04/27/2008, Horseshoe Cove, Maine
And so begins a new chapter in our sailing life together. We are confident that GLORY will prove a more appropriate platform for a pair of active seniors than her immediate predecessor, GUSTO for which this blog was originally named.
Readers planning to cruise the waters of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton may wish to consult the previous log entries and photographs that provide a detailed record of our trip from Penobscot Bay to the Bras D'Or lakes and return in Aug-Sep. 2007 aboard GUSTO, a cold-molded custom 44' sailboat designed by Chuck Paine and built by French & Webb in 2002.
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09/15/2007, Seal Cove Boatyard, Horseshoe Cove, ME
Sep 13-14: It's hard to imagine a more perfect journey of 190 nautical miles from the friendly and helpful community at the Shelburne Harbour Yacht Club (SHYC) to a mooring ball in Seal Cove Boatyard's anchorage in Horseshoe Cove, GUSTO's hailing port and spiritual home.
Our three-day layover in Shelburne waiting for the wind to die down proved fortuitous, and enabled us to take advantage of a two-day weather "window" ideal for the overnight passage around Cape Sable direct to Bar Harbor.
I devoted considerable time synchronizing our departure from Shelburne to take advantage of the tidal currents that sweep around Sable Island daily in two 12-hour cycles. The Canadian Hydrographic Office publishes a slim spiral-bound booklet with a pale blue cover that shows the force and direction of the currents at hourly intervals based on the tide table for St. John's New Brunswick. My analysis suggested a departure time around 10:00 Thursday, which would place GUSTO just south of Seal Island and Blonde Rock (about 54 nautical miles from Shelburne) at 20:00, just in time to catch the northbound current that would power us and our companions aboard JOURNEY for four hours or more towards our destination. Happily, we would be leaving SHYC at the top of the ebbing tide as well.
Bill Walch and I compared notes on our respective calculations. Based on another set of tide tables, he had concluded that JOURNEY should leave around 09:00. So we had arrived at the same "ballpark," which was doubly comforting. Later that day, while underway, we would agree to alter our landfall from Bar Harbor to Northeast Harbor which would knock about twenty miles off the trip.
We motored out of the harbor under light and variable winds into a pristine and serene seascape punctuated by the occasional passage of fishing boats going to work. For an hour around noon, the WNW wind piped up to the mid-teens and we were able to turn off the engine and broad reach under working jib and staysail at 7-8 knots. I'm not sure why it took me more than 5 years to figure out that these two sails work beautifully in tandem, affording a double-handed crew an effective and more flexible alternative to a large genoa.
I'll digress momentarily to talk about sail selection. GUSTO's "rig" was intentionally designed to enable her to sail as a sloop (with either a large overlapping jib or a smaller, working jib on a Harken furler). With the installation of the detachable inner forestay and a hanked-on staysail, she becomes a cutter. You have to go forward to the base of the mast to hoist the staysail; the sheets run directly back to their own winches (via a pair of adjustable blocks) on the cabin top, however, and can be trimmed easily from the cockpit. When the wind blows hard (twenty knots or more) the staysail balances the boat better than say, a furled working jib. But when it's calm and you have to motor "close-hauled," you can leave the sail up, "centered" and trimmed hard, ready for a wind shift to a sailable tack.
The usual rap against the staysail is that it makes tacking the working jib on its furler difficult to impossible unless a crewmember goes forward to ease it around, and that remains true aboard GUSTO when the wind is light. When the breeze is right, the working jib has no problem getting around the forestay, in part because I'm using a single line as a jib sheet attached to the clew with a Tylaska spool shackle in lieu of the more usual practice of attaching two sheets with bowlines to the sail.
Instead of simply motorsailing to Brazil Rock and on to Blonde Rock before turning to a rhumbline course of 297 degrees true, I took a page out of Bill Walch's usual practice of "cutting corners." So we left these two usual waypoints to port and headed for the "intersection" between Mud and Seal Islands, where we arrived at 19:00, one hour before low water at St. John's. (Ashore to starboard was a "windmill farm" with 17 enormous towers harnessing the power of the wind.) Boat speed through the water was 6.67 knots and ground speed was 7.0 knots at the time, which confirmed that we were about an hour early vis a vis the tidal currents.
Actually, it wasn't until midnight at position 43 43.62N 66 44.83W that the positive "spread" between boat and ground speed maxed out at 2.4 knots. At the time, Janet was watching a "target" on radar which we identified on the AIS display as motor vessel, ZERIFOS on its way out of St. John's. The closest point of approach (CPA) would be 11.3 miles, or 57 minutes later assuming course and speed of both vessels remained unchanged.
Janet inquired about the difference between the relative bearing of the target on the radar display and the true bearing shown on the Nobeltec AIS display. She proved to be a quick study and a far more adept student of this important aspect of navigation than I had been three years ago, when I was single-handing GUSTO back from Halifax to Penobscot Bay - intensely sleep deprived - trying to convert the relative numbers on the radar screen to true or magnetic ones. Foolishly, I even tried to build an Excel spreadsheet from scratch to do the computing "automatically."
About 04:00 I overheard JOURNEY hailing the vessel, MAASDAM (plainly visible on our display, but not yet on radar) on channel 16 and conversing on 10. The Mason 33 confirmed with the modulated Dutch speaking voice on the "other end" that the cruise ship would pass the sailboat to starboard on its way to Bar Harbor. Thirty minutes later GUSTO crossed the Hague Line into American waters, but I figured I would wait until light to haul down the Canadian courtesy flag from the starboard spreader.
MAASDAM steadily became more visible from astern. It wasn't until I looked at her through binoculars that her solitary red navigation light became distinct from the welter of dazzling white illumination that seems to be the hallmark of the modern cruise ship. At 0500, the log reads "CPA: 2.4 nm; TCPA: 49 minutes." And so she came and went.
Around 08:00, I awoke from my third "power" nap of the voyage to an eerily tranquil morning and an empty sea. The wind had shifted to the south, and diminished to 3-5 knots. GUSTO was 14 miles from her landfall off Baker's Island, and lobster pot buoys began to make their appearance. An hour later I got on my cel phone and called Todd French, one of GUSTO's builders, and Chuck Paine, her designer.
I've gotten into the habit of calling these folks at the end of a long sea voyage to acknowledge once again their important roles in creating the magnificent vessel that's transported us on a thousand mile journey in comfort and safety. I left a voicemail for Todd, but caught up with Chuck, driving back from the Newport Boat Show. "I'm so delighted that you are really enjoying GUSTO," he said, adding that so many people build boats that don't get used nearly enough.
It was almost 09:00 when I called U.S. Customs at their special Maine reporting number in Houlton. I passed along the required information to an inspector, and said we were about 45 minutes out from the Northeast Harbor Marina, where I had reserved a slip the day before. He said I would get a call back from one of his colleagues with the time for our inspection.
An hour later we were moored to an empty dock at the Marina, operated by the Town of Northeast Harbor. As I inched GUSTO along side, I watched in awe and amazement as Janet tossed the one inch diameter spring line in her hand, snagging the tip of the mooring cleat on the dock. She calmly continued to pull on the dock line holding the 15-ton vessel in place. Leaving the engine idling, I scrambled over the side, seized the line and made it fast. We spent the next five minutes securing and adjusting the remaining three lines, and I gave her a "high five" and a hug for an amazing piece of seamanship.
As we couldn't go ashore, we unrolled the dinghy on the dock, inflated it and put it over the side. Around 11:15, two genial Border Protection Service officers, armed and ready walked down to the dock. They apologized for their tardy arrival, noting that they had been backed up with the arrival of MAASDAM in Bar Harbor. They completed the formalities in record time, and complimented us on GUSTO's appearance. So many people have new boats which they don't take care of declared one of the two, "even Hinckleys," he noted.
The day had turned into one of those halcyon days which come all too rarely during the Maine summer. Given the lousy weather prognosis for Saturday, we elected to make for Horseshoe Cove some twenty miles distant, and not spend the night in Northeast. We thanked the folks in the Harbormaster's office, cast off, and watched GUSTO do one of her now-predictable reverse turns to starboard (to port if you're facing aft with the tiller in hand). We motored the brief distance to Clifton Dock, took on 34 gallons of diesel to top off our tanks, and headed out to Western Way with a fresh breeze blowing from the southeast. We made the right turn that would take us over the Bass Harbor bar and eventually to the Casco Passage, Jericho Bay and the Eggemoggin Reach. Shortly after clearing the bar, we raised the main for the first time: I promised Janet that we would remain on asingle tack all the way to the daymark that guards the entrance to Horseshoe Cove.
It was a spectacular sail, once again proving the old Maine adage, "If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes." We had glorious sunshine until we reached the Passage, fog scaling up well into the Reach, partial clearing with the sun breaking through around the Pumpkin Island Light, and back to fog as we turned into the Cove. Along the way, Janet raised JOURNEY on our cellphone. They had just arrived in Northeast, having elected to turn off the engine, and sail the last three hours prior to making their landfall.
The mooring field was virtually empty, and as previously instructed, we picked up one of the two outer moorings. As I put GUSTO into a 180 degree turn to head into the wind and shoot the mooring, the depth display reminded me that there are still a few shallow spots in this anchorage. Janet deftly scooped up the pendant on the outer ball with a boathook and at 17:15 GUSTO was safely moored after a 190-mile journey that had begun thirty-two hours before.
We secured the working deck, detached the outboard from its traveling position on the stern pulpit, and lowered into the waiting dinghy below. We assembled a jumble of duffles and garment bags, dropped them, literally, into Mr. Wiggle's capacious "foredeck," and headed for the Boatyard's docks. It wasn't until the outboard emitted a roar of protest as the prop skipped over the bottom in several places that I realized how "low" the tide had fallen.
We tied up to the dock, newly attired with full-length canvas fender material, and struggled up the steep incline of the gangway past the office, and on to the shed to find our dust-covered SAAB ready to receive us. A half-hour later we stumbled through the front door of the Blue Hill Inn with that shambling gait favored by exhausted sailors, ready for a hot shower, food and drink.
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