David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Saturday, September 26, 2009
Location: Off the Coast of Maine

Ayla has a game on her phone called “Cube Runner” in which you’re speeding across a great plain as the driver of some motorized vehicle, trying to avoid randomly appearing colorful cubes. If you crash into one of the cubes, you die (well, your avatar in the game dies). In other words, it’s really important to avoid the cubes! I’ve only played the game on her phone a couple of times, but here in Maine I feel like I’m playing a seafaring version of Cube Runner with the lobster trap floats.

We arrived in Maine last Monday morning after a 24-hour cruise from Shelburne, Nova Scotia. The cruise across the Gulf of Maine was smooth and uneventful — just the way we like it. Our destination in Maine was Northeast Harbor, which is on Mt. Desert Island, where Acadia National Park is located. Mt. Desert Island is also where the better-known town of Bar Harbor is, but the harbor there is not as nice for visiting boats, so we set our course for the smaller, more protected Northeast Harbor.

We were about five miles off the coast of Maine when we started seeing colorful floats. We predicted that this would probably be the case, so we timed our passage to arrive after dawn so we could see the floats. At first they were few and far between, maybe a quarter mile between sightings. But as we approached Mount Desert Island they became more densely deployed. By the time we were headed into Northeast Harbor, we were actively steering through a mine-field of floats, each of which were now only about 50-75 feet apart. The surface of the water was blanketed with them. The lobsters up here don’t have a chance!

We enjoyed four nice days on Mt. Desert Island, doing some touring, and also getting some work done. We were hooked to a mooring ball in Northeast Harbor, so we savored quiet evenings aboard the boat. I had parts for our broken bilge pump delivered here, so I spent one day fixing the bilge pump, which turned out to be a bad valve flapper on the intake side. There was also a small air leak in an upstream fitting, so I took care of that as well. I had never worked on a pump like this, so it was gratifying to actually fix it and have it work when I was finished. 🙂 We also spent a day touring Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and Kathryn and Ayla spent another afternoon walking in and out of the Northeast Harbor shops, bakeries, and inns. The weather was very mixed (fog, sun; windy, calm; mild, cold), which is to be expected in the Fall.

Our weather window to head down the coast arrived this morning, so we hauled the dingy on deck, and secured the interior of the boat for a cruise. The wind was light, the sun was shining, and it was a cool 40 degrees. We had originally planned to take two or three days to cruise down the coast to the Boston area, but the weather isn’t going to cooperate for that. Instead, it looks like we have a about a 30-hour high-pressure system before things collapse again into turbulent air and rough seas, so we’re heading straight to Boston (actually Marblehead). It should take us about 24 hours. We’ve been out for a few hours now, and the seas are calm and the winds are light.

On the way out of the harbor this morning we had the same video-game experience as going into the harbor: there were lobster trap floats every 50-100 feet for the first two hours. Once we got out to water that was more than 100-feet-deep, the density dropped off. And now that we’re in 300-foot depths, we’re not seeing any floats. We’ll set a course that keeps us in deep water through the night so we don’t have to worry about snagging a float line on our stabilizers or propeller. If we snagged a float line we certainly wouldn’t die (as in the video game), but it would be pretty inconvenient: I would rather not have to get into the water with a knife tonight. 🙂