Weather Variable

The weather here is showers and sun, fog, rain and then clear again. Winds are running north east, then back around to the south west. Because there is still work to do before we can have the masts stepped, the boat stays in the shed today.

The weather, while variable, has clearly moved into summer. The air just smells different. Even though it gets cool, the rain is intermittent, and not for days on end. The locals say they had a cold, wet spring that kept them all indoors.

Boat Progress

To help conserve our fresh water we are having a handpump which feeds saltwater to the sink. The idea is to use the salt water for everything we can, and save the fresh water for drinking, cooking and final rinses on clothing. The only thing is that to do this we have three choices: 1) run a water line from way forward on the port side where the head takes in saltwater; 2) connect a fitting to the engine water intake (water cooled diesel engine uses salt water through a heat exchanger) or 3) drill another through hull and connect to that.

Option 1 has us leaving a seacock open all the time that we don't normally leave open, and the potential for leaking somewhere down the length of the hose is a concern. Option 2 has the potential to interfere with the correct functioning of the engine. So we go with option 3.

Although I am not wild about another hole in the hull, I think this is likely to be the least trouble. We will just have the yard guys put the through hull where we can keep an eye on it for leaks, in addition to a good valve and proper connections. Our experiments with just dropping a bucket over the side last year showed us why that was not likely to work well for us. We nearly lost the bucket and a crew member over the side.

I made several copies of the scaled drawing we have. I plan to go through what we have aboard and make notes on the drawing tonight after the yard crew goes home. We try to stay out of their way so they can just get things done. (The rate goes up if we watch, more if we help. )

Plant notes

The rain and wind have finished up almost all of the azaleas and apple tree blossoms. Just a few straggly petals clinging to branches here and there. The blossoms on the moutain ash (rowan) have gotten quite white as the flowers open out. If the weather is kind, the tree will have enormous clusters of red orange berries in late summer or fall.

In places the medians and verges have been mowed. The remaining plants are a bit more noticeable as a result. Lupines blooming along the hillside above the ferry terminal parking lot peer above the grass around them, so all I see are the flowers. Several weeds that look more like chrysanthemums than anything else are popping up all over. They are likely to be small herbaceous shrubs about 2 feet across, if they don't get pulled up or mown down.

Memorial Day updates

Along with much of Rockland, the public library was closed Monday for Memorial Day. Sunday was warm and sunny, a bit hot even, but by Monday morning the clouds had returned. The sun came out again in the evening, along with the mosquitos.

We went aboard the boat and removed everything we could from the lockers to help speed up the work. We should be in the yard tomorrow, to have the masts stepped, and hope to be in the water by Friday. We plan to take a couple of days to doodle around the harbor, making sure everything is working before we head out.

Looking at the prevailing winds in the Atlantic Ocean, the run to England is likely to be easier than the run to Bermuda.Our routing service says a front is expected over the weekend, with a small low peeling off of it. This would make the winds more favorable, at least for the first 100 miles or so. Otherwise, we are likely to spend the entire trip heading towards the wind for the most part, which is less comfortable sailing. Looking at the current marine data for the Southern Region of the Atlantic, I see wave heights in the 5 feet and less range for the area along our course, so I do not expect a lot of heavy seas.We will see what we get when we are out there.

When I have felt the need to be productive I wander around the boat yard talking to people and offering a hand. So far I have helped scrape barnacles off the bottom of a skiff, and washed down a schooner before its launch. I hope to start more serious work on our own boat tomorrow.

Spring In Rockland - Plant notes

We have been watching the progress of spring in Rockland. When we first arrived I was not paying a lot of attention to the flora. Being on foot means we see more than we would if we drove.

In the nine days we have been here I have watched the maples go from waxy translucent leaves as they open to full dark colors. The red maples are particularly lovely. The public library has a few varieties of maple with different shapes of leaves, some more finely divided than others.

The lawn of the library has a scattering of violets across it, and when the sun shines you can smell their sweet scent. The apples have moved from bud to blossom, with some of the first flowers fading away. I have seen at least two different apples: one with large light pink flowers, the other with smaller blossoms and a darker, almost red flower. Since these are both in areas where they are probably planted as ornamentals, I expect they are some form of crab apple.

I only noticed the European mountain ash tree yesterday as we were leaving the library. It is about half grown, and the flowers are just beginning to show white, which is what finally caught my eye. The last of the tulips are fading. Tulips were quite abundant when we arrived, mostly tall Darwin types.

We don't have azaleas back home. Our soil is too alkaline for them to survive. While I would not say they are common, I have seen several here that are doing well. The sight of a bush covered in pink flowers is remarkable to my desert born eyes.

On one of our trips to the grocery store we passed a tree with large leaves and tall spikes of white flowers. I am not sure if it is a Horsechestnut or a Buckeye, but the picture of the horsechesnut flower is really close to what we saw. I am reminded of a delphinium flower, but standing up from a tree branch. This is the first time I recall ever seeing this flowering tree.

Another first was spying the pyracantha hedge in bloom. I am used to seeing them covered in orange berries, but do not recall ever seeing them in bloom before. I suppose this might actually be a variety of cotoneaster, but the leaves and stems (including some wicked thorns) look like what I always called firethorn. The little flowers were a light buff with rosy edges, and felt like wood shavings rather than flower petals. Eighth to quarter inch hemispherical bells.

Along with all the painting going on to start the summer season, the shops along Main Street are planting out window boxes. Most of the flowers are things I recognize (pansies, gazania, geraniums) but there is one I have no idea what it is. All along the front of one store is a series of window boxes planted with a short, grassy looking leaf. I am wondering if it is a miniature dianthus, or perhaps some form of cypress rush. I doubt we will be around to see it bloom, since we are hoping to head out by June 4.

A Friday of Mixed Weather

The day dawned bright and sunny, shading to rain and then mist in the afternoon. Today's rounds included the NAPA parts store for a special vice-grip to deal with the propeller shaft, a run to the boat parts store for pieces parts to attach the fancy radar reflector, and our nearly daily run to the library to update the blog.

The boat has some of her fittings reset: the bow and stern pulpits, the portlights (windows) which are rectangles with rounded corners on this boat. The hand rails (wooden rails for hanging on to both topside and below decks) will have to wait until Tuesday. I am not sure what else is done, having not been aboard to see.

We are making good use of the library card, both with the computer access and checking out materials. We spend at least 2-3 hours every day walking, some days a bit more. The local cab company charges $5 for a ride in town, so when we have more groceries or boat parts than our two hands can carry, we call the cab. Not too bad for a couple of suburban rats trying to make it work without a car. Besides being too cheap to spend the money if we don't have to, the exercise is good for us. We also get to know a lot of people just by running into them on the street.

We talked to the boatyard folks. They tell us it will speed their job up if we can get everything possible out of the way, so our plans for this weekend are to remove all of the equipment and stores from the boat, go through and repack to go back aboard when the work is done, and just generally stay out of trouble.

If the weather is fair, we thought we would don our life jackets and take the dinghy for a spin around the cove. We nearly frightened the wits out of the boatyard crew with our antics the first year we had the dinghy, and we thought we ought to get some practice before we need to use it in Bermuda.

I think there is supposed to be a parade, probably on Monday. If we have not found anything else to do, we will watch that. We know several of the people with boats in the water, so I expect we will spend some time talking to them about how their work is going. I may even catch up on my correspondence. It would help if I had remembered all of my address book.

Launching boats

Watched the yard crew launch 6 boats in just a few hours today.

The tide has to be up to have enough water for the boats to go into the lauch slip. Otherwise the water is too shallow. They had to move some boats to get to the ones to be launched. With a pretty full yard it reminded us of one of those puzzles with pieces that slide with one missing from the pattern. You have to move this one over here, so you can move that one, etc. There probably wasn't that much shuffling, but the travel lift with a boat on the slings is a great big piece of equipment and something of a marvel.

The lift moves out on tracks that run alongside the launch slip. Once it reaches the far end, the slings are lowered until the hull touches the water. Just before the boat is floating free, the slings are stopped and the boat is checked for leaks. It is much easier to pull a boat out if it is still positioned on the slings. Once the check for leaks is completed, and the engine is started, the slings are lowered until they hang quite below the hull, leaving room for the boat to motor on out to the docks.

Watching one boat launch is interesting. Watching six in a row is amazing.

The paint is not quite ready for us to be tromping around on. The weather here has been intermitantly raining, which slows the curing process down. At least Fiddler has been moved into the middle building where we can visit while we wait. We hoped to be doing more detail work aboard by now, but sometimes these things take longer than planned.

Things to do in Rockland, Maine

Rockland has a number of events throughout the summer season. One of the big ones is the Lobster Festival, held the first weekend in August. While we have made it to the festival twice, we will not make it this year. There is the North Atlantic Blues Festival, which we will also miss, but just barely.

Mostly we just wander around town, talking to whomever we find who can spare a few minutes and see the sights. Being on foot, we are a bit more limited in where we can go in a day. We are both finding it gets easier with practice.

Places to visit: the Farnsworth Museum has works by various Wyeths.
The Maine Lighthouse Museum (which has since moved into a new building closer to Harbor Park) has wonderful exhibits of lighthouse lenses.
The Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse is out on the end of a mile long granite breakwater built to protect the harbor from stormy seas. For the runners in the crowd, there is a 7.5 mile "Light to Light Run" starting at the Owl's Head Light and ending at the Rockland Breakwater Light June 18. (We should be just leaving Bermuda to come home.)

Schooner Dreams

Where we are staying we have a bird's eye view of the yard. We have been watching schooners rig and fit out for the season. Masts and booms going up, sails getting tied on to the various parts that hold them. Signs with boat names being repainted and rehung on the boats.

Watching the setting sun gleam off of the bright work and the gilding on the signs of the schooner Olad was a lovely end to a day.

Not the end of the working day for many of the schooner captains. They are getting ready for the tourist season, which starts Memorial Day weekend, so they are putting in long hours getting ready. They saw our lights go out around midnight, and they were still working. Oh, the delights of the small business man.

Explaining "Step the Mizzen Mast . ."

I forget how much vocabulary we have picked up since we started sailing. Someone asks what does it mean to 'step the mizzen mast on a steel hulled yawl.'

A yawl is one of many styles of rigging a boat. What a rig is called depends upon the number of masts, the relative heights of each mast, the sails and placement of each on the boat. For a yawl, you have two masts: a main mast forward which carries the larger sail, and a mizzen mast further towards the stern which is usually smaller. The difference between a ketch (which is how Fiddler is set up) and a yawl is how far back the rear sail is relative to the rudder post. If the rear sail is in front of the rudder post, the boat is a ketch. If the rear sail is behind the rudder post, the boat is a yawl.

There are all sorts of other variations in sail plan which all have their own names. If that were not confusing enough, the individual sails have names depending upon the type of rig and where the sail is in the sail plan. It reminds me a little of learning all the names at a large family reunion. Trying to keep track of who is related to whom. I will see if I can find links or references to share.

Hull materials vary. The classic boat is wood planks attached to a wooden frame. Modern boats are often made of fiberglass, steel and even concrete as well as wood. While I expected US Naval vessels to be made of steel, I was a little surprised the first time I saw a steel hulled pleasure boat. The lines are a bit different, and the angles made by the plates gives the vessel a distintive look. I have yet to see a concrete boat that I am aware of, but I am assured they exist, and not just for the concrete conoe race (something like the Kinetics race.)

To step a mast is to place it into the socket made for it on the boat, frequently called "the mast step". On this particular boat, the mast step is a square socket that just fits the foot of the mast. When we arrived, the mizzen mast was laying out on the deck. The captain had taken the main sheet (the rope and block that control the main sail boom) and tied it on to the mizzen mast a bit above halfway up. This gave us a line to hoist the mast and control its descent into the step. We had five people: the captain and his wife, me and my husband, and the hand hired to run some of the electronics. With three down by the mast step, and two of us up on a work platform, we raised the mast from the deck until it was vertical, then lowered it down as the folks by the step guided the foot into the step. The recent rains had swollen the mast slightly, so it was a tight fit and took some fiddling to get it to go in.

A Lazy Tuesday

Slept in a bit today, and took our time getting going. I rummaged around in our luggage trying to bring a bit of order to the chaos. Remade the bed into a sofa sort of a thing. Gives us a place to sit, and makes the room look more tidy.

Around noon we painted the dinghy "yacht white" and gave the rest of the quart of paint to the yard, since we have no good way to store such a thing. (Earlier we gave half a box of bronze boat nails to one of the schooner captains for the same reason.) We made and effort to seal all of the seams and joins between sheets, as well as fill the edges of things where the plywood shows cracks. Mostly along the edges of the knothole fillers, and a few long wise cracks in the surface of the bottom. I get the job of painting around the name so as not to obscure it.

Spent time wandering around the yard watching other folk working. With a slightly windy, dry day lots of people were painting: several of the boats, the yard folk painting the dock house office, and the city crews repainting the fireplugs. I note that the crosswalks are almost invisible at this time of year, noticeable mostly by the marks along the curb indicating the ends. We wander along until we find one, then look at the local architecture until a break in traffic comes along. While the law says drivers have to stop for pedestrians in the cross walk, this early in the season most folks are out of practice.

A late cup of coffee and a half a sandwich at the Rockland Cafe, then off to the library for updates. I have a list of writing projects that I brought with me, and I may finally unwind enough to get started on some of them.

We packed quite a lot of the more fragile material with clothing to save space. We found the fleece lap throws last night, as well as getting the pillows pulled out of the boat between coats of paint, so we have a more comfortable bed and I was not cold at all last night. We are getting quite domestic in the loft. I have thoughts of consolidating and rearranging all of our stuff so we have fewer containers to handle when we move aboard.

For tomorrow: we expect the mounting brackets for attaching the reflector to the mast, and I may get the gear rearranged.

Monday's work notes

The only thing we had on the list we could do was to patch up the dinghy where it got scuffed last year helping to pull someone off of the rocks in the mooring field. A few minutes of mixing epoxy paste, filling the scratches and we were done.

The news for the boat, we will get to move aboard Thursday. We have pillows and such so our bed should be a little more comfortable than it has been. Now, what to do for three days?

We spent the rest of the day visiting with folks in the boatyard, walking up to the grocery store for some non-perishable provisions, and generally hanging around. Still looking for that third hand, and we may have another lead. We'll see how it turns out.

Looked into getting a card to the local library. Two options for those of us from away: $10 for three months (temporary card) or $25 for a year. We went with the temporary card. The public library is a wonderful resource for travelers, and the libraries in Maine make good use of their resource sharing.

A Not So Quiet Sunday in the Boatyard

The boatyard being closed because it was a Sunday, I expected it to be a quiet day. However, the yard is quite full of boats in winter storage and a lot of people were working on their boats to get them ready for the summer season.

We saw two commercial schooners getting rigged for the tourist season, which starts over Memorial Day weekend. Lots to do. We helped a fellow step his mizzen mast on a steel hulled yawl. We watched crews dance around with rigging and sails, and work on hulls for painting. We watched three children take turns running each other, then their father, up the mast on the bosun's chair. Interesting process, not quick. I look at that and mark it down as another reason to be sure everything up the mast is in as good a shape as possible. I have no interest in playing human tetherball.

Since it was a nice sunny day between spring rains, we also took advantage of the day. A walk to the other end of main street for our daily visit to the boat parts store, and back to the yard with a snake of rub rail to attach to the dinghy, along with a one pound box of bronze boat nails to do the attaching with. It took us most of the day, but we now have a nice canvas covered rub rail around the top edges of the Jack G. Jackson, which looks a great deal better than the hot pink and bright yellow swim float noodles we had been using.

About the time I began to wonder about lunch, a woman came by with a tray of sandwiches left over from a wedding to give away. Her timing was perfect. We were just taking a break to go look at some of the wood work on the schooners.

We met the current owner of the Sea Dog. Her previous owners, whom we met in 2004, sold her when they went to China. The people in the boat yard are as varied and interesting as the vessels they operate.

Today's plan: Repair the bottom of the dinghy where it got gouged last year, then repaint.

Fitting out Fiddler

The boat is currently sitting in the paint shed, drying. The paint shed is a large building lined in lights and fitted with a killer ventilation and filter system to allow whole vessels to be painted at one time. The painting was scheduled for earlier, but the shop guys found some water damange on the deck that needed to be taken care of first.

We will now have a light gray non-slip, which I am told will look pretty sharp.

The rest of the weekend we will go through our gear in detail, catch up on reading and correspondence and generally kick back.

Monday all of the fittings that were removed to paint will be rebedded, and we should be in the yard by Tuesday to have the masts put on. Most of the MUST DO list is complete, and much of Would Be Nice list, too. I am working on a my provisions list, which is actually an ongoing process. We add things that sound like they might work and take them off when they don't work out.

Somewhere in this whole process we will start stowing gear aboard and figuring out what needs to be done to secure everything for sea.

Travel Notes

We took the train from home out east from Denver to Boston.

Starting out from Denver several hours later than scheduled, we had a sleeper car. Not a lot of room, but at least a place to sleep, and a door to close on the rest of the world. Meals are included with the sleeping accomodations. We dozed and read during the day, watching the scenery and the changes in the land from the flat fields of western Nebraska into the rolling low hills of eastern Nebraska and Iowa. The stop closest to noon Tuesday was Creston, Iowa.

Met several interesting people on the train, traveling to and from graduations and visiting relatives. The big news was the 'rock star' - a fellow with mid back length blond hair and an impressive collection of jewelry. I have to admit that I never heard which band or bands he played with, but he was good with all the children who swarmed for autographs.

We changed trains in Chicago to another sleeper car of a different design. Single story which gave us more room per compartment, with an overhead lugguge space that helped with our 10 pieces of carry-on luggage. Yes, I said 10 pieces. Between the sextants (2) and the musical instruments, then a change of clothes each and our travel papers, we had 10 items. Plus the one large duffel of clothes we checked. Need to plan better on the return trip.

Reached Boston, only to find that the hotels were pretty full, and we decided that for $169 a night, we would push on to Portland. We arrived with just enough time to collect our gear from the train, but tickets for the bus and board. We arrived in Portland, spent the night and caught the bus for Rockland the next day.

Noon position - Rockland, Maine

Noon position - Rockland, Maine - fitting out

Noon position Portland Maine

Noon position Portland Maine

Noon position Creston Iowa

Noon position Creston Iowa

How we got this far

Largely with the help and encouragement of a lot of people. We have added links for many of them. We are quite sure we have missed some folks, but to all of you we say

Thank You!

Gordon Bok sings songs of the Maine coast ( and other places) and was our first introduction to Maine.
Knight Marine Service provided our first ground level view of the Atlantic Ocean in Maine and continues to provide boat yard services as we go along.
John Foss and the crews of the American Eagle have been excellent hosts when we have sailed with them, and have answered a fleet of questions.
Victoria Sailing School was the first of several schools we have taken classes from.
Pete Conover and Bay Island Sailing School added to our skills. Particular thanks to Terry Moore, who has helped us learn to work together as a crew.
We met Mike and Julie Rogers on board the American Eagle in 2001 and have followed their progress with the Jenny Norman.
Blue Water Sailing School taught our Offshore Passage Making courses, 8 days between Ft. Lauderdale Florida and St. Georges Bermuda with Capt. Ted Wheeler.
Pope Sails & Rigging our appreciation for advice and assistance as we configure our rig for offshore sailing.
Good Old Boat magazine has useful articles on how to fix just about anything. Jerry and Karen Powlas write for those of us who own boats with a few years on them.
Lin and Larry Pardey, with their go small, go simple and go now philosophy have encouraged us to move forward with our sailing, and find ways to make it work.
The folks of the Starboard Home Chronicles have provided inspiration by example.

A portrait of Fiddler

Beginning

Initial entry. We are still in Denver making arrangements. Fiddler is being repaired. We plan to head for Maine in about a week.