“No one is so brave he is not disturbed by something unexpected.”
– Julius Ceasar
To see all photos from this post, please see the google photo album HERE
For all the planning and figuring we do, sometimes things just change course, and this summer has tossed me a curve that isn’t wholly unwanted, but certainly unexpected!
For the past 5 or 6 years, I’ve been on the waiting list to be a member at the Centerboard Yacht Club in South Portland. It’s a communal boating club that is less YACHT CLUB (said with a New England WASP drawl) and more a shared co-op for boating and racing. CYC has a nice clubhouse, a dock, a mooring field, a gravel parking lot, and 4-6 college kids every summer to drive the launch and get people to and from their boats… and that’s it. There’s no restaurant, no bar, no jacket and tie dress code… it’s just literally a nice shared space for boating.
Member driven, all volunteer focused, and I’ve been helping out around the place for a few years because I like to help and kept hoping that there would be space for my boat. (that’s the big limiting factor, space for the boat)
So, I checked in on my status earlier in the spring and there were about 10 boats ahead of me on the waiting list… that pretty well felt like years to go, so I put it out of my mind.
WELP! Got an email the end of May saying “Hey, congrats, we can offer you a spot!” and then had to scramble to find the unexpected member dues and the purchase cost for my new mooring… but the long and short is that I get to now CHOOSE whether I’m in Rockland or Portland at any moment!
Since Portland will be a much easier place to base out of getting ready for the trip, I’m headed… right back where I just came from. *laugh*
End of the first long day saw me pulling in to Christmas Cove, near the Boothbay region. Darling little hole to hide in for the night, and I grabbed some dinner and crashed hard for an early morning.
Made it to Portland in good time and found myself with a new mooring location… except that the depth was a little shy of what was needed on the one side. Thus began a saga that surely strained the patience of the mooring coordinator at the club and the dive guy who handles moving them around… but we did finally find a place, well down the Fore river in a spot I am calling the “Fore River Estates” – which sounds both like somewhere kinda shishi, but also like what you’d call a mobile home park?
Yeah, it’s right between the Coast Guard station and the Eimskip commercial loading dock… at the mouth of the Confined Aquatic Disposal cell where they are dumping all the contaminated dredging material.
I … will not be swimming off my boat here.
BUT, the presence of the osprey nest means that the other birds don’t come sit. on our boats and leave food bits and poo… so, that part is AWESOME.
I’m still tweaking and creating new ideas for the boat, and one of them is a medicine cabinet for the head, where there was only a kinda crappy mirror before. I found this plastic molded drop-in medicine cabinet at Lowes, and took the mirror off and mounted it to the bulkhead, and added the elastic strings to keep things from falling out, and have ordered a custom plastic mirror that can be the new door. Total, the thing is going to run me about $60.
The second new solution is this grill mount arm that goes in the winch handle port on my winches. The grill is a second hand one I bought at Mass Marine Parts in Quincy MA (think I paid $30 for it) and it’s fabulous, but it needed somewhere to live.
I’ve tried several options, and it was either too close to the shade top, or in the middle of things… and I finally decided to weld up this prototype at the maker space. This is definitely intended to be a temporary proof of concept which will be replaced with stainless steel… so you can be assured that I will still be using this one when I return in the spring.
Regardless, it makes a great dinner, and the evenings on the water are the best. I’m “home” in Portland once again, and it’s time to get some friends aboard for the July stretch.
See you next month!
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