Author: Larchmont Jim

August 25^th

“A man’s got to know his limitations” 

Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry) in Magnum Force

I am preparing for a 200-mile, 24-hour bicycle ride coming up on September 13^th from London to Paris, with a ferry crossing of the English Channel in the middle.  It’s a charity ride sponsored by my Firm.  I really need to be training up for that instead of messing around in boats.  So I spent half of yesterday getting in some major miles on the bike.   With 65 miles under my butt by lunchtime, I didn’t have the energy to go sailing in the afternoon.  So today I am really antsy to get on the water.  

The problem is it’s been blowing like stink out there since last night, so it may not even be doable.   At my house a mile inland it’s pretty blustery, and Windfinder is predicting 21-25 knots out of the northeast all afternoon. When it blows out of the northeast, there’s at least 50 miles of fetch for the wind to whip up some serious waves to funnel into the Western end of the Sound.

I head on down the cove to take a look and decide whether to give it a try.   When I get there I see the boats on the moorings porpoising madly, and whitecaps everywhere.  There are a few larger boats sailing out on the sound, and they’re bouncing around pretty well also.   But… the wind will be on the beam for a reach straight out and then I can reach straight back.  I really want to get out on the water. I also want to see how Grey Fox manages with the sail shortened to the max.  I get up my courage and rig up.  Besides, Dave, one of our club Laser sailors, is there rigging up, and if he can go out in this, I can go out in this. 

I tie in the third reef on my mainsail, which shortens the entire sail by 6 feet off the bottom.  The foot of the sail is about 11 feet long, so that takes ~60 square feet out of my 105 sq ft foot mainsail.   I also leave the mizzen mast sitting on the dock;  I only have two hands, for mainsheet and tiller.  Grey Fox will be a sloop today with only around 45 square feet of sail instead of its full rig of 122.

In the Northeast breeze, even though it’s howling just outside, the cove is wonderfully protected and I’m able launch the boat and then rig the sail dockside, jump in and go on a beam reach.  No rowing required.  In fact there’s such a wind shadow that it takes me a while to get the 75 yards to the mouth of the cove and clear the lee of the point.  Then – BAM!  THE FAN IS SWITCHED ON.  I’m immediately on the windward rail and hiking for all I’m worth.  The greatly reduced mainsail is manageable on a reach, although I still have to luff it a bit, but the boat is moving well.   Immediately outside of the cove, I’m in the full blast of the wind but still benefiting from some wave protection from the Larchmont breakwater a quarter mile upwind.

Sailing out further, I get out into the full waves and they are big! 4 or 5 feet with some of the tops breaking.  With only my 150 pounds as movable ballast, the closest I can sail to windward is a sort-of-close reach, and with that the waves knock down my speed and occasionally the top of one jumps into the boat.  There’s also a steady stream of spray coming over the bow and collecting in the boat. But my two hands are too busy sailing the boat to bail.  

Falling off onto a beam reach, the boat speed is exhilarating but the waves roll the boat pretty severely.  On one big roll the leeward rail dips under for a split second and a couple gallons of water join me, a sign that I don’t want to stay out here. It only takes about 3 seconds of water coming over the rail for the boat to just fill up and go horizontal. It doesn’t sail well in the horizontal position.

As detailed in prior posts, the Calendar Islands Yawl has plenty of flotation to allow for self-rescue from a swamping in not-crazy water.  This water is crazy. The guy in the Laser knows that if he capsizes, he can just right the boat and sail on.  Not so in Grey Fox. Were I to swamp the boat in these waves, there is no way I could self-rescue.  It’s also too rough for a rescue boat to come alongside and help pump out my boat. And even getting a tow with the boat full of water in these conditions would be dicey and dangerous.  At least it’s warm water and warm air, so I wouldn’t have to worry about hypothermia – for a while. . .

Having satisfied myself that the triple-reef works well and would be manageable but still tricky in 20-25 knots of wind but smooth water, I’ve recognized by now that all I want to do is get back to my dock in the little protected cove without a disaster.  As my salty old grandfather drilled into me as a kid, “Discretion is the greater part of valor.”

Because I can’t point the boat close to the wind and keep it upright, it takes me three tries to execute a tack from a reach and carry enough way to get the bow through the wind.  Once over on starboard tack, it’s a hair-raising but exhilarating sail.  I even get confident enough to bear off and get a couple awesome surfing rides down some of the waves. 

Once behind the breakwater, it’s a pretty easy sail the rest of the way in. The wind is still howling but the waves aren’t breaking over the rail. On the way in and just about when I gain the lee of the cove, a friend on the dock snaps this picture of me and the Fox.   Note the mainsheet in my teeth, in true dinghy-sailor fashion.

Moments later I was alongside the dock and able to relax.

Note to self:  It was good to learn what the boat can handle with max-shortened sail in case you get caught out in some wild conditions, but if it’s that wild before you start out, you’re better off just staying on land for the day. 

Another month has gone by and I manage one more blog post. It’s actually mid-September… So much for real-time journalism. But let’s get caught up.

July 27th. Another beautiful day.  Blue cloudless sky, and a little warmer than yesterday.   I could be forgiven for believing that every summer day in Maine is like this!  Well, let the reverie continue because this is pretty awesome.

Most of the fleet is anchored in the Reach either right off the Reach Knolls campground or just around the corner in the Benjamin River harbor, having finished yesterday’s sail and dropped anchors right here.  While I returned to Herrick Bay yesterday afternoon on Elyssa, today I’ve found a berth on Centennial, a 20-foot Banks dory that has been decked over and rigged with a sloop rig. I met Centennial’s builder/owner/skipper Dan Noyes of Newbury, Mass at dinner last night, and he graciously offered to have me crew on his boat today.

Centennial has some history behind it, as it’s a replica of the first boat ever to be sailed singlehandedly across the Atlantic.  That occurred in 1876, when a Gloucester fisherman named Alfred Johnson modified a garden-variety Banks dory, the most basic of utility boats of that era and employed heavily in the inshore as well as the Grand Banks fishing trade, to be suitable for a transatlantic passage.   (As if any 20 foot, centerboard wooden boat is suitable for a transatlantic passage…) He set off from Gloucester, Massachusetts in June, 1876, survived a major gale that capsized his boat, and finally made landfall in Wales in August 1876. 

Mr. Johnson must have been viewed as something of a lunatic by his Gloucester neighbors.   But Captain Johnson knew that a high-sided banks dory, loaded down with a thousand pounds of fish, was a pretty stable and seaworthy craft, and with a deck built over it to shed water, could handle all kinds of rough water.   So he adapted a 20-footer (a large dory even in those days) with a watertight deck, a centerboard, several hundred pounds of stone ballast and water tanks, and even a well for the skipper/helmsman/crew/extra ballast to stand our crouch in to keep weight low and keep semi-dry. It was the centennial year of US independence from Britain, so he named his craft Centennial.

After breakfast I get my gear together, hand the car keys to John, who will be sailing on Elyssa again today out of Herrick Bay, and head down to the shore to get aboard Centennial.   The rowing-only boats of the SRR fleet are doing a yeoman’s job ferrying the sailors out to the anchored boats, and I grab a lift out to Centennial.  It’s easy to spot, as Dan has painted the broad dory planks of his boat in great swaths of red, white and blue.  

Dan and his regular crew for this SRR, Pike (his former high school rowing coach) are already aboard and rigging to sail.  I stow my gear and Dan hoists the sail, raises the anchor and we’re off.

Dan’s boat is impressive.  It is completely traditionally built, pine planks on sawn oak frames, with a white pine deck. The sail is old-fashioned cotton canvas and all the lines are manila or hemp.   Dan has been a stickler for authenticity in building his replica 1876 boat.  I ask him how he learned the skills to build it.  “Well, I grew up around Newbury north of Cape Ann around boats, and I worked for 6 years at Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, Mass. building dories, skiffs and other traditional small boats. Then for a while I was building boats on my own commercially.  Eventually I got a more conventional job.  Building Centennial was old hat for me, except that I had to do it on nights and weekends so it took me almost a year.”  (Or something like that… I was not sailing with a voice recorder). Kudos to Dan for building and sailing the real deal.

At 10 in the morning the wind is still light to non-existent, and we start off by mostly drifting rather than sailing.  The current is ebbing to the Southeast down Eggemoggin Reach, so we move in the right direction even if we’re not sailing much at all.  It takes me a few minutes to get comfortable on the boat, as unlike most of the SRR boats where you sit pretty low in an open boat, on Centennial you sit on top of the deck, and the boat is among the highest-sided boats in the fleet.   So despite the 600 pounds (if I remember correctly) of lead ballast that Dan has in Centennial, it’s a little tender with all the crew weight up on deck, and finding a comfortable sitting position takes a little doing.

Before long the wind comes up from the East and we are making nice progress tacking back and forth up the reach, with at least a knot of current pushing us upwind.  Since we kind of got a late start we are mostly viewing the other SRR boats from astern. 

After a couple of hours of tacking back and forth up the passage between Torrey Island and the mainland, we make it to today’s lunch rendezvous spot, which is the sandy beach on Babson Island, across the harbor from the WoodenBoat School waterfront.   Babson Island is owned by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and is a real gem with its beautiful (and at low tide, large) sandy beach and spruce-fringed interior.   Since we arrive just before low tide, there is plenty of room for the SRR fleet, and the beachfront boat museum is as impressive as ever.

Someone tells me not to miss the amazing fern meadow in the interior of the island.  Following the other lookie-lous to a trail at the end of the beach, I walk about 50 yards into the woods and then into this:

That’s not grass, that’s a huge open meadow composed entirely of ferns.   Well worth the short walk!

I have been freeloading for three days now on other people’s boats, so the least I can do is offer a “cool refreshing adult beverage” to captain Dan and crew Pike.  Dan is happy to accept a beer from my small cooler and we enjoy lunch in the shade of Babson Island’s spruces, on the beach made of crushed seashells. 

With our small beer supply exhausted and with most of the fleet already on their way back towards Herrick Bay, we pack up and get back on board Centennial for the afternoon sail.  By coincidence one of the other boats getting underway about the same time is Elyssa, and I get the opportunity to snap a photo of the two boats I’ve sailed on at this year’s SRR, together.  

The wind has moderated while we were ashore, so we’ll be ghosting for a while here as we make our way through Naskeag Harbor and around the point to turn into Herrick Bay.  Dan entrusts me with the helm and the navigation, which is great.  Thanks Dan!  Keeping a close eye on the chart, I note that there are some rocks named “The Triangles” right in the middle of the passage between the mainland and Hog Island that are not marked by a buoy or a daybeacon.  Not wanting to find those rocks, I tell Dan that I’ll hug the shore of Hog Island since there’s good water right up to the island, and that will keep us well clear of the rocks. 

While we are sailing in the light air, we see a nice cruising sailboat coming the other way through Naskeag Harbor.  It’s going to pass to our port, not more than 100 yards away.  When it gets close I can see that it’s a Hinckley Bermuda 40 yawl, a beautiful boat and one that is considered one of the finest fiberglass cruising sailboats of its era – the 1970s.   This one is in great shape.  It’s under power with its jib and mizzen flying, and mainsail furled. 

The calm of the afternoon and the light breeze is interrupted with a gut-wrenching CRUNCH! as the Bermuda 40 hits the rocks and lunges up out of the water, then remains pinned on the rocks with its waterline at least a foot out of the water.  I would guess it was going 5 knots when it hit the rocks, so it did a bit of climbing.  OUCH – it hurt to hear that, even more to see it occur up close and personal.  Well, the B40 is a well-built and sturdy boat, and he probably hit the rock with the lead of the keel, so hopefully no major damage was done.  It’s low tide rising, and they are in protected waters with no chop running and no real wind pushing them farther up on a lee shore.  So if they just sit tight and wait for the tide to lift them off, they’ll be ok.  Still, that was a horrible experience I’m sure for the skipper of that boat. As we pass I note the homeport listed on the transom of the B40:  Houston, Texas.   I guess in the Gulf Coast area if you hit the bottom with your boat, it’s not very hard.  In Maine, the bottom tends to be some pretty immovable rocks…

As we pass through Naskeag Harbor, an active lobster fishing harbor, Dan decides it would be great if he could buy some lobsters for tonight’s dinner.   As we sail by a handsome looking lobster boat that just made its mooring and has a long line of lobster “cars” (floating cages) strung astern, Dan inquires if they can sell him any.   The deckhand aboard the lobster boat replies “sorry, we’ve finished pulling traps and I can’t sell you any lobsters now” but points to a boat outside the harbor still working traps and says “check with her—she’s still pulling and might be able to.” So as we sail out towards the point and into Blue Hill Bay, we try to get near the working lobster boat.  As we near the lobster boat, Dan pulls out a greenback from his pocket and waves it, hoping the universal language of money makes it clear to them what we are looking for, as it’s a little windier and they are a bit too far upwind to hear us. The crew on that boat also signals that they can’t sell us any lobsters.  There must be some rule in Maine nowadays that the fishermen can’t sell retail off their boats.  It’s OK, as Dan will be able to buy lobsters cheap in Brooklin on the way back to the campground.  Me, I just signed up for the lobster dinner provided by the SRR caterer tonight at the event closing dinner.  

We round the point and have a great downwind leg into the anchorage at Herrick Bay, and drop the hook close to the Atlantic Boat dock to make Dan’s recovery of his boat tomorrow as easy as possible.   Another fantastic day small boat sailing in Maine… it doesn’t get any better than this!

Well, it could… what if the Swedish Bikini Team just happened to drop in…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtnMtrEB1-I (obscure and completely incorrect reference to a 1980s Old Milwaukee beer ad)

Bikini team fantasies aside, it really doesn’t get any better than this.

July 26^th

Ok, so it’s really August 20th, and I am just getting around to posting something that happened a month ago. I have no future as a live blogger. But since I have no mass of followers eagerly awaiting my next pronouncement, I guess it’s ok. Most of my posts are composed from airline seats, when I have captive time on my hands to write. Today’s trip is from Mexico City back to New York, plenty of time for another post.

After two glorious days of warm, sunny and dry weather, it would not be surprising that Maine’s reputation for fog, cold and rain might catch up with us, but today is yet another perfect day to get out on the water.  There’s not a cloud in the sky, and the forecast is for light winds in the morning but maybe a bit more breeze in the afternoon. 

Today’s plan is for the fleet to set out from Herrick Bay and rather than do an out-and-back sail to some lunch spot, to make a one-way trip up the Eggemoggin Reach and anchor for the night just off the shore where the group is camping for the four days at Oceanfront Camping at Reach Knolls. For that to work, the fleet needs the tides and currents to work with us rather than flushing us down the reach just as we’re trying to make our way up it (up here being to the Northwest, or from Jericho Bay towards Penobscot Bay).  We also need a docile forecast for overnight, as the proposed anchorage is totally open to the Reach and would get dicey in any serious wind.   Fortunately the SRR Race Committee has that all figured out and the weather and tides are all lined up in our favor. 

I use the term “Race Committee” in jest; the organizers of SRR are as salty as can be, know these waters like the back of their hand and are very focused on the safety of the fleet.   But there’s no real racing at SRR, and not one of the organizers is sporting the traditional race committee garb of tomato-soup pants and blue blazers that you might see on the committee boat of, say, a New York Yacht Club regatta.  Of course, you don’t see any megabucks racing machines, kevlar/carbon sails or trophy 2nd wives at SRR either.  (Tom Wolfe called the latter “x-rays” in The Bonfire of the Vanities” because they were so thin that you could see their bones). 

And the competitiveness of the sailing is good-natured and not so serious:  on a downwind leg in super-light wind on a previous SRR, I saw the crew of one of the Caledonia yawls get out a couple of big beach umbrellas they carried and use them as spinnakers… this caused a nearby boat to cry foul for the unauthorized additional sail area, but I don’t recall a review of the purported foul by a Race Committee jury, no 720’s were performed, and the offending parasolers were not ejected from the day’s sail. 

I’m on Elyssa again today, and so is my erstwhile Grey Fox crewman John, so the longest boat in the SRR fleet might have the biggest crew today as well with six people.  Rather than make the one-way trip and anchor overnight off Reach Knolls, Susan plans to return to Atlantic Boat this afternoon.  That’s fine with me and will actually have us doing more sailing as the one-wayers.  The plan is to sail to  Campbell island on the south side of the Reach and just off of Deer Isle and anchor for lunch, then most of the fleet will make the short leg from there across the Reach to Reach Knolls, while a few boats will return to Atlantic Boat. 

The wind is once again ultra-light in the morning, and we’re on the late side of the fleet in getting underway, so we lag most of the other boats.   It’s a patience contest all the way out of Herrick Bay and past Naskeag Point and Smuttynose Island into the eastern mouth of the reach.  Then we find some wind and make good time in the smooth waters in between the islands lining the south side of the Reach.

As we are a little late to the lunch spot, and have longer to go to get back to Atlantic Boat than the boats going to Reach Knolls, rather than anchoring or rafting up with some of the boats already on their lunch hooks, we just sail through the fleet a few times while Dave experiments with a 360-degree video camera that he has just bought for the SRR.   We get some funny looks, as Dave’s camera is at the end of a 3-foot pole and he looks like he is chasing an invisible butterfly with a net, so we yell at the other boats to smile and look nautical for the camera.

After buzzing the fleet we head into the Reach and then eastward towards Jericho Bay and Herrick Bay.  The wind has kicked up to around 10-12 knots, which is when I would be tying in a reef if I were sailing solo on Grey Fox, but Elyssa is a much heavier boat and handles this kind of wind perfectly.   I have the privilege of steering for almost the entire trip back, which is just great. The sailing is such fun that we’re tempted to just keep on sailing all the way over to Pond Island before turning around to head back to Atlantic Boat, but we don’t want to hold up the chase boat crew that will be acting as yacht club launch ferrying crews from their moored boats to the dock, so we take a more direct route back.  

Another perfect day of sailing. 

The stroll down the beachfront small craft museum that is lunchtime at SRR, combined with a careful perusal of the SRR fleet guide, reveal some of the leaders in this arcane corner of boat design. I counted the following number of boats in this year’s SRR by designer. Here’s the hit parade:

#1 Iain Oughtred: 13 boats. The Australian/Scottish old man of the sea is the clear granddaddy of glued-lapstrake traditional small boats. He was a pioneer in glued-lapstrake construction, and a prolific interpreter of classic boat styles into glued-lapstrake plans and kits. In this year’s SRR fleet there are 8 Caledonia Yawls, an Arctic Tern, a Ness Yawl, a Penny Fee, a Fulmar, and a John Dory. Wow!

#2 John C. Harris of Chesapeake Light Craft: 7 boats, including 3 Northeaster Dories and 2 Skerries. CLC is the volume leader in this little niche, and is probably responsible for turning more complete tool-newbies into boatbuilders than anyone else. My first sailboat build was a Northeaster dory, and the first rate kit parts (including all the solid timber pieces, pre-cut, milled and planed) and super-detailed instruction book made it easy to turn out a beautiful, high-quality boat. John has excelled in rendering classic boat types such as the Swampscott dory and the Whitehall into damn-close replicas with much-simplified “LapStitch” construction.

#3 John Gardner & Howard I. Chappelle: 5 boats (not counting the many other designs they inspired). I’ll group these two names because they were the guys who recorded the lines of all of these old small traditional craft so that we could re-create them after all of the old ones rotted away. They weren’t designers, they were preservationists. I think it’s safe to say that the Traditional Small Craft Association, and all of us traditional small craft nuts, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Gardner’s and Chappelle’s work.

#4 Michael Storer: 5 boats, all Goat Island Skiffs. The Aussie designer was onto something when he designed this poor-man’s racing & daysailing dinghy. He kept the design simple, inexpensive and super easy to build (all flat plywood panels). With its light weight, hard chines, nearly flat bottom and prodigious sail area, it’s fast as can be until big chop makes the flat bottom suboptimal. It probably doesn’t row as well as some of the more round-bottomed boats, but life is a series of trade-offs.

#5 John Welsford: 3 boats — a Navigator, a Pathfinder, and a Scamp. Welsford’s designs are built for cruising, and have more features incorporated for cruising than a lot of the other totally-open boats. At 12 feet in length, but with a cuddy cabin and ample freeboard, the Scamp must be the smallest pocket cruiser in existence that really deserves the name.

I’ll stop counting at #5 but mention just a few other names. I was surprised not to see more Francois Vivier designs. They are beautiful and highly traditional in inspiration, but innovative in their construction design. The usual 2 or 3 Ilurs that have graced prior SRRs weren’t present this year…

I was disappointed not to see more Clint Chase designs, but that was partly my fault because one of them is Grey Fox and we didn’t manage to get the boat to Maine. Clint was represented by one of his Deblois Street Dories, and as kit-provider by some of the Goat Island Skiffs, for which he is the kit-cutting agent in the USA.

And the Chuck Paine-designed Norseboats were the most prevalent factory-built boats in the SRR fleet. They seem to combine a traditional-inspired hull design with some decidedly modern features including a high aspect full-battened mainsail and a cockpit dodger. One even had a bimini top.

One of the coolest things about the SRR fleet is the incredible variety of boats. You could (and I did) learn a lot by scrutinizing the details of design and construction of all of these boats. And one of the most impressive things about the fleet is the quality of workmanship in the boats. Many of the owner-built boats are just gorgeous, and benefit from a level of detail in the finishing of the boats that would be beyond what is economical for a production boatbuilder to do– certainly for a small boat that wouldn’t have a market if the price were too high.

July 25th

John and I are in Maine and managed to get in a great day of kayaking in Merchants Row, and now the Small Reach Regatta is about to begin. 65 or so small, mostly wooden, mostly owner-built sail-and-oar boats getting together for a rendezvous and to share their quirky love of old-fashioned small, slow, motorless boats. On Wednesday night we joined the opening dinner under the big tent at Oceanfront Camping at Reach Knolls in Brooklin, hard on the shores of Eggemoggin Reach.

After dinner the organizers gave a briefing of the next day’s events, where the fleet was going to sail, who’s in charge, safety procedures, etc. When it came time for questions and announcements, I raised my hand and announced that we were two hardy sailors with good intentions but were boat-less, as my boat is hard aground back in New York on the broken trailer. We had come anyway, sans boat, and were “looking for a ship”. Would anyone take a couple of lost sailor souls on board?

Thankfully, Tom Jackson, who is the head honcho of the event, introduced us to a couple of folks who expressed their openness to taking on crew, or ballast, and we confessed our willingness to be either as long as it got us out on the water.

John lined up a ride with Gardner Pickering on his Caledonia Yawl. At 19’6″ and with a wide beam and lifeboat-like volume, the Caledonia has room for lots of people. Even better, the Iain Oughtred-designed Caledonias are beautiful, notoriously fast in almost all conditions but especially in the light air we’re likely to see today, and probably the most numerous model of craft at the SRR. I think there are seven of them in this year’s fleet. Gardner and his Hewes & Co. millwork and cabinetry shop in Blue Hill, Maine is the exclusive agent for cutting Oughtred’s CNC kits in the USA, so John will surely learn a lot about the design and maybe the building process from Gardner.

I got a berth on a unique boat in the fleet, Susan from Massachusetts’ 22′ “Elyssa”, designed by Roger Long and built by Paul Rollins in 2011. Susan refers to it as a yawl dory, but I don’t think it is either of those; the large size and fairly far-forward placement of the mizzen makes it a ketch rig, and it does not have the flat bottom, wide planks and tombstone stern I associate with a dory design. It’s more like an stretched salmon wherry, with a strip-planked hull below the waterline and traditional lapstrake above, and a wherry-shaped wineglass transom stern. I’m guessing the beam is about 5 feet, so it’s truly stretched, almost like one of those limousines. That’s great for me though, as with my addition we’re five souls on board, but not at all crowded into this big and beautiful boat.

The wind is all but nonexistent as the fleet weighs anchor from Atlantic Boat in Herrick Bay, Brooklin (on the Blue Hill Bay side) and heads out towards today’s lunch destination: Sellers Island, a 1-acre Island at the eastern entrance to the Eggemoggin Reach. Sellers is one of the many islands in the region that have Maine Island Trail (MITA) campsites on them, and last time I was there we camped overnight and had it all to ourselves. Today, 65 SRR boats will descend on it for lunch! It’s a good thing that it will be just about low tide when we arrive, as otherwise there would not be enough exposed beach to handle all those boats.

With little wind, our trusty crewmate Christophe moves the boat along under the “ash breeze” (oars).

After an hour of rowing and drifting, a slight breeze comes up and gets us – slowly – to Sellers Island. The beach there is already crowded and at about 2,000 pounds, Elyssa is not a boat you want to be hauling up and down the beach with the tide, so we anchor and wade ashore. The sight of the whole fleet from the water with the island as backdrop is truly impressive:

In addition to snarfing down our picnic lunch and a beer, we spend a good part of our lunch break walking up and down the beach inspecting all the other boats. It’s a veritable museum of small craft, most of pretty traditional styles including Banks dories, Swampscott dories, double-enders inspired by Shetland Islands yole boat designs, Penobscot Bay salmon wherries, Maine Peapods, and Whitehall rowing boats. There are also a few more modern designs, the most popular of which seems to be the Goat Island Skiff (five of them). While a number are built in the traditional lapstrake manner, with cedar frames riveted or screwed to oak frames (including Elyssa), the large majority are traditional shapes rendered in modern epoxy-plywood construction.

Trailer sailors aren’t stupid, and they recognize the advantages of this method of building, which produces a 100% watertight boat that doesn’t need to “swell up” in the water, doesn’t suffer from going from in the water to onto a trailer, is probably 50% lighter than a similar sized traditionally built boat, and — perhaps most important, or at least most causal of the preponderance of these boats at SRR — is much more easily built by an amateur knucklehead with no real boatbuilding skills, no access to good boatbuilding timber, and limited time available to spend building a boat. You know, a knucklehead like me.

After lunch, the fleet shoves off / weighs anchor for the sail back to Herrick Bay. With a bit more wind, we’re able to move along better and the sailing is delightful. Surely sailing in Jericho Bay on a crystal clear day, with the big hills of Mount Desert Island looking in the distance, is about as good as small boat sailing gets…

Or a Lemon Margarita.

July 24th. Brooklin, Maine

Having pitched our tent and set up our palatial screened-in sunshade/gazebo in the dark, we awake to an absolutely gorgeous day in Maine and nothing that we have to do.  No boat to get into the water, and – unfortunately – no sailing to do.   As I lie awake in my sleeping bag contemplating whether to get up, I overhear the campers in the next site talking about kayaking.  That’s the idea!  I hadn’t thought of that but here we are near some of the best sea kayaking territory on the East Coast, and I know exactly where we can rent some kayaks to get out on the water before the rest of the Small Reach Regatta arrives.

Motivated by that idea, I jump out of the sack and get a start on the day.  I associate civilized camping with good food – no freeze-dried eggs or canned stew for me – and that means I’m cooking up fresh coffee, eggs and bacon on our little butane stove. 

After a leisurely breakfast we head off to the Old Quarry Campground in Stonington on Deer Isle.   I had used Old Quarry as a launch base for a cruise in my dory several years ago, and it’s ideally located right next to the myriad Islands of Merchant Row south of Stonington. I also knew that they rented pretty good kayaks.  By a little after noon, our butts are in kayaks and we are headed south across the Deer Island Thorofare towards Merchant Row.  The day is spectacularly perfect for paddling, with very little wind and a cloudless blue sky.  

Merchant Row encompasses at least 30 small Islands flung out on the water like a giant’s marbles all the way between Deer Isle to the north and Isle Au Haut to the south.  A well-known paddler’s paradise, the Row has the highest concentration of Maine Island Trail campsites anywhere along the coast:  something like 8 sites within a 3 mile radius.  We’re not camping on this day trip, but we can see why this is the place to go kayak camping in Maine. 

After passing several Islands we land at our chosen lunch spot, the gorgeous sand spit between Devil’s Island and Shivers Island.   (You really can’t beat the names of these Maine Islands… in addition to these two, later in the day we would pass Hells’ Half Acre, Wreck, Bold, Bare, St. Helena and Crotch Islands, among others.  I wonder if the ghost of Napoleon lurks on St. Helena. And on the chart, Crotch Island is shaped like a – well, use your imagination.

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The sand at our lunch spot is made entirely of broken bits of seashells, the water is Caribbean clear, and we have a captive view of what little boat traffic goes by on Jericho Bay, making for a most inviting scene for lunch and a snooze.

After lunch we skirt Devils Island and then Spruce Island, where John is intrigued by the huge monolithic granite shoreline and the enormous glacial erratic boulders sitting there like dice left behind by some geological giant.  We pull up right on the sloping granite shore – no beach here – a maneuver made possible the incredibly smooth water, and get out of the boats to poke around.   John even finds a lawn chair sitting on the granite.

Back on the water, we head south to McGlathery Island where a couple of sailing yachts are anchored. Then I spot a large vessel anchored to the west and we decide to go investigate.  As we draw nearer we see that it’s a REALLY big yacht, with a sleek and classic design that is either quite old or a new boat designed to look right out of the 1930s.   As we get up close I am dazzled by the mirror-smooth and gleaming Navy-blue hull and the brilliant varnished brightwork.  It’s the motor yacht “Marie”, which according to her transom hails from Newport Rhode Island, and she is flying a New York Yacht Club burgee.  I comment to John that “that’s a big chunk of change floating there” and he replies “$20 million, you think?”  Probably not too far off, judging by the size (I guess 120 feet) and the quality of the workmanship (immaculate).   The photo of John in his 16-foot kayak next to Marie gives a sense of scale.

A little post-paddle internet research reveals the identity and history of the vessel: Known until recently as Acania, Marie was built in New York in 1930 by Consolidated Shipbuilding for the silent film actress Constance Bennett. Over the years she has had several owners and served duty as a submarine echo finder during WWII. In 1995 a new owner rescued her from a scrap yard and did a complete overhaul while keeping as much of her history and original features intact. I will say that the restoration was wonderfully done.

From there we thread our way through more of the many gorgeous Islands in Merchant Row, heading north until we get into the Deer Island Thorofare just in front of the town of Stonington.  Then an easy paddle down the Thorofare brings us back to Old Quarry.  A wonderful day in a truly fabulous and beautiful marine playground!