You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Or should I say “bay”? My weekend at the Common Ground Fair was followed by the better part of the week cruising Penobscot Bay in a historic schooner. My first time overnight in a ship, at that.
I’m just beginning to digest the experience, but it was my second digital detox within a month – a healthy opportunity, to my mind. I’m sure you’ll be reading a full report sometime in the future here.
At least my body’s home now.
In one recent historical society presentation looking at locally constructed ships, we learned that a working span of 50 years or so “was a long time” for such vessels.
Many went down at sea, of course, and captains routinely expected to lose a proportion of their crew to death on each extended voyage.
I suspect hard numbers are hard to find, though I’m curious.
Besides, are there really as many retired boats propped up in yards and boatyards around here as there are people? Sometimes it seems that way.
And I can think of the remains of three sailing vessels that are visible at low tide.
So here I am, out on the waters for the better part of the week on a 152-year-old schooner, assuming that the odds are in our favor.
Including one of 20 hydroelectric plants on the Androscoggin River as it runs from New Hampshire to the sea.
Not since remarrying 23 years ago, curiously, even though we have taken some delightful extended weekends here in New England but not yet beyond.
The closest I’ve come to solo is the week of the annual sessions of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, held on college campuses in early August. But there, the emphasis has been on doing Quaker business and spiritual renewal together.
Maybe that’s one reason I’m so excited by my upcoming windjammer adventure, whatever the weather.
Better yet, it’s following on one of our family weekends away, the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine. Even if I expect to be spending part of that manning the Quaker booth there.
And better yet, I’ll be with a dear friend of my retirement years – somebody who grew up on the waters, unlike me.
So what’s your idea of a “vacation” Even in a shoulder season, where we are now?
We were hoping the Norwegian expedition cruise ship would get better weather than it had last year on its inaugural port-of-call stop in town. It was greeted by a blustery deluge. The event planned for Friday was to be the ship’s first stop in the USA for the Pole-to-Pole, four- ocean cruise that originated in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Here’s how it looked last year in some really nasty wind and rain. Now I’m getting superstitious.
The trajectory of Hurricane Lee is increasingly looking like a landfall somewhere near us, and that had the Norwegians deciding to change course and bypass Eastport.
However, it’s also caused two other cruise ships to head for shelter here, both return visitors who appreciated their previous welcome.
We do hope our electrical power holds up in the coming storm and that Lee veers more toward the Nova Scotia side of the latest forecast.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been pretty much out of action. Good thing I schedule most of the Barn releases well in advance.
The latest sequence of setbacks started when I knocked a martini glass over, splashing my laptop keyboard, while talking to my wife. And here I’ve been the one to scold others about drinking coffee right over the computers. Ah!
Many of the keys became irreparably stuck or functionless, so it was time to move on to a new machine.
Things were going well with moving my files over from Carbonite until Microsoft’s One Drive got in the way. I have way too many photos for the MS service unless I opt to pay, which I prefer not to do. It’s a Big Brother Is Watching You sort of thing. We’ve been warned.
I wound up taking both machines to a highly recommended computer guy an hour down the road.
Just kept telling myself I wasn’t screwed, not between that and the fact that my beloved elder stepdaughter had given me an external hard drive for one Christmas and I had all but maybe my last two months’ worth of new writing and photos backed up there.
Alas, I’ve also been vigilant about erasing photos from my cell phone gallery and my Google photos. Get the picture? It’s just too easy to get bogged down in all the clutter otherwise.
Being without a computer is an exercise of its own these days. I’m far from the point of using my phone for most of my online browsing and emailing, and I’m definitely not drafting blog posts much less a novel there.
That said, enough of the whining. I’m back.
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Just in time to keep a nervous eye on Hurricane Lee, which may have Eastport as a target. We’d rather Lee go out to sea, well to the east of Nova Scotia to our east. We’ll see.
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The lead headline in the Bangor Daily News the other day touted another development:
The first ship arrives tomorrow, ahead of the autumn foliage.
Quite simply, Eastport is being discovered as a unspoiled destination, in contrast to crowded Bar Harbor or the state’s biggest city, Portland.
Here’s hoping the rogue hurricane season doesn’t disrupt this trend.
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Here’s also hoping for fine conditions at the end of the month and the schooner cruise on my schedule.
In the meantime, there’s a lot of writing I need to attend to, not all of it mine.
Best wishes to you all.
The festival is our farewell to summer.
We go out with a bang.
They’re Calais, Eastport, Lubec, and Machias. Or the other way around, depending on how you’re driving or sailing.
Like pearls on a string, one that hugs the coastline of vast Washington County.
The image of four anchors arrayed along a map makes sense, each one with its own distinctive attraction.
Their combined population comes to barely eight thousand.
The terrain around here is much more real than Acadia, for sure, if you’re the least bit interested in the Real Maine.
Nothing like a decaying hurricane somewhere out at sea to roil the water. This one was rough enough to cancel ferry service to neighboring Monhegan Island for days.
Jnana's Red Barn 