AN UNEXPECTED MAINE CRUISE by Jack Griswold

(Jack and Zdenka sail Kite out of Portland, Maine. After returning from a seven-year westabout circumnavigation in 2016, during which they served as Roving Rear Commodores, they spent two years as Port Officers for Portland, after which Zdenka joined the General Committee and in 2019 became a Rear Commodore.

They understand the requirements of a club journal perfectly, having recently completed four years as editors of the Cruising Club of America’s annual publication, Voyages. Nearly all the photos were taken by Zdenka Seiner Griswold.)

Kite in Criehaven, Maine’s most remote inhabited island

Last spring, Portland shut down – restaurants closed, theatres, museums, bars and barber shops all shuttered. And no one was going anywhere by bus, train, or plane. But we had Kite, our cutter-rigged Valiant 42, and we had the coast of Maine, as good a cruising ground as any we have found in our travels around the world. The coast measures about 228 miles, but the tidal coastline, including all of the inlets and bays, stretches almost 3500 miles and increases to more than 5000 if you include Maine’s 3166 islands.

Dix Island in the Muscle Ridge Channel

Kite was ready to go. We had worked on her over the winter in preparation for a transatlantic passage to Ireland. That was no longer going to happen, but she could be our antidote to COVID-19 isolation. And so we embarked on a long, leisurely summer cruise along the coast, with an emphasis on the leisurely, our indispensable Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast by Curtis Rindlaub and Hank and Jan Taft in hand. We wanted to poke around parts of Maine that we hadn’t visited before, particularly some of the rivers and inlets formed by long, rocky ‘necks’ left behind by retreating glaciers in the last ice age. Many of these anchorages are quite out of the way, and normally we might just blow by them on our way to the cruising grounds of Penobscot Bay and points further east. You can sail Maine for an entire lifetime and never see it all. This was our chance to explore our own backyard.

Peter Passano aboard Sea Bear with her new owners

Heading up the Sheepscot River, we spent a night on a friend’s mooring, just outside the Oven’s Mouth where the tidal current rips through a narrow channel. We dinghied over to their dock and walked up to the house for a drink. There, during a ferocious thunderstorm, we learned that our friends’ son and his girlfriend were buying Sea Bear, the steel-hulled, self-built cutter belonging to our friend, OCC member and 2002 Barton Cup winner, Peter Passano. Peter has sailed Sea Bear all over the world, including some impressive Southern Ocean voyaging, much of it singlehanded.* We knew how pleased he must feel that Sea Bear had been given a second life by this young couple. Heck, it made us feel warm and fuzzy. Peter and the new owners were outfitting her at a dock in Wiscasset, just a few more miles up the river, so we set out to meet them the next morning.

* See Sea Bear Doubles the Horn and Sea Bear in the South Atlantic in Flying Fish 2002/1 and 2002/2 respectively, both available at https://oceancruisingclub.org/ Flying-Fish-Archive.

Red’s Eats, Wiscasset

Wiscasset was a prosperous seaport in the late 18th century and, as a result, has a lot of pretty colonial-era architecture. One of its claims to fame nowadays, however, is Red’s Eats, a small shack on a street corner that serves takeout lobster rolls. For some reason that we can’t figure out, Red’s Eats has become quite famous and is a bucket list item for every tourist coming to Maine. A lobster roll is composed of a bun (usually a hot dog bun) filled with lobster meat and either mayonnaise or butter. That’s it. There isn’t much difference from one lobster roll to the next, except maybe the amount of lobster. Nonetheless, there’s always a line outside Red’s and even during this pandemic summer, it was continuing to churn out those rolls at $24 a pop.

At the head of Muscongus Bay, we anchored near the Todd Audubon Sanctuary on Hog Island. Among the special things about the Maine coast are the many undeveloped, preserved wilderness spots open to the public. Organisations such as the Maine Island Trail Association work with land owners to make private islands accessible. Maine Audubon manages several coastal sanctuaries and local preservation trusts maintain numerous trails along the coast. Just about every day we would anchor in some beautiful place, more often than not by ourselves, take the dinghy ashore and go rambling about.

The Basin on Hurricane Sound, Vinalhaven

Muscongus Bay is filled with small islands and rocky ledges. We were carefully picking our way through them at dead low tide on our way to Port Clyde when we passed Friendship, a small fishing village with a busy working harbour. We decided to pick up a mooring for an hour or so while we had lunch, figuring that the owner was off lobstering for the day. Pleasure boats are few in Friendship and, despite its name, it has been known to be downright unfriendly to yachties. We had just got the pendant aboard when we saw a large lobster boat steaming directly for us. We braced ourselves for a not unjustified stream of crusty invective. The skipper pulled up next to us and let loose with a stream of ... apologies! He was so sorry, but he needed to use the mooring. Normally he’s out fishing, but he had to do some unexpected maintenance on his boat. He usually had another mooring available which we could have picked up, but a friend was using it. We left feeling badly that we had made him feel badly. We promised to come back another time and use his mooring.

A fisherman’s skiff in Winter Harbor

Tranquil, well-protected Maple Juice Cove is around the corner from Friendship. We dinghied in to a nearby lobster operation with a working dock and fish store and asked if we could leave our dinghy there while we took a walk. No problem. The owner even promised to keep an eye on it for us because the dock was so busy. We were invariably welcome to tie up to these fishing docks, though we always made a point of asking first. A short walk up a country road brought us to the handsome farmhouse where Anna Christina Olson lived with her brother, made famous as the scene for the painting Christina’s World by US artist Andrew Wyeth. The house is now owned and operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, but unfortunately it was closed because of the pandemic. Reminders of the pandemic were all around us but cruising itself, socially distant by its nature, did not seem much different. In a world suddenly turned sideways, this was comforting.

Escaping the inlets, ledges and bays of the coast we headed out to Monhegan, 12 miles offshore. This craggy island of tall granite cliffs covered with pine trees has been home to an artists’ colony since the mid-19th century. It still draws artists, but also day trippers and vacationers who come for the solitude and remoteness as well as the beauty. Monhegan Associates, a private land trust, maintains 17 miles of hiking trails. Although not far from the mainland, Monhegan feels like a different world. It’s not an easy place to visit by boat, with a small harbour completely exposed to the prevailing southwesterlies, no anchorage and no way to reserve a mooring in advance. If it’s not blowing from the southwest (which it usually is) you pick up a vacant mooring if one is available, then go ashore in search of the harbour master, who can sometimes be found at the Fish House restaurant. With luck you will be directed to an overnight mooring. If not, Port Clyde is not far away. But Monhegan is worth it.

Manana Island is next to Monhegan, on the other side of Monhegan’s harbour. Much of it privately owned, it is the site of an abandoned US Coast Guard station and, in summer, a small herd of curious goats. We dinghied over to explore and stumbled upon a fairly large tortoise in the grass. This was curious. As far as we knew, no tortoises are native to Maine. A Google search turned up the Maine Master Naturalist Program. That seemed to be just the ticket, and we sent them a picture.

The Olson house, Cushing

Very quickly we got a reply – it was an African spurred tortoise. Native to the Sahara region, they are apparently popular as pets, but can grow to over 200 pounds and live anywhere from 70 to 150 years, so they are often abandoned. This was the initial hypothesis for how this tortoise got to where it was, and it set off an excited flurry of activity among the master naturalists as to how to rescue it before the brutal Maine winter set in. E-mails flew back and forth as they identified possible places that accept rescue tortoises and determined how they would get it there. Apparently, Delta Cargo has a live animal transport service – who knew?

Hiking on Monhegan

Sammy’s World

One of the naturalists made plans to capture the tortoise and we agreed to help out. Luckily, before the whole enterprise was set in motion, he got in touch with the island’s owners to get permission to land and the mystery of the tortoise was solved. He was indeed a pet and had a name, Sammy. Every summer, Sammy is let loose on the island and every fall he is picked up again. We wondered if perhaps the owners’ great, great grandchildren would still be transporting a 200 pound Sammy to his summer home in the 22nd century. Zdenka took a picture. Perhaps influenced by our recent foray to the Olson House, we thought of it as ‘Sammy’s World’.

Criehaven

Penobscot Bay, a little more than halfway up the coast and spoiled with picturesque islands, towns and villages, has a justified reputation as a premier cruising ground. The destination of choice for many cruisers coming to Maine, this year that was true in spades. Because of the pandemic, many more people seemed to be out cruising. Some were locals like us who had planned to be elsewhere but had never left, others came from neighbouring New England states, and there was a contingent of COVID-19 escapees from the Caribbean – while Europeans had sailed home across the Atlantic, many Americans had headed to Maine.

Bottom work at low tide, Winter Harbor

A happy consequence was that we were able to meet up with many friends. We perfected the art of socially distant sundowners in cockpits, ashore and, when we were with OCC members Cindy and Jeff Wisch – fleet surgeon of the Cruising Club of America who set an impressive example to us all – tied to the stern of their Oyster 53, Wischbone, sometimes with an empty dinghy as a COVID-19 buffer between guests.

A less happy consequence of the pandemic was the plethora of megayachts, an unusual sight in these parts. Normally these things go from the Bahamas or Caribbean to the Med, but this year they couldn’t do that so many of them came to Maine. Fortunately they seemed to mostly stick around the more ‘social’ spots – among them Camden and Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, which also have some facilities to support them – and only sporadically ventured out to the more pristine anchorages such as the islands of Merchant Row, near Stonington. ‘Down East’, the sparsely-populated easternmost part of the coast beyond Mount Desert Island, owes its name to the fact that it is reached by sailing downwind in the prevailing southwesterlies. Here, there are only a few fishing villages and the coast has a wilder, more remote feeling. Rocky and rugged, it can also be foggy, and this summer seemed foggier than most. In the old days – actually not that long ago – cruisers would often become fog-bound, unable to move for several days or longer. But with our chartplotter, radar and AIS we were able to navigate fairly easily even when we could hardly see past our bow. We often felt as if we were in some sort of video game.

In the fog ...

... but it doesn’t bother the lobstermen

The bane of our existence, in fact the bane of all sailors in Maine, was the ever-present lobster pots. Lobstering is such a lucrative fishery that lobster pots are ubiquitous. In many places they look like a multicoloured carpet and you don’t think there can possibly be room to steer through them. You can never really relax, and navigating among the pots in fog raises the anxiety needle pretty high. Nobody relishes the spectre of going into Maine’s frigid waters to free a tangled prop, or losing the ability to manoeuvre while being carried towards a ledge. Even anchorages are affected. When we arrived at the absolutely lovely Cows Yard we saw no clear spot to drop the hook. Finally, we anchored in the best place we could find – near a ledge, with about a foot under the keel at low tide. By next morning we had fouled three pots, which were wrapped around the prop, keel and rudder. It took a good, painstaking hour to free ourselves, but happily we were able to untie and retie the floats without cutting any of them.

Kite in Jonesport

Soon we were as far east as we could go. Another year, we would have sailed a quick overnight to Nova Scotia (where lobstering is not allowed in summer!) or continued up the coast to New Brunswick and into the Bay of Fundy. But this year Canada was off-limits with the border firmly closed.

The old lighthouse at Mistake Harbour

We anchored at Cross Island, an uninhabited National Wildlife Refuge. A lifesaving station, built in 1874 and long abandoned, still stands on Cross. The island has a large network of trails and it’s easy to get lost – in a good way. You would feel far away from it all were it not for the US Navy’s very low frequency antenna station right next door. It is huge, with two arrays of 13 antennas each. Each array has a central mast 997ft tall, surrounded by an inner circle of 875ft masts and an outer one of 800ft masts (304m, 267m and 244m respectively). The station’s job is to communicate with the Atlantic fleet of ‘boomers’, nuclear ballistic missile submarines (commanded by a corps of ageing captains?). We understand that in the event of nuclear war, this antenna station would be a primary target. It’s sort of a spooky spot, and you can’t help but wonder if all those powerful radio transmissions aren’t somehow scrambling your insides.

Cross Island, with the navy VLF station beyond

The small town of Cutler, the last decent anchorage before Canada, was our easternmost and last stop. Its narrow, attractive harbour is surrounded by houses and a pretty lighthouse sits on an island at the entrance. The harbour is full of fishing boats and moorings, but there is room outside the mooring field. Just after we anchored, we received a call on the VHF: “Vessel anchored in Cutler, this is IceBear. We have a mooring that you’re welcome to use, would you like it?” The boat name was a bit unusual, and Zdenka remembered that one of her best friends from university had recently mentioned a sister who was in the midst of a circumnavigation on a boat called ... IceBear? She answered yes, we would love to use the mooring, and by the way, was this Carol? After a stunned pause, the radio voice said yes, but how could you possibly know that?

And so we spent a pleasant afternoon on the porch of this welcoming couple’s house, overlooking the harbour. Amazingly, Carol had a stack of photos from her sister’s and Zdenka’s university days, memories of a happily misspent youth. IceBear, the handle Carol and her husband use when radioing visiting boats to offer the use of their mooring, was in Cape Town under COVID-19 lockdown. We have often been struck by how small the cruising world is, but even so, this connection surprised us all.

Jack with our new Cutler friends on their porch

We spent over three months on our leisurely cruise along the Maine coast. What began as a summer of dashed plans ended up being one of the best seasons we have spent cruising. And now, we’ll look forward to visiting Friendship again and picking up that lobsterman’s mooring, checking in on Sammy to see if he has grown and we know that we’ll have a spot in Cutler the next time we get there.