped, finally. It’s still damp and dreary but we venture ashore to walk in the town and stretch our legs. We park the dinghy on a dock in a raft of weed and floating debris and find our way through a gap in the dock security fence. We would have happily asked if it was OK to dock there, but no one is around.
The town at first seems a bit down trodden, even grubby. But then we finally find the nicer parts and end up in Timber Steakhouse, a nice bar for drinks at dusk. When we leave it starts to rain again and we debate whether to go to the cinema or run for the boat before the rain starts in earnest. We chose the latter and spend the evening watching a movie in the cozy saloon as the rain rattles on the deck above. Weather is supposed to be better tomorrow.
Portland Maine video on Sail Cloudy Bay You Tube channel
