Making it to Maine

After our whale spotting adventure, we turned our focus to our overnight run up to the Portland area. I went down below to rest after dinner, and Patrick and Cecelia got this lovely moonrise shot for me as a substitute for a sunset photo (there wasn’t much of a sunset).

As the night moved in, the sea state picked up, and the wind clocked around to be behind us, but it was not very strong (our speed was outpacing the wind). We were unfortunately unable to carry sails for much of the night and had to give in to just riding the swells without much to stabilize our motion. This made for a rolly ride, and not much sleep.

Patrick and I traded off two hour watches because the fog also rolled in and we were under motor, which meant watching AIS for other traffic, watching our path for traffic and lobster pots (pretty rare in the deeper water but they are not something you want to accidentally run over!), and just generally trying to will the fog to lift. It was a long night – uncomfortable and challenging. But we knew we’d get through it eventually!

Dawn did not bring much lift to the fog.

We knew we’d be navigating into Portland Harbor with very little visibility, so we went with a multiple man approach – one person watching the plotter for navigation and steering between marks and traffic, and two watching for pots on either side.

We managed to pick our way into Falmouth Harbor and once we were in, we could see again, mostly. We found our mooring, talked with a friendly launch driver who was impressed we had located it without much direction, and then packed up the mainsail.

It started raining basically as soon as we arrived, so we made a big breakfast, toasted our arrival with some white wine (why not?), took showers, and then took some epic naps!

2 Replies to “Making it to Maine”

  1. Sounds exciting and at the same time very challenging.
    Glad you guys reached the destination.

    The blog idea is great, Thanks for sharing

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