During the first week of July, Heather and I had some friends visiting from Atlanta.Jay is a sailor, and I thought it might be nice to get him out for an overnight. Plus, that would allow Heather and Tanya and the kids to spend some quality time together without us guys in the way. So we decided to take a Monday-Tuesday cruise to one of my favorite locations—Snow Island. It didn't take much twisting of Tim Lackey's arm to get him to agree that an overnight might be enjoyable, so he agreed to join us for the trip.

Dinghy Nightmare

The plan was for Jay and I to head out and pick up the boat, then meet Tim at PYC at 1000. But when Jay and I arrived at the town landing dock, the dinghy was no where to be found. After making a couple of trips up and down the docks to be sure the dinghy really was gone, I called Heather to alert her of the problem, registered a complaint with the harbormaster, then called Tim to figure out what to do. After some discussion, we decided that the best thing to do would be for Tim to go back home and get his Fatty Knees dinghy. What a pain! But that seemed to be the only solution, if we were going to go sailing.

Meanwhile, Heather's father, who lives aboard their Hans Christian 38 in the harbor, came by in his dinghy. Apparently Heather had called him to let him know what had happened. Gerry ferried Jay and I and all our gear out to Dasein, then went off to search the local area for our boat. He was able to find it "hidden" on the far side of a private dock about a half mile towards Cumberland. It was pretty beat up, with one of the rope handles torn free, but it was still floating, so he brought it back to the town landing for us. I figured that I had sent Tim home for his dinghy, so we might as well use that one. Its nicer anyway. So it turned out that Jay and I arrived at PYC at the same time Tim was launching the dinghy. He rowed over and stowed his gear, while we griped about the hassles of the town landing.

A Pleasant Trip

Soon we were ready, and despite the apparent calm, we set off. As is my habit, we hoisted the main and motor sailed in the light air. We headed out past the north end of Clapboard Island, motored out to Chandler's Cove, and headed between Chebeague and Hope Islands. Even though there was no wind, it was a nice enough day, with some high thin clouds overhead. We continued on out into Broad Sound and up past Little Mark Island.

As we approached Little Mark, there seemed to be a bit of wind building, and soon after we passed the Island we unfurled the jib and killed the motor. The breeze was light at maybe 10 knots, but we were close on the wind and had a nice beat up to the entrance to Quahog Bay. We then reached off for the long run into Quahog Bay to our ultimate destination of Snow Island. Very enjoyable!

Relaxing—What Else?

Once we got past the ledges at the end of Pole Island we dropped our sails and motored into the harbor to investigate our options for the evening. After some discussion, I decided to pick up one of the many destination moorings in the area. Snow Island is suffering from the ubiquitous proliferation of destination moorings, which take up the prime anchoring real-estate. But I was pleased to see the mooring we picked up—a very nice one I might add—had a large yellow sticker on it. Investigation revealed that this mooring was "Unpermitted, and will be removed by the Town of Harpswell on July 16, unless suitable permitting is obtained." Wow, nice! It was heartening to see that the town is taking steps to stop the destination mooring trade.

After putting the boat away, we broke out beers for the weary sailors, and Jay suggested that an awning might be in order. He was burning in the hazy sun, and Tim and I were getting a bit pink as well. After a bit of rummaging about, I was able to improvise a crude awning with a very bright quilt that my great aunt had made some years before. We laughed pretty hard at how un-yachtly the awning was, but we had to admit that it worked! Plus, it kept the other boats in the harbor from coming too close—perhpas they were afraid they might catch whatever lubberly disease we had!

We amused ourselves with chat, and spent some time laughing at a bunch of local kids who were wakeboarding—poorly. They were attempting to jump the wake of the boat and clear one of the big mooring balls, but each attempt ended in a faceplant in the water. They seemed to be enjoying it though, and we were amused too.

Dodge Morgan Knows Class

Snow Island proper is the home of Dodge Morgan, a local celebrity who at one time held the fastest time for a non-stop single-handed circumnavigation. Dodge owns a number of classy boats, and Tim and I decided we needed to get an up-close look at a couple of them. So we hopped into the Fatty Knees and made the row—maybe half a mile—over to the boats moored in front of Dodge's house. All the while Jay mocked us for "rowing all that way."

In addtion to having great taste in boats, Dodge is one of those seemingly rare souls who doesn't feel the need to drop a 15,000-square-foot McMansion on the shore of his island. He gets a nod of approval from us!

On this day Dodge had Eagle, his gaff-rigged schooner and a sexy wooden launch hanging on his moorings. Eagle is the epitome of class, and we spent some time oogling her, and snapping pictures before turning, and rowing back to Dasein

.

After a dinner of grilled chicken sandwiches and rice pilaf, we spent the evening chatting and just enjoying being out on the water. We turned in early.

White Out!

The next morning we awoke to a relatively thick fog. Ugh. Because Jay was leaving for Atlanta the next day, we felt that we would have to push on to home in spite of the fog. I put Tim in charge of the coffee, as he seemed to be unnaturally happy—even before the coffee had been made. We dubbed him the cafebrewmeister. I wonder what was going on in his head? Meanwhile I whipped up some bagels, tuned in to NOAA radio, and started plotting a course and programming waypoints for the trip home.

Once everything was ready, I hoisted the radar reflector, and we headed off into the fog. Visability seemed to be about 1/2 nm or so—not great, but not terrible either. It was glassy calm, and we motored blithely along from waypoint to waypoint, following a more inside route than we had on the way in. But as we motored out along Orr's-Bailey Islands it seemed to be getting thicker and thicker, and one of our waypoints appeard to be off.

I recalculated the waypoint and found that it indeed had been entered incorrectly into the GPS. Had we followed it blindly we would have ended up in the middle of Bailey Island! Oops. Glad we caught that one.

As we rounded the end of Bailey Island and headed for Little Mark it really was quite thick. In fact we were not able to see Little Mark until we were about 0.2 nm away! After passing the ubiquitous Little Mark and turning in Broad Sound, we found the fog to be thinning, which was nice, and we had an uneventful ride back in Broad Sound, and back to Falmouth.