Playing Tourists

We have had so much rain lately that the locals are starting to refer to this region as the Pacific Northeast. It rained Monday. We put the sticks (masts) up in the rain. High Monday was about 55º F. with fog most of the day.

Tuesday the yard crew wanted to work on our boat and get it ready for launch so we rented a car and took of playing tourists. We got as far North as Bucksport where we visited Fork Knox (NOT the one in Kentucky where Uncle Sam keeps the gold reserve). It was begun in the first half of the nineteenth century to keep the British from seizing the area again (they did it in 1779 and again in 1813). I’m a history nut and I used to be a cave explorer so I took along a flashlight and went crawling through the rifle galleries and magazines. Kathy and Star waited up on top and looked at the barracks and bakeries. The place was defended by several fifteen inch Rodman guns, rifled muzzle loaders with a range of about 5500 yards. The fort commands both branches of the Penobscot river.

Fort Knox is a pentagonal fort with two sides facing the water and three sides facing the land. Their main batteries face the water and nobody would try a frontal assault from that direction. To the landward, it looks like a big hill with stone retaining walls twenty feet high in places, but the real defense to landward is a "ditch" behind these walls about forty feet deep and about fifty feet across. with vertical walls facing into the ditch and every ten feet in either of these walls is a rifle slit three inches wide. The ides is that infantry that manage to get on this berm will find themselves without cover facing howitzers on swivels every few feet. If they jump or fall into the ditch, the men in these rifle galleries will shoot them. That ditch is intended to be a slaughter pen from which there is no escape.

The place is of granite and brick construction and must have been bloody uncomfortable in winter. The officers quarters were fairly primitive; the enlisted swine were rather less sophisticated and must have been very crowded and dark.

After spending enough time there we crossed over the new bridge over the Penobscot River. It opened last year and has an observation tower in the Western support tower with a veir of the area for about sixty miles. The old bridge is still standing, but I understand they plan to take it down soon.
From there, we drove on to Castine where we spent last July Forth and which we wrote about last year in this blog. (Kathy still moans "five and a half hours of history!" every time we mention it.) Dennett’s Wharf still has some fine scallops broiled in bread crumbs with a great view of the harbor.

We got home about 1030 and crashed.

This morning, we got up, bought groceries and took the car back to Enterprise before the deadline and resumed getting the boat ready to go in the water tomorrow. While Tuesday was fair and warm all day, Wednesday was back to fog and rain. I haven’t gotten a tan, but I do have a fine coat of rust. We are supposed to go in the water about high tide Wednesday which should be about 11:00 AM.

I don’t know if we’re having any fun yet or not.

Dave