Portland - Yarmouth

 Getting the crew together

Shortly after Sasha and Julia left, my cousin Anton arrived with his wife Catherine and their kids Leo and Maia. We spent a nice evening together having dinner and then singing songs.

Sunday morning the preparation work began: laundry, washing the boat, getting groceries, little fixes here and there. By early afternoon we were mostly done, so we left the dock and motored around the Casco Bay. In the wind shadow of an island I left Salty Ginger drift with the wind so that Anton, Leo and I could take a quick swim. The water was a balmy (for Maine) 19C. When we motored around the island so that we were exposed to the water and the wind from the Gulf of Maine, the water was 1.5C colder.

Viktor, our next crew member, was at the dock when we came back, ready to take the dock lines. We finished getting the provision list together so that he and Catherine did a run while I finished dealing with the laundry and accounting for bed sheets, etc.

As soon as the dinner was ready, Frank arrived to the marina, so the crew was all here. Over dinner Frank and Viktor got to meet one another as well as Anton and the family. Unexpectedly it was midnight and it was time to go to bed in order to get up at 6 for the planned 7 o’clock departure.

Morning stillness

The morning air was clear and still, obviously it was going to be another warm day in Portland. After a quick breakfast, Catherine and Maia left us to start driving home and the five boys were ready to cast the lines and head east.

While still in the clear view of Portland, we picked up 5 lobsters for our lunch in the harbor and headed out of the bay. The water was practically flat with no hints of any wind. That was not unexpected, but we wanted to be able to land in Yarmouth before the end of the business day to avoid having to spend the evening on the boat without the possibility of going ashore. Therefore the early departure and motoring in windless conditions were necessary.

Within a couple of hours Leo was overcome with seasickness and it was clear that one lobster was not going to be eaten for lunch. Shortly thereafter Anton followed his fate after a nap in the cabin. It really sucks to be seasick, but each person feels it differently. I boiled all the lobsters, figuring that a cold or reheated lobster would be better than a spoiled one. Anton and Leo were awake for lunch, they took Dramamine while watching the 3 of us eat. To our delight, later in the day both felt a lot better and had one of their lobsters for dinner and even ate some chili that Frank brought and reheated.

Visibility… What’s that?

The sun and good visibility that we enjoyed in Portland vanished well before we reached the longitude of Monhegan island. We were in fog and watching for lobster trap buoys was paramount. As we kept motoring on the course towards Yarmouth the fog got thicker and thicker. Everything started to get wet as the fog droplets were precipitating on all surfaces. It started to drip from the dodger, the bimini, the sails, the backstay. The hatches had to be closed because the water precipitated on the mosquito nets. Even when the nets were closed, water droplets would form on the frames of the hatches and would drip down.

But at first we had half-a-mile visibility or so. The further east we went, the thicker was the fog. Towards the evening, as we saw lobster boats, (luckily fewer) lobster pots and occasionally logs appear out of nowhere, I realized that we have to slow down for the night. It would be disastrous to hit something at 7 knots.

Between Frank, Viktor and I the 3-hour shifts were divided with Frank starting at 21:00, Viktor at midnight, myself at 3am and so on. As I went to sleep around 10pm, Frank was in complete darkness with 100m visibility. It was not cold. Frank was in his foul-weather jacket but in normal pants. I suggested that he change the pants to waterproof ones, but he said “how bad can it be?”. (He came dressed in pants and jacket at 6am.)

I heard Viktor get up for his midnight shift, but as soon as I dozed off, in came Frank because he wanted me to restore the waypoint to Yarmouth. Ok, I understand that I didn’t give a full set of instructions on how to use onboard electronics. I tried to explain what should be done if something like this happens again, reset the waypoint to Yarmouth harbour entrance and went back to sleep. I think I remember Frank mentioning a fishing boat, but I was too sleepy, and cold having run out in pants and t-shirt into the cockpit (violating the boat rules that everyone after dark in the cockpit should wear a life vest and be buckled to a jack line).

In the morning Frank told me the whole story. He was monitoring a vessel on AIS that was moving slowly. Obviously, he couldn’t see it because of the fog, and when Viktor came up, they were a few meters away from a huge fishing vessel with all of its lights up. Luckily, that was the only close call in the night. Viktor’s shift was unremarkable and the closest vessel I “saw” with the instruments was a mile away.

In the early morning we enjoyed a decent visibility, which we hoped would last until landfall. No such luck. As we were pulling into the channel that leads to Yarmouth, not only could we see no land (which was 500m away), the buoys on the opposite side of a relatively narrow channel were partially obscured by fog.

Fishing

We like to hope that trawling a line with a hook behind the boat as we sail will reward us with a fish. It’s not vanity hope: we have caught a bluefish and a small tuna-like fish, but it’s still an opportunistic feat.

The first thing we caught, shortly after we started sailing in the fog, was the line of a lobster pot. I was quite sure that I did not hit it with the keel, but all of a sudden I saw our speed drop to 4.5 knots from 6. Something was off. The fishermen that have just dropped the buoy were still nearby and they were concerned that we caught it with our prop. We pulled in one line that we were dragging easily, and then it was apparent that there was no way for us to rescue the lure of the second fishing line. I cut it loose and immediately the line of the lobster pot sunk. Good for us!

Of course, from that point on we decided that fishing in the fog was not a smart idea, especially in Maine waters which are full of lobster traps.

The next fishing attempt was on Tuesday morning when the entire crew, including Anton who had a full breakfast, and Leo who finished the second lobster for breakfast, were on deck. All of a sudden the reel on the rod started to whistle. Gotta be a fish! Well, it was very heavy, but it didn’t seem to fight. Weird. We took turns reeling it in, and at some point it seemed like it was jerking the line. Nope, it was a huge pile of weed that probably jumped on the waves as we reeled it closer to the boat. That happened again, but did not deter us from pulling the line, until…

Sailing

Thanks to the troubleshooting by the Maine Yacht Center, we can see the wind instruments working. I didn’t think that it was a big deal, but it does give extra information, which is useful for determining whether or not we might actually be able to sail as opposed to motoring.

From the start, we kept looking at the apparent wind speed. Initially it matched the boat speed exactly, but then it started to have a distinct sideways component that seemed to be strong. And it kind of coincided with the forecast that the wind should be turned on after 14:00 on Monday. At some point we set the new Genoa to help the engine, but then it started flapping. Then we rolled it back in: hopeful sailing is not sailing.

Late on Monday afternoon there was an hour-long window when the code-0 (a nylon genoa) was pulling us along at 5+ knots, but then our speed dropped down to 3 knots, so we rolled it in and continued motoring.

When we hauled the code-0, I thought the lines looked weird at the top of the mast, but decided to hope that they would “figure things out”. Google SRE motto: hope is not a strategy.

When I came on my shift at 3am, it seemed like the wind was a bit livelier, so I decided to unroll the code-0 to see if it would add speed to our motoring. Miraculously, it did! I turned off the motor and tried to optimize the sail set in the dark. Shortly thereafter the sun started to illuminate the fog and I set up the Hydrovane (a mechanical autopilot) to steer the boat. Partly it was to eliminate the noise of the electric autopilot, partly because I want to learn to use this toy.

Salty Ginger was sailing at 5.5 knots, which I felt was okayish for not being able to see anything in the fog and the darkness. I think the crew appreciated being able to sleep without the boat being shaken by the diesel engine. The wind built up and before too long we were sailing at 7.5 knots, but now with sunlight and better visibility.

Frank came onto his shift just after 6, profusely apologising for being a few minutes late, and enjoyed sailing while figuring out how Hydrovane worked. Anton woke up shortly before that. Viktor and Leo were up by 9am. Everybody was enjoying the ability to sail and the visibility that we haven’t had for at least 12 hours.

Then the wind started to die down.

Ups and downs

With less than 15 miles to go to the entrance of the Yarmouth harbor, Salty Ginger slowed down to under 5 knots on a beam reach. Given the experience that Sasha and I had in the week prior, this was a golden time to set the spinnaker, tighten its luff and get her back to 5+ knots. We talked through the procedure: code-0 gets rolled in, gets lowered, put in the bag, then the spinnaker gets set.

Step 1 went fine. The sail is ready to be lowered. But the sail did not want to be lowered. It was stuck. How stuck? Totally stuck! Viktor and I tried to pump the halyard so that it would allow for the block of the doubled halyard to come down, but that clearly was not happening. Oh, boy, why did I hope that the “something wrong” would straighten itself out.

I didn’t know what we could expect from the winds, so I really did not want to go into the harbour with the sail partially lowered. There was only one obvious choice: I had to go up the mast.

That’s when not all things were talked through. I asked Frank to keep a downwind course so that I would be sheltered by the mainsail as I go up. I knew that Viktor had rock climbing experience (but Frank did not), so he would be ok bringing me up and down. Frank sent Anton to help us out, which was great: I asked him to help bring the sail down onto the deck without dunking it into the salt water once it was ready to come down.

Viktor started to winch me up. The thing we did not talk through: especially early on, I can help him by lifting myself up the mast, so he would only need to pull the line in. With that line of communication broken, I gave up and waited for Viktor and Frank to get me up our 20m tall mast. While sailing. In the fog. Luckily no big waves and no strong winds.

That’s when I saw our two fishing lines being dragged behind the boat. “Hey, Viktor,” I joked, “now is the time for the fish to bite!” Little did I know, one of the rods caught another clump of weeds, so Frank reeled both of them in while I was preoccupied with getting the halyard free.

The halyard was badly twisted. I believe that when we hoisted it, we didn’t have the block all the way up, and by the time the sail unrolled itself, it got the lines twisted under tension. All the rest follows.

With the sail (and me) on deck, Frank started motor sailing towards the harbour entrance while Viktor and I did the exercise of running the halyard up and down the mast without the load and untwisting it in the process. The last time the halyard went up cleanly, so I’m quite optimistic (hopeful?) that we can safely bring the sail up, use it and bring it down the next time around.

There is no photo documentation of the craziness that went on, since all 4 of us were busy with something and Leo was completely oblivious to what was going on, lying in the cabin. But the view from the mast was quite nice. There were storm petrels sitting on the water, there were wavelets, there was the sun obscured by the fog.

Cleared in

Motoring into the harbour was uneventful. After successfully spotting all the buoys that mark the channel, we were greeted by Peter on the dock who told us to call the authorities and then come ashore to talk to him. Canadians cleared us in by phone, trusting that we had no cannabis, nor firearms and within minutes after starting the call we were ready to toast to a successful, but not quite uneventful passage.