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First Passage
I’m from Maine, I live very close to the Penobscot bay, but I learned to sail in Kansas. That may seem ironic but if you’re a sailor in Kansas you enjoy an extended sailing season (compared to New England) and there is not much to block the wind! My Wife’s friend taught me how to sail on his Oday 222, so it seemed natural for my first boat to be a small trailer cruiser. I found a South Coast 22 at a local boat club that was screaming for me to buy it. After convincing my Wife that it was a necessity, it was mine. I sailed it whenever I had a spare minute.
After four years in Kansas my wife and I moved home to Maine. We missed our families, the pine trees, clear water lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. I continued day sailing with friends and family on lakes and on the Penobscot bay. I wanted to stretch one of these day sails into a cruise; I wanted to sail "someplace" not just "around". The passage I had in mind was a sail from Rockport (close to home) to Little Deer Isle (19 nautical miles across Penobscot bay). My Wife’s Parents have a camp right on the bay at Little Deer Isle. My Idea was to have my Wife drive to the camp with the boat trailer in case the weather turned bad (I asked if she wanted to go with me, but she declined) and I would sail to the camp and meet her and her parents there. I had a plan; I just needed a crew crazy enough to come along. This turned out to be my Dad, a retired Navy Pilot. His one request was that he not be put into a survival situation but I offered no guarantees. We set the trip up for a long weekend; we would leave Rockport on Friday morning and sail back from Little Deer Isle on Sunday.
The night before the trip we plotted our course on the chart and entered our waypoints into my GPS (I got it for free for test driving a Cadillac!!). The morning of our departure we loaded the gear into the boat and trailered it to the Rockport boat ramp. I set the boat up while my Dad brought the truck and trailer back to the house and came back in his car. We left the town dock around 11:00 AM, there was a little fog that was lifting but no wind. We motored with my new 5hp, 4-stroke for the first 8 nautical miles, but then the afternoon wind started to pick-up and we raised sail.
The sailing was great. The combination of the late summer sun and the breeze was perfect. The Atlantic ocean was just about at its warmest, warm enough for me to jump in and act as a human sea anchor for awhile (dangling from a line behind the boat while my Dad was at the tiller). Just another great thing about sailing is: not only could we see the porpoises that popped up from time to time but we could hear them clearing their blow holes and sucking in a new breath before dipping back below the water. We saw harbor seals and sea birds, and caught and released mackerel by trolling. The adventure of picking our way through the islands of the bay was a lot of fun. The give-a-way GPS worked great, it was neat to finally find out how fast I was sailing (the knot-o-meter on the boat hadn’t worked as long as I had owned it and I was never curious enough to try to fix it). It took about 5 hours to make the crossing. We sailed past my in-laws camp, raised the swing keel and the rudder and tied up at the neighbor’s tidal dock where I had made arrangements to leave the boat.
The rest of the weekend was filled with daysails with the family, lobster bakes on the beach, swimming and collecting shells. The weather on Sunday turned out to be great, we raised the sails about 100 feet from the dock after casting off and sailed the whole way back to Rockport.
The crossing was a great confidence builder for me. It was a nice way to hang out with my dad and I hope it was the first of many such cruises to the islands in the bay. If I can build some more experience without crashing into anything, my wife might even like to come along. Maybe the best part of the cruise is that I can call upon these memories on a cold February day like today and the outside temperature seems to climb a couple of degrees.
