Before we leave Damariscove Island, we decide to finish the one trail that we did not go on yesterday. It leads from the dinghy dock, around to the south to a tiny, self-contained inlet called Little Damariscove. Just Jennifer and I stand there with little else visible. The edges are surrounded by blooming ragosa rose bushes. In Maine we see much more seaweed floating around on the surface of water forming large rafts perhaps fifteen feet across. There is an excellent collection in this cove.

Despite all the seaweed, when we clean the raw water strainer, the engine has taken up only a small amount of eel grass. It is nothing more than normal.

Damariscove Island is our furthest point east at 69° 39.1'. As we leave, we need to weigh the fore and aft anchors. We let the fore anchor out and pull in on the back anchor, when we are directly over it, in 30 feet of water by the way, I pull it up onto the swim platform. It is a muddy mess, but the procedure is easy. Next, Jennifer uses the anchor windlass to pull in the 150' of line and chain. It pulls us closer and closer to the boat anchored directly in front of us. As usual there is a slight roll that is causing our bow pulpit to chop up and down ready to bring our neighbor's boat to ruins. It comes scarily close but at the last minute, the anchor is up and I can start backing away from the boat.

Off we go and loop around north, quickly marking the 7 miles to Boothbay Harbor. Along the way we see two more harbor seals. We pick up a mooring at Browne's Wharf Marina, which is on the east side of the harbor. We are making such a short trip to a large city (by Maine standards) so that we can mail our autopilot to Ray Marine. It has been performing poorly, doing things like popping out of gear or slipping when it is trying to turn. Ray Marine has a rush service, so we mail it to them and they will return to Artie and Marie in Rhode Island, where we will pick it up.

We walk around town. For lunch, we eat fried scallop rolls at a restaurant, which is run by the Lobstermen's Co-op. We cross pedestrian bridge that cuts right across the harbor. It gives the illusion to people that they are setting in boat right in the middle of the harbor. After mailing the autopilot, we visit the local library, but all of the computer terminals are busy. This has been very common in most libraries that we visit. They have Internet access, but not usually dial up access. All of the terminals are usually very busy throughout the day. We were able to buy some cheap books at 10 cents a piece. We grab a beer at a bar. In conversation, the bartender tells us that in Maine, you can be a bartender at 20 years old, which he is. Before dinner, we are finally able to update our web site. The marina where we are staying is also a hotel and they let us use one of their dial up lines for 2$. The updating takes a while and we have trouble finding a place for dinner so late (8:30). We end up eating appetizers at the Rockside Inn. We have lobster stew, bruschetta with brie, clam chowder, and lobster cakes.

We meet a couple from New Hampshire. They are traveling around on a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Their name was Jim and Mary and they had recently had a baby after being together for 20 years. Their mother was watching their baby for the weekend and this was their first trip away. They are fascinated by our life-style and ask a lot of questions that we happily answer. Jim had taken a cross-country tour before their baby was born and I am struck by the similarities. Every day involves going somewhere new. Everyday you need to make some miles. Every day you need find a place to sleep, get some food and rest, and re-provision. The interesting thing was that Mary had convinced Jim to join a Disney travel club. Every evening it was Jim's responsibility to find motel rooms for 16 bikers. Amazingly, the typical amount was $10 per person per night!

Before we leave Boothbay Harbor, we go for a morning run. We run all over town with a lot of up and down including a slow climb up Summit Road. We leave Boothbay Harbor and head west toward Casco Bay. As we enter the bay, we turn immediately north up New Meadow Bay. The navigation is very difficult with long 2-3 mile runs between submerged ledges with no markers. It is complicated because as usual there are lobster buoys everywhere. We tried to capture how confusing it is to find a path through the buoys in the picture below. But trust me, the picture does not do justice to the reality. Along the way we have our ration of seal sightings, today three seals.

As we continue north we aim to anchor in The Basin. It as an amazing anchorage with a snaky, winding entrance. Once inside we are completely surrounded by tall fir and pine trees. Since the entrance winds there is no view of the exterior bay. The feeling is more like a mountain lake than anything else. The water is relatively warm, 66 degrees, so we go for a swim. As the tide goes out and the water starts to drop and we hear the light kathunk! of the boat scraping a rock every once in a while. We weigh anchor and move to another, deeper part of the basin. We enjoy a quiet dinner and retire early.

In the morning we go ashore to Basin Island. It is a tiny island about 150 feet across. It is part of Maine's Island Trails program where a boat, usually a kayak, can go camping through a chain of undeveloped islands. It is notably beautiful here with stands of oak, fir, pine and birch trees. At the north and south end of the island, there are tall firs, with the distinctive piles of sticks that indicate an osprey's nest. Each nest has a male and female osprey couple. As they like to do, they whistle at us. Ashore we see two more couples.

We make a short trip to the southern portion of Casco Bay. Along the way we see two more seals. We head to Jewell Island. It is another of the uninhabited island. The anchorage is pretty difficult. There is a narrow spit on the north side of the island and there are already a lot of boats. We motor around but do not find a suitable place to drop the hook. We anchor out away from the best protection, but still in a relatively safe place. We go ashore to hike on the island. We first go to a portion on the south side of the island called the punch bowl. It is very appealing. It has a sandy beach in a small bay. Now at low tide, rocks enclose the entrance to the bay, making a completely self-contained swimming hole. At high tide, the ocean spills over the rocks and refreshes the water every 12 hours. There are lots of tidal pools and fascinating red rocks. We harvest some mussels from one of the pools for a late afternoon snack. Rain is predicted and we hear some rumbling in the distance as a light rain begins to fall. With our new hiking boots to protect our feet, we continue our hike. There is an abandoned WWII observation base here. There are two towers where they searched for German U-boats. The biggest is 8 stories high. We climb to the top and spy on all of the islands in Casco Bay. We get a glimpse of tomorrow's destination, Portland.

We find some wild raspberries and eat our way further around the island. The forest is wet and we get the impression we are hiking through a rain forest with everything dripping and sparkling. It begins to rain pretty heavily and there are mud rivulets rushing down the path that we are on. We hide under a covey of trees for a while. The rain gets even heavier and we make a run back to the tower and hang out in there.

After the rain lets up, we hike down Smuggler's Path, which is enclosed by an archway of pine trees. As we head back, we pass through a number of the campsites on the island. We have never seen anyone at one of these campsites yet.

The tide has gone out so we need to lug our dinghy about 50 feet across the rock beach. When we get back to the boat, Jennifer notices a line running underneath our boat. I pull on the line and notice that it is attached to our boat. I pull the other end and see that it is connected to multiple lobster traps. Jennifer dons a wet suit and is ready to dive in. Before she goes, I try putting the boat in neutral and rotating the propeller shaft from inside the boat. Luckily, this works. We pull up anchor and move into better protection where another boat has left. In the evening we watch an old Jackie Chan movie, "The New Fists of Fury".

In the morning there is too much fog and we cannot leave until 11AM. We do some light engine maintenance. We tighten the belts, add some oil, clean the raw water filter, and tighten up a bunch of loose stuff. We motor the short 7 miles north to Portland. Along the way we see another seal. They are really marvelous. Just like in a child's storybook, they surface near the boat. They look at us with their mournful eyes. We look at them and jump up and down and say, "Hello, seal!"

When we get to the marina, Portland Yacht Services. Someone has temporarily taken our mooring. We have to motor around for about 20 minutes before we settle in and the rosemary plant is out on deck. Despite the fancy name, the marina is pretty run down. The bathrooms are a disgrace. The shower stall is only one and half feet by one and a half feet.

We go for a run into town. There are lots of delightful shops and little interesting bars. We meet Jennifer's parents who have come up from NJ to visit us. We get a post-road, pre-dinner snack at Rosies. We eat lobster and smoked salmon chowder, Buffalo chicken wings apparently made by Lucifer, beef nachos and a couple of beers.

Jennifer's parents have not reserved a hotel and that kind of scares us because during our run we stopped at Portland's visitor center. While we were there, a docent said that no rooms are available. Fortunately, they were able to grab the last room at a Howard Johnson's, just a few miles out of town. At their room, Wynette sneaks a nap and I get to watch the NY Liberty perform miserably in a crucial game against the Cleveland Rockets. We go to Boones Restaurant downtown. We all have Lobster dinners and beers served on red and white plastic table clothes.

In the morning we run with Jennifer's father. We run for 45 minutes on a path that goes all around the outside of the city. It is a little further than we usually run but at least we didn't have to deal with traffic. Since we are at a marina, we get yet another shower in the tiny stall. In a car, we drive north to Yarmouth. There we see a house where Jennifer lived when she was only three, almost forty years ago. From there we go further north to Freeport. We buy Wynette some quilting material and supplies for her birthday. We eat lunch at the Jameson Inn where the papers of secession of Maine from Massachusetts were signed. We take a quick run around the LLBean retail complex and then eat some ice cream outside.

We drive a few miles west to the Desert of Maine. Wow! We have an outstanding tour guide who seems to know everything about the desert and how it got there and what is happening to it. Surprisingly, she has only been here one month. She travels around in her RV and gets jobs like this one.

The desert appeared because of lousy farming practices. The owners cut down most of the trees, herded sheep, who ate all of the grass, and grew potatoes without ever rotating to another, replenishing crop. The end result was that very quickly all of the topsoil blew away. Underneath, there were hundreds of feet of sand that were left behind from an ice-age glacier. Once uncovered, the sand now blows all over and mounds up into dunes. Over the years, the owner has lost an entire building, whose roof is now 10 feet underneath sand. Even now the dunes are slowly moving toward the southeast at about a foot per year.

On the way back, Wynette and Bob take us to get some much-needed propane and take us food shopping. To end the day, we go to dinner at an Italian restaurant and eat some steaks, lobster fettuccini, and lasagna. We are exhausted after such a long day and call it an early night.

When we get up the fog is so dense that we cannot tell where the dinghy dock is. At about ten o'clock it lifts enough for us to see the Harvey Gamage, a large skipjack aslip, which for some odd reason John insists on calling the Heavy Damage.We take the dinghy in for another trash run. We also visit Hamilton Discount Marine Supplies. This is a great store with everything for boats, e.g., on one wall they have various sizes of wood plugs going from top to bottom and varying types of wood, pine, fir, teak, mahogany, going from left to right. However, they do not have the one thing we need, more glue for the dinghy patch kit. They do have an emergency/temporary patch kit, which we buy.

We leave Casco Bay amid commercial traffic. There is no wind so we motor all day, 36 long, noisy miles. We anchor north of Cape Neddick facing the sand of York Beach. We are close enough to hear a Bavarian band ashore. We eat steak, vegetables and buttered pasta for dinner, while listening to a tuba, a trumpet, accordians, cow bells, and yodeling. We spend some time updating this web page, and go to bed early.

Amazingly, there is no fog this morning and we can leave at 8 o'clock for Rockport. The only wind is still directly in our face, so it is another day of running the noisy, smelly, engine. (John says that his engine doesn't smell). We finally are leaving Maine! We need to get to warmer water. We go past the Isle of Shoals on the ocean side and pass quickly through the five-mile stretch of New Hampshire. We get to Rockport early in the afternoon. The cruising guide says to call the harbormaster to see if a mooring is available, but that you will probably be sent to anchor outside of the harbor. We eliminate the call to the harbormaster and drop a hook in the anchorage.

Wow! It is really hot in Massachusetts. It is so hot that there appears to be a brown out. Many of the shops have signs in their windows indicating that they will re-open when the power comes back on. We walk around the tiny, winding streets of the town. There is a little fishing shack here that has been painted so many times it is known as "Motif One." We sit across from it and watch a family try to pick up their mooring in the harbor. The harbor is packed with boats, so each boat has a mooring off their bow and their stern to keep the boat from swinging. The family of three girls, a mother, and a father/captain passes their stern mooring and successfully passes it from the girl at the bow down to the stern. Then the father/captain leaves the tiller and tries to tie the mooring onto the cleat. Each time he does this he looses headway and the girl at the bow cannot reach the bow mooring. They attempt this five times, trying various configurations of people at the bow with and without boat poles. We find this very entertaining and watch the whole process until they finally get the yacht club launch to haul them to the bow mooring. This is better than TV.

Once the mooring entertainment is over, we go back to the dinghy and the boat. The water is not significantly warmer than it is in Maine. We stick our feet in to cool off; it's shockingly cold. We eat dinner and go to bed early, preparing for our big trip to Boston in the morning.

The wind is not directly on our nose, so we are able to sail a little. The wind is very gusty and we raise the main with the first reefed in. A little later, the wind dies and we take the reef out. Within the hour it has gusted up to twenty knots again and we put the reef back in. After about an hour, the wind dies and we take the reef out again. This time, even with the full main up, we aren't making one knot through the water so we reluctantly turn on the engine.

We are staying in a marina that we visited when John was in Boston on a business trip last year. Back when we worked, ha ha. It is a very small marina, right in downtown Boston on the Long Wharf across from Faneul Hall. There is a very tight turn into our assigned slip, but John does great and wiggles the boat gently in.

We rush ashore to go play. We take a trolley tour of the whole city. The trolley driver is a real character. He sings, tells tall tales of people being killed by molasses, and gives us a sense of the historical importance of the sights along the way. Whenever anyone new gets on the trolley he asks them where they're from and then sings an almost appropriate song. Unfortunately, we got on at the beginning so we don't get to hear his rendition of any Bruce Springsteen songs. We go all around including Charlestown and Cambridge. We see the statue of George Washington in the public gardens in Boston Commons. The driver tells us that if one foot is up on a horse in a statue, it means that the person was wounded in battle. George Washington was wounded in the French and Indian War.

After the trolley tour, we go on a walking tour of the local Irish public houses. We eat in the Green Dragon. John has a great Irish stew, which even I like except for the potatoes. It is late when we return to the marina and fall into our bunk.

We still need to do laundry. We get one load in early and then there is a line for the single machine in the marina. This marina is somewhat expensive at $2.50 a foot, so we call Constitution marina. It is not as convenient to town but it does have a pool. That marina is even more expensive, $2.75 a foot. We decide to stay where we are. The next picture shows one of the delightful duck houses that are in the marina. Look close and you can see the baby ducks at the side of the house.

The dock master asks us to move our boat outside the T-head dock to stay another day. We pull the boat around with the lines like the pros that we saw at Lockwood Marina. Safely in our new slip, we decide to walk the Freedom Trail.

It is a hundred and four degrees outside. No exaggeration. We are walking through Boston. This is not the smartest decision we ever made. At least we do not run. We take the trolley to the Charlestown Shipyard. This is a civil engineering historic site because it has the first dry dock in the world. The USS Constitution is docked here. We don't go on the boat, but we do go through the air-conditioned museum. We see samples of the mast, the yardarm, and the one-foot thick oak sides of "Old Ironsides."

From the Charlestown Shipyard, the Freedom Trail leads us to Breed Hill, which is where the Battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought. Apparently, the commander of the Revolutionary troops defended Breed Hill despite his orders to defend Bunker Hill. No one knows exactly why and many of the soldiers thought they were on Bunker Hill at the time. The British won the battle, but suffered extensive casualties. The Bunker Hill Monument looks like the Washington Monument. Actually, the Washington Monument was designed to look like the Bunker Hill Monument. John climbs up the 280 steps to the top of the monument just before it is closed due to excessive heat.

We cross the Charles River back into Boston. We eat foccacia sandwiches for lunch in Little Italy. We visit the North Church where the "One if by land; Two if by sea" lights were displayed. And we view the statue of Paul Revere. Notice that one of his horse's hoofs is raised so he must have been wounded in battle.

We also visited the house where he lived at the time of his famous ride. It is one of the few remaining 16^th century, wooden houses remaining in America.

We continued walking until we were back downtown at the Old State House. This was originally a British Governor's house. It is also where the Boston Massacre occurred. British Soldiers shot down unarmed colonists in front of the balcony, which gave the American colonies its first martyrs. The declaration of Independence was first read in Boston from the same balcony.

We visit the Old Granary Graveyard. There are more than 1600 graves here, including three signers of the Declaration of Independence - John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. The most interesting gravestone is the one below, which contains the remains of Mary Goose, who is believed to be Mother Goose. Notice the adornments. A skull, representing the dead body, on top of wings, representing the freed soul. Below the skull and wings there are cross bones on the outside.

We go to Boston Commons and view the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the fifty-fourth regiment. They were the first black regiment to serve in the Civil War. Half of the regiment perished in the attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Their story inspired the movie "Glory".

We figure out how to use the subway and take it back to our marina.

We prepare to leave Boston even though there are thunderstorms predicted for late in the afternoon. We scoot across the river and purchase some diesel. It is pretty tricky getting in and out because the wind is picking up. We start to leave the harbor and the wind is already up to 25 knots and close to raining already. The weather radio is telling us that this is only going to get worse, so we turn around and go to the Constitution Marina, which we had rejected before. It turns out that it is $2.06 per foot since we are members of Boat US. The weather clears up for about an hour, so we swim in the pool by ourselves. The bathrooms are very clean and spacious and there are three washing machines and four dryers. This is heaven

The storm comes through so we just hang out below safely protected in our slip. The local radio announces lots of sorm damage from heavy winds but we were tucked away and did not even notice. Once it clears we cross over a series of fish chutes and locks that cover part of the Charles River. We walk over to the Fleet Center (the crappy version of Boston Garden) and take a subway downtown and go see "Rush Hour 2" with Jackie Chan. When we come back, we stop at McGann's a really nice Irish bar near the subway. We eat dinner at McDonald's a secret treat for us.

In the morning, Jennifer bakes some banana bread, while I walk around the docks and check out the boats. When I get to the end, I see that we are called the Constitution Marina, because the last dock faces the port side of the USS Constitution. Even more amazingly, a pair of tugboats removes the ship from its slip. This is something extra special, so I run and get Jennifer and my camera (I think that was the order). The boat is facing into the sun so I don't get a great picture. So, please excuse the artsy treatment.

As we leave that morning we see that the Constitution is being paraded past downtown Boston. This time, Jennifer gets great shots of the fire boat and the USS Constitution against the Boston skyline.

We leave Boston by winding our way through the 8 miles of islands that surround the Boston Harbor. The trip down to Scituate is short, just over 20 miles so we arrive there in no time. We get a mooring and take the launch into town. It is a small town but everything is right there. There is an Irish bar so we go in and meet Irving who served on a ship during WWII. He is out with his grandson Michael and their boating buddy, Billy. They are celebrating Michael's 21^st birthday and they have a good old time. We do too. We buy some groceries and diet coke and take the launch back to the boat. I cook a great veal chop on the barbeque.

The weather is rainy when we awake and rain and thunderstorms are predicted all day. We just lay around and read. Our big accomplishment is that we eat lunch. At 4 PM we go ashore and go to the movies and see "Planet of the Apes 2". As we wait to take the launch back to the boat, we get our usual surprise and meet people from New Jersey. The dock master went to Camden Catholic High School where my sister went. A woman in the office lives in Mount Laurel, which is where I lived when I went to high school. It is a small world. We take the launch back in the pouring rain and go to bed early.

The weather is a little better so we decide to make a longer run today. We want to go south through Cape Cod Bay and get through the Cape Cod Canal. To make it through, we must have the current with us. That means we cannot go through untill 5PM. We decide to the best time to leave is at noon. We have to kill so time, so we decide to take advantage of Scituate's free pumpout service. A boat comes to your boat, pumps your holding tank dry and its goodbye poo-poo. The pumpout boat arrives exactly at noon. In fact, I had just decided that we were going to leave without a pumpout and up he comes.

We travel thirty miles south to the canal and it is all motoring. It is still pleasant though. When we get to the entrance to the canal, a hige tig and barge is waiting for another tug and barge to come out. We hang out and wait for both of them to clear and then we go in. We probably should have gone in and let them pass us because 7, 80-foot, military YP boats and a luxury liner passed us anyway.

We get to the other side of the canal and go north into Onset and drop an anchor just outside of the mooring field. This is the end of another long day.

We leave Onset with a fair wind behind us. We need to recharge our batteries so we run the engines with just the head sail up. We are getting 6.5 knots with just 1500 RPMs of the engine and our small headsail. We get to Woods Hole and try to anchor where the Watreways Guide tells us there should be plenty of anchorage space. The area is loaded with moored boats. It is plenty windy by now and, with the eel grass and tight quarters, we cannot get a proper anchor set. We leave and go about two miles away to Hadley Harbor. The anchorage there is filled with three huge Coast Guard moorings. Pleasure boats are tied to two of them. I ask one of the sailors if it is OK to tie up to the third. He said that his brother-in-law called the Coast Guard once and they told him it was OK. We eat lunch, but neither of us feel very comfortable staying here over night. We look at the charts and notice that Martha's Vineyard is only seven miles away. So, we pull up anchor and head over to there. The wind is good so we sail over. We find an anchorage in Vineyard Haven Harbor near the pond bridge. We take our dinghy ashore and walk about a mile to the Acme food shopping. We get a case of Diet Coke, of course, and buy some frozen tuna steaks. On the way back, we pass a fish store that is selling lobster tales for $4 a piece. S o we buy some of those too. We have a great dinner of lobster tails, corn on the cob, and Italian bread with olive oil and pepper.

We get up early and run for 45 minutes. We run along the shore and then over a ridge to Oak Bluffs. We realize that Oak Bluffs is a port that we visited when we chartered Black Sheep out of Newport almost 10 years ago. The run is hard and long and I have to row ashore before the run and row back afterwards. We are both a bit overtired. We jump in the water and wash our hair and rinse off with fresh water from the SunShower. The water is 72 degrees, which is quite a change from Maine.

We row ashore again and walk to downtown Vineyard Haven. We get all day bus tickets that allow to go anywhere on the island. The buses are crowded so we catch the first available one, which happens to go to Edgartown. It is pretty miserable. The bus is packed and we have to stand and there is an obnoxious teenager right in my face. Plus, I am already crabby from running and not eating. We finally get to Edgartown. We grab some food at a restaurant right on the water. The restaurant overlooks the two ferries that are constantly making the 100-yard run between Martha's Vineyard and Chappequiddick.

There is not much to do at Edgartown, so we get on the bus and go to Oak Bluffs. There we wander around sightseeing and drinking a few beers. It turns out that we are very lucky. This evening is Illumination Night. Oak Bluffs has a Methodist camp that is almost identical to Ocean grove in New Jersey. There is a hundred-year-old tabernacle, which is really a huge, outdoor amphitheater. Surrounding the tabernacle are small Victorian houses that are encrusted with gingerbread accoutrements. The streets are narrow and only intended for foot traffic. It is very cute.

On Illumination Night, the locals decorate their homes with Chinese lanterns, rice paper parasols, and Mexican luminarias. It is positively magical. There are hundreds of tiny, storybook houses, each softly lit up with dozens of lanterns. In the spirit, we bought our own "portable" Chinese lantern, which we light up with a phosphorescent GloStik.