It's been quite a while since my last update; we've been enjoying ourselves too much to have time to write about it, and a lack of serious breakage has stifled the need for furious spells of whining.

Last I wrote we were in Annapolis. We headed north on July 18 and did a fairly rapid transit to Gloucester, Mass about a week later. We re-traced our route through the upper Chesapeake, the C&D Canal, Delaware Bay, the coast of New Jersey, New York, Long Island Sound, Newport, and then direct from Newport to Gloucester. It was a pretty uneventful passage.

We kicked around the Salem/Marblehead/Gloucester area for about a week before leaving from Marblehead for an overnight passage to Northeast Harbor on Mt Desert Island in Maine. As Maryann has already written, we had dense fog approaching the Maine coast. It was indeed eerie, ghosting along on a nearly flat sea, avoiding the lobster pots and anxiously avoiding other boats and hoping we were where the GPS and chart plotter said we were - Maine is full of hard granite ledges at or just below the surface and it would really ruin a day to run into one of them.

We spent over a week exploring Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, and the rest of Mt Desert Island before my son Erik joined us. We'd had cold and foggy and drizzly weather from the time we arrived in Maine until the middle of Erik's visit when it finally turned clear and a bit warmer. We spent the week exploring the islands around Mt Desert, including Little Cranberry, Long Island, and Swans Island. It was truly gorgeous cruising. The scenery is spectacular, there are many sites to see, and the distance between islands short.

There are, however, hazards to cruising in Maine. There are over 3 million lobster traps in Maine, and each trapline has 2 or sometimes 3 buoys. Sometimes it seemed as if the sea was carpeted with lobster trap buoys. We didn't do too badly, only running over and severing 2 buoy lines, and snagging 2 others. Our line cutter on the prop shaft kept us from wrapping potwarps (the line that goes to the trap) around our prop twice. There's a sharp thunk when it happens, giving everybody aboard a momentary fright. We had a longer-term fright the 2 times (inside a couple of hours!) when we snagged a potwarp and were dragging the line of traps behind us. In one case I actually had my (very thin, tropical) wetsuit half on, ready to dive in and disentangle us from the line. Luckily in both cases the lines dropped away once we stopped our forward motion without a need to jump into that 58 degree water.

Lobstering is at an all-time high here in Maine, and it seems nobody knows if it's sustainable or not. The government biologists say it's isn't; the lobstermen say it is. If you are truly geeky enough you can find a copy of The Secret Life of Lobsters and read all about it. It was particularly interesting to read since it centers on lobstermen living on Little Cranberry Island, which we visited.

Little Cranberry and Great Cranberry were once noted for their many mosquitoes, so around the turn of the century they drained the bogs to eliminate the mosquitoes. The cranberries never returned, but the mosquitoes did. Even late in the season we had clouds of mosquitoes at dusk, and obnoxious flies day and night. Not enough to seriously dampen our spirits, but annoying nonetheless.

We had a visit from Maryann's daughter Julia and her husband Morgan for a long weekend after Erik left to return to San Diego. Nice to have visitors, especially to share the beauty of the Maine coast. Also nice to have privacy again in our little living space after they leave.

After nearly 3 weeks in and around Mt Desert Island we left for new cruising grounds. We went from Mt Desert Island through Eggemoggin Reach to Castine on Penobscot Bay, stopping at the Wooden Boat school along the way. Though never particularly interested in wooden boats, it was fascinating visiting the school. Almost made we want to try building a wooden boat!

We spent time wandering about Castine, Camden, and Rockland in Penobscot Bay. Camden in particular was nice as the weekend we were there they were hosting the annual Windjammer Weekend. That was somewhat balanced by the hordes of tourists. Castine has the Maine Maritime Academy and some lovely old homes and a lot of history (including the worst naval defeat the US ever suffered prior to Pearl Harbor). Rockland, though a pretty industrialized town, has the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Maine Lighthouse Museum. So all in all we had a pretty enjoyable time for our last week in Maine.

We left Rockland earlier in the week, with the intention of sailing overnight to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. Unfortunately, our autopilot decided to go nuts on us. We were headed downwind in a stiff breeze, would get a gust, and the boat would head up. The autopilot would turn the rudder to correct the movement, but then would overcorrect and with the overcorrection would then overcorrect wildly in the other direction. Out of control oscillations which were only stopped by steering manually. We didn't feel much like hand steering for 20 hours, so we reversed course and pulled into Tenant's Harbor. Next morning we talked with the Raymarine customer service folks. They suggested recalibrating the autopilot which we did; that seemed to fix the problem, so we proceeded on to Provincetown.

We'd been to Provincetown out on the far tip of Cape Cod previously, so didn't spend a lot of time wandering around. It is an incredibly touristy place, but still fun to walk about, have lunch, and people watch.

The day before yesterday we left Provincetown for the Cape Cod Canal and Wood's Hole, with the goal of heading on to Nantucket Island for a couple of days exploration. We made good enough time, though, that we kept right on through Wood's Hole and on to overnight in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard. For old farts like us, it was interesting being on a mooring between Martha's Vineyard and Chappaquidick Island, where Ted Kennedy drove off the causeway years ago, most likely erasing his chances of ever being elected president.

Though we'd wanted to spend some time in Nantucket, tropical storm Hanna changed our minds. The remnants were predicted to pass over southern New England early Sunday morning, bringing torrential rain and wind gusts up to 50mph. Given the center of the storm was forecast to pass over Nantucket we decided that Newport Rhode Island would be a better place to ride out the storm. So yesterday we left Edgartown after refueling and headed for Newport. We had a wonderful sail with a bright, sunlit day, sparkling sea, consistent wind, and mild seas. We arrived in Newport yesterday late afternoon and picked up a slip (an expensive slip - I think Newport is the most expensive yachting destination on the east coast!). We'll park ourselves here until the storm passes, hopefully by sometime tomorrow.

Finally, for those keeping track, in the past month we've had surprisingly little breakage and very few maintenance jobs. Oil changes on the main engine and generator and filter changes on the water maker were pretty much it, other than a mild fright about dirty fuel which necessitated changing fuel filters. But in thinking about it I'm almost certain we switched to an empty fuel tank and simply ran of diesel fuel and did not really have dirty fuel; sometimes you can get confused managing 4 separate fuel tanks. I can't say how nice it is, though, not to have things breaking left and right.

We are hoping to spend a couple of days in New York before heading to the Chesapeake again. We'd like to spend a week or so anchored off the tidal basin in Washington D.C., then plan to return to Annapolis once again where we'll see if we can't get the boat in condition to sell. We've both decided we're mediocre sailors at best which precludes long passages across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans and costs are going to keep us from continuing this life style for much more than another year. Given we've heard it'll take up to a year to sell we need to get her ready. We're hoping get some interested parties passing through the Annapolis boat show the 2nd week of October, folks that are going to have sticker shock when they see new boats on display. After the boat show, presuming we don't get an interested buyer, we'll head south once again, how far south and for how long is yet to be determined.