Day 170 - Sun 13 Sep 2015
Moored – Rockland, ME

[photo: the partially-preserved lime kilns at Rockport]

Diane didn’t sleep past 0430 today for some reason, but I was happy to sleep in until 0630. She sat up in the cabin, feeling rather chilled, without thinking to put the heat on until I got up. It was cloudy and drizzling off and on, as we expected. The baguette from yesterday with some jam tasted mighty good with the hot coffee.

Despite the less than ideal weather, we cast off at 0830 for a one hour run in light fog to enter Rockport harbor and tie up at the town dock for a few hours. The weekend harbormaster explained that there was a very convenient washer/dryer located here, so Diane decided she wanted to get a load done. I took Clyde for a nice walk on the grass which he enjoyed but obviously wished that it wasn’t wet.

With one eye on the cat, I was able to view one of the small, semi-preserved steam locomotives that used to bring limestone from the nearby quarries to the lime kilns (also semi-preserved right near the harbor). The chunks of lime were burned at high temperatures in the kilns to force a chemical reaction that allowed the remaining ‘burnt lime’ to be pulverized and used as a mortar for building. Ships took hundreds of heavy casks of this burnt lime to seaports all over the east coast, but it was dangerous cargo for any contact with water could cause massive amounts of heat to be liberated and cause a fire.

There is also a stone sculpture of Andre the seal who was famous in Rockport and their harbor mascot and ambassador for decades until he died over 20 years after being adopted as a pup. Our visit started to go downhill when Diane came back from the laundry room to find out that the dryer was already being used - by the weekend harbormaster! It was almost 70 minutes later until she could get usage of the dryer, and then it took another 50 minutes to ‘mostly’ dry our load. Diane was not happy. In the meantime, we took a walk around the little town near the harbor. Almost everything was closed on a Sun morning, of course, but we still a nice little walk.

We had a hot lunch aboard of hot dogs and sauerkraut, retrieved the laundry, and cast off for Rockland. During that 2 hour stop, the ENE wind had built quite a bit and the waves were pretty uncomfortable on the beam as we tried to head S. I had to zig-zag a few times to keep the waves hitting the boat at a better angle. Fortunately, it was only an hour later and we were tied to the mooring that Ned had arranged for us. For the wind direction we had, it was actually one of the best places in the large harbor to be located, but we got rocked quite frequently and have to assume it was wakes from the ferries or other large boats. We couldn’t really see out the windows for all the condensation.

One disturbing realization was that we lost one of our larger fenders in the last run from Rockport to here. Diane swears it was tied onto the rail when we left Rockport, and she pulls all 4 of them up over the rail to rest on the deck after we depart a dock. How both ends got loose and the fender was lost is a big mystery. It is not a cheap item to replace, but not the end of the world.

We got the dinghy down and dressed pretty warmly (I still had shorts on, though) and headed downwind across the harbor to meet John and Laurie on m/v Mirto, a nice Nordic Tug. They are hoping to start the Down East Circle that we are close to completing and wanted to discuss things about the trip. It was a great visit on their beautiful boat and we know we’ll be staying in touch to share more information later on.

Around 1600, Diane was getting pretty cold and preferred to just head back to Diva Di for the evening. I really couldn’t blame her. As choppy as that part of the harbor was, I thought we would be soaked with spray, but we got back pretty dry. After settling in and warming back up, I cooked up some penne pasta to go with the meat sauce I had made the other day. It was a great meal to have on a cold and raw day. I know Mainers are not thinking this is too bad, but for Floridians, it is cold and damp.

A number of boats came in to mooring balls over the next few hours. Wherever they came from, it was not a fun time to be out there in the cold, waves, wind, and rain. We both read for a while and made it another early night. We expect a slightly warmer day tomorrow with less rain, and then several days of nice weather. We will get together with Ned and his wife, Carolyn, and get a taste of Rockland before moving on again Tue.