After Cruising on the American Eagle

Rockland Harbor
August 8, 2007

Well, it’s been more than a week since I sat down and wrote anything. We’ve been out on the American Eagle for a week letting Captain John Foss do the navigating and Rick Loaleo cook our meals. Then after being pampered silly until last Saturday morning, we were set loose in Rockland for the last two days of LobsterFest, Rockland’s big celebration of/for tourism.

It being impossible to find a motel room within 100 miles during this shindig, Dennis Stockwell kindly gave us shelter on his boat, Sky Breaker, which is confined to dry land until he can re-do the planking or else figure out a way to seal it up. Every two years or so, a wooden boat needs to have its planks examined and a few of them replaced. This is one of the reasons why fiberglass hulls have become popular. Anyway, Dennis has taken pity on us and kept us from having to find a bridge to sleep under until we could get back to Fiddler.

As you may recall, we left Fiddler in Stonington at Billings Diesel and Marine having her fule sustem cleaned out and improved. To get back to Stonington, we contacted Pennobscot Island Air Service, who, for a very reasonable fee, picked us up at the boatyard and took us out to the airport where they put us and our junk aboard a Cessna 206 (a beefed-up version of a Cassna 172) and flew us over in about twenty minutes.

It was an amazing experience flying over to Deer Isle at 2500 feet. We could see from Castine in the North to about Portland in the south and this whole area we’ve been sailing about in looks so compact and small. Of course, tripping along at 120 knots instead of 5 knots may have had something to do with it. Having flown Cessna 172s in the Air Force back in my salad days, I had the feeling that the poor thing was being held aloft by the bigger engine alone as a result of being burdened by our three lard-butts and our gear.

Upon descending, the pilot stuck the plane in what looked like a section of abandoned secondary road about 1500 feet long. We were unloaded at the terminal (a one-room building which was unlocked) while Billings Diesel sent a nice lady out in her car to collect us.

We got back to Fiddler about 1:00 and settled in. The work was done, bt the bill was not yet compiled, so we spent the evening trying to figure out what to eat for dinner, since we’d emptied the ice box before we left.

Along about 4:00, the sky got dark and then a squall hit us. The wind was howling straight down the dock we were on and Fiddler was bucking like a colt so I calmly(?) got off and put on a second set of dock lines and in a couple of hours, the cold front had passed and the fog settled in. We later found out that back in Rockland, the wind gusts had been about 55 knots and the catamaran of some people we know had been dismasted. She was still sitting on her mooring when we got back to town on Tuesday afternoon looking forlorn and unhappy.

On Tuesday, we went up to Billings’ office to face the music and pay the piper. To our amazement, the bill was only two thirds of the estimate, a nice surprise.
When we listened to the weather forecast, the rather thick fog was predicted to burn off about noon and was supposed to be moderate all of Tuesday and Tuesday evening, but to be foggy, rainy and windy Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. If we wanted to leave, Tuesday was the day. We fueled up and got the hell out of Dodge.

We motored across, wanting to test out the new fuel system. It worked flawlessly and we got across Isle Au Haut Bay in about 1 ½ hours, drove down the Fox Island Thoroughfare without incident, only to hit a cold wall of thick fog as we came out into Pennobscot Bay. Oh well, we’ve been in fog before. The GPS gave us our headings and we chugged across, blowing out foghorn all the way to the mid-bay bell buoy where the fog abated and we made into Rockland and picked up a mooring about 6:00 PM.

We all went ashore and ran off to the grocery store for ice and food (and booze) and ate dinner aboard about 10:00 PM. The New York Yacht Club is in town for their biannual do and we watched them showing up in everything from small (like ours) thirty foot boats to huge chartered and professionally crewed ships. They ignored us and we talked to the professional crew who were more to our liking anyway.

Today (Wednesday) we awoke to thick fog and rain and we all of us said "screw it!", slept in and spent the afternoon reading novels. A good time was had my all.