Friday July 5 -- Portland to South Freeport

During breakfast, Dave, my hinge friend, came by in his skiff after fishing and was welcomed for a tour of ILENE. He visits NY from time to time and has our numbers as we have his for our next stop in Portland.
But one must move on, today to South Freeport, which is in the Harraseeket River and about two miles by road from Freeport, which is the home of L.L. Bean with a huge collection of its stores surrounded by many other outlet stores -- a shopper's Mecca. 

I am fortunate that Lene is not really a shopper, at least for diamonds and other luxuries. (She does have an obsession with supermarkets though.) And she loves a bargain. So we came up here into the Northwest portion of Casco Bay.  The chart shows that the Bay is full of many long skinny islands. They seem to be arrayed in the form of some of those fireworks sprays, with the big explosion in the NE corner and the islands radiating out to the south and southwest. Our passage was only about 13 miles and for a while at 14 knots of wind speed, we made 7.5 knots over ground including maybe half a knot of tidal current. Most of the time, however, the wind was too light to sail and when boat speed dipped below 2.5 knots, we motored. We were underway from 9:15 to noon.

We saw a seal swimming off our port side, only his head above the water. He (or she?) took a good look at us. At the entrance to the river is a tiny island that the chart calls "Pound of Tea" with a house on it. Cute! The boats off to the left are where we are moored.

But before mooring in the Brewers mooring field here we pulled onto her dock and gave ILENE her first drink of diesel fuel since she was filled up last November 14, after hurricane Sandy. Then she had 2128.6 engine hours. At the end of today's trip, she showed 59.1 additional engine hours -- 2188.0 total. Those 59.1 engine hours were incurred in part from daily engine idling to freeze up the refrigerator's cold plates, but mostly in moving the boat. We always use the engine for a few minutes per day when picking up a  mooring or landing at a dock but, as you know, we frequently have to motor sail all day to get where we want to go. Since her last fill in October, avid readers of this blog will note, ILENE  has had 19 sailing days. And today she drank 33.9 gallons of diesel fuel, having used .57 gallons per hour. Another way to look at it is that we got five local day sails out of City Island and from there to here on only 33.9 gallons of fuel. 

In addition to her supermarket obsession, Lene likes clean laundry, so we did three loads of laundry. The marina has only one washer and one dryer so this took quite a while. In the process she met Angela who sails with her husband John. They are retired dentists who sailed across the pond and have lived aboard for the past ten years with fortnightly vacations from their boat to visit their home in Winchester, about once a quarter. Their boat, "Frodo," is a very solid and well maintained 42" Malo, built in Sweden, hailing from the Isle of Wight. That Island on the south coast of England, was the site of the first Americas Cup race, which the Americas won. It is still the centre of British sailing. (Photos in tomorow's post.) 

We had dinner with them, at Harraseeket Lunch & Lobster,

after some wine aboard Frodo. Nice folks and we hope to sail with them a bit more before their next trip to England in a few days. The most exciting thing this evening occurred while we were walking (running really) from Frodo to the restaurant and while huddling under its outdoor awning: a huge deluging thunderstorm. But the restaurant provided a towel for us to wipe off the picnic table and benches where we consumed our first Maine lobsters.