Horseshoe Cove

Wednesday we set out from Buck’s Harbor down Eggemoggin Reach to get to Stoneington for the night. We changed the fuel filter before we left the harbor and motored back west a couple of inlets to a lovely place called Horseshoe Cove. This long, narrow inlet is full of ledges. When we called the boat yard about the spare filters, the gentleman on the phone said to not follow the chart as it was not particularly accurate in this case, the ledges having been put on the chart more or less at random. Our instructions were to follow the markers, favoring the green one as we came up the channel, go up the middle of the mooring field and pickup the first available mooring. We were NOT to try and reach their dock. They would send a boat out to meet us with the filters.

After passing by the inlet the first time, we turned around the small island at the mouth and worked our way up the channel. The first ledge by the day marker at the entrance looked very odd to me before I realized that what I was seeing was a small group of seals laying about splashing around on the rocks in the shallow water. The tide was falling and when we came out the seals had moved on to another rock awash and were laying about splashing about with their flippers the in the shallow water. They reminded me a lot of small children playing in the wading pool.

This all seems a little odd because we often see seals pulled clear out of the water sunning themselves on rocks, or for that matter what ever they can find, but they usually just lay there and look at you as you go by. It is not unusual to see a seal lounging around on some of the navigation buoys.

The channel was plenty wide enough and we never touched anything but water, but with all the rocks visible it was a bit nerve racking for me. As we approached the final set of markers in, a boat heading out told us the channel was to our left, which was where we were heading. As we pulled past the final set of markers, a fellow in a dinghy with an outboard called out "You here for some filters?" We said we were. "I’ll send someone out to you." Just a few minutes after we got onto the mooring, another small boat comes motoring up with our three fuel filters and change. We dropped the mooring and made our way back out to the big water, back past Thrumcap Island and its attendant ledges and headed down south east through Eggemoggin Reach.