September 2, 2018
Our destination of Linekin Bay was only eleven miles away, so it afforded us a late start… something I thoroughly enjoy whenever possible.
However, heading nearly into the wind with very little wind, not to mention a plethora of lobster pots to navigate through, made for especially difficult sailing.
Even if we did get the engine shut off for a while, sailing through the pots quickly became exhausting and stressful. The autopilot was on standby; manually steering by hand was the only way forward.
Also, sailing inside a true wind angle of less than sixty degrees gave us very little ability to steer to the right to miss lobster pots without losing all our speed and steering as the sails luffed, or having to tack completely around to a different point of sail.
In the end, we found ourselves having to do a lot of motorsailing… those dastardly lobster pots.
And it seemed that, as we got closer to land, the numbers of lobster pot floats kept growing exponentially. It reached a point that it appeared they had been placed more with the intention of catching boats than lobsters!
We passed right by the very popular Boothbay Harbor without even blinking, precisely for the reason that it was very popular… more of a destination for the marina and mooring ball dwellers.
Our intended anchorage was Lewis Cove, just around the opposite side of Spring Point. It appeared that it would be much less crowded, yet still easily within walking distance of all the facilities located in Boothbay.
A sound idea… but we crapped out on the actualization of that plan.
In Lewis Cove, we were delivered three strikes – mooring balls everywhere, lobster pots everywhere, and low tide depths of greater than thirty feet anywhere there was a gap between balls or pots. We would have to find an alternate location.
After nearly an hour, we settled on a quiet corner of the bay further north… no lobster pots, no mooring balls in the immediate vicinity, and depths of fifteen feet.
Immediately suspicious and skeptical, we were wondering what we were missing. However, the anchor set perfectly and all seemed good. We had our own secluded spot, with very few houses along the shore and only a handful of unoccupied boats on nearby mooring balls. The only uncertainties were shore access and whether we were miles from any facilities.
A dinghy ride to one of the private docks netted us twenty two gallons of water, after gaining permission from a man of few words who didn’t seem to entirely get why we were anchored so far away from civilization without access to a car… oh well, free water is free water.
A bit further along we found a public dock with dinghies tied up to it. However, an exploration of the area uncovered only one small general store with nothing we needed. I passed on the $25 lobster roll.
Trying to give Dena and James all the space they needed to work things out, instead of being a distraction, we spent three peaceful nights at Linekin Bay.
During that time, we met a immensely friendly local resident named Charlie, who stopped alongside Exit in his dinghy. He gushed compliments at us for our choice of boat, pointed out that cruisers almost never anchor here as it’s so far away from anything, passed on information regarding lobster fishing as well as advice aimed at avoiding being fouled by the lobster pot lines, and gave us permission to fill up with as much water as we could hold using the spigot at the dock we had gotten water from earlier.
Once again, we were amazed at the hospitality and helpful nature of some people we stumbled across.
Even stranger was the exchange we had when we were visited by two women and a man rowing a pair of kayaks. They had seen our hailing port of Pullman, WA on the transom and couldn’t resist coming over to talk to us.
We were stunned to learned that the man and woman were actually from Pullman, on vacation in Maine visiting their friend (the third person). They had lived in Pullman for fifty years and, though we did not know them personally, we immediately recognized the street they lived on.
Then, as if that wasn’t enough of a small-world-holy-shit-moment, further conversation revealed that their daughter Jennifer and I had actually graduated in the same high school class! We have had some pretty bizarre crossing orbits in our travels, but that one has to be near the top of the list.
Later that afternoon, we received a text with the news we had been anxiously hoping to hear. Dena and James were buying a new boat. Woohoo!
We immediately decided to lift anchor the following day and head straight for Robinhood Cove, just twenty nautical miles to the west… right after filling our water tanks. Thanks Charlie!
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