Monday, August 7

19.9 Nautical Miles | The Basin, New Meadows River

After a seemingly interminable, dreary spring and early summer, the 2006 cruise was finally here! Unfortunately, the weather forecast for the first day out was for 15-20 knots increasing to 20-25 knots and a 70% chance of severe thunderstorms in the afternoon. I almost put off departure, but decided that I wanted to at least be on the boat, so I headed down to the club, arriving at 0815 to see how things might develop.

Rain and Clouds, Winds and Seas

Almost immediately upon arrival at the boat, it began to rain. Ugh. I had checked the radar before leaving however, and it looked like any rain would be short lived, and indeed, the NOAA forecast called for clearing, hot and humid conditions throughout the day. So while the showers moved through, I finished stowing gear and prepping the boat for departure.

Soon the showers began to abate and I tucked in a reef and headed out, leaving the mooring at 0920. I hadn't decided yet on my destination for the day, but had several options programmed into the GPS, and I figured I'd decide when I saw what the conditions were like once I got outside the islands. It had been blowing at 15+ knots all night, so I expected a bit of a sea.

Zooooom!

I had a generally fast passage, with a favorable SW breeze. Had a nice ride out through Chandler's Cove, along Hope Island, across Broad Sound and out to Little Mark Island, maintaining speeds of 5.5-6.5 knots the whole way. There was a real short, steep chop through the little passage at Little Mark, and outside the islands I found a relatively sizeable sea running. I'm poor at estimating sea-size, but since the horizon was well-obscured when I was in the troughs, I guessed that the seas were in the neighborhood of 5-7 feet.

I decided that since the seas were only likely to increase, I would take the inside route along Orr's and Bailey Islands to the Basin on the New Meadows River. I had wanted to take advantage of the favorable wind direction and get further along, but figured I would be exhausted if I tried to sail all the way to Harmon Harbor on the Sheepscot River.

I had a dead run down along Orrs-Bailey, then had a nice sail across Quahog Bay and over the New Meadows River. I ran down the river to the narrow entrance to the Basin and rolled the jib to head in. There was enough wind that I thought I might actually be able to sail through the narrow opening and into the Basin proper, and was nearly able to do so, but towards the spot where the entrance turns sharply to port I lost my wind and was getting rapidly set by the current that was racing through.

Wind? In here?

I fired up the engine and motored through the entrance and across to my normal anchoring area near the couple of moored daysailors. I set the anchor and put the boat away and looked forward to the first afternoon of relaxing. It was, after all, only 1300!

Over the course of the afternoon, I was amazed at just how windy it was in the Basin. I've been there before on relatively windy days and found that it was usually still in there, even when it was blustery out in the bays. Still, there was no more than a light ripple on the water, despite gusts that must have approached 25 knots, so there was little to worry about.

It turned out to be fairly busy in there with perhaps a total of 15 boats, or so, anchoring over the course of the afternoon. Of course, one boat had to anchor ridiculously close, considering how huge the anchorage is, then proceed to run their engine/generator for 2 hours. A minor annoyance, really, but sheesh... there's room for 100 boats in there. Why anchor on top of me?

Must be my rugged good looks.

I was lucky not to get caught by any major thunderstorms, some of which were reportedly quite severe, with quarter-sized hail and winds in excess of 50 knots. I did watch one storm pass just to the north. The lightning was mostly hidden in the clouds, and each flash lit the clouds up with a deep red glow. Quite beautiful.

Overnight the wind did abate somewhat, and around 0030 a weak thunderstorm passed through, with a couple of rumbles of thunder and moderate rain.