What We Did This Summer

From June 11, our first day, when we came aboard, got ready and slept aboard in anticipation of departure the next morning, through September 10, when we returned to our home mooring and went home, we were absent 92 days, and 91 nights -- a good part of the summer and the 2013 season.  Our summer went to Maine!

So where, specifically, did we go and what did we do there? Most of the rest of this post is extracted from the 63 posts published during the adventure. They are a diary/log,  and the data is tabulated here.

We had 26 lay days and 3 day-sails with the balance, 63 days of passage making. This is a higher percentage of sailing days (73%) than in the Caribbean, which surprised me, though many of the Maine passages were much shorter.

I added up the mileage of each daily passage: a total of 1415 nautical miles round trip -- equivalent to 1627.25 land or "statute" miles.  The lowest daily mileage was 1.7 miles and the longest was 128, with an overnight.  Days of less than 20 miles numbered 34, and on only 15 days did we go more than 30 miles. Only 5 days included in those 15 longer days (including the two of the overnight)  saw passages of greater than 50 miles.

We visited 57 different anchorages/ports/harbors, though we did not go ashore at 14 of them. We visited Portland, Frenchboro and Bar Harbor twice, but each of these three counts as only one discrete harbor. Of the 57 stops, 29 were new to us and 28 were old favorites, which we had visited at least once before in 2002 and/or 2008.  Some old favorites did not make it into our itinerary this trip including Camden, Castine and Belfast in Penobscot Bay, Burnt Coat Harbor and Bath. And with a plethora of little niches when you can anchor and hang out in solitude, there are many more new spots for next time, whenever than may be: 2015, 2016? Roque Island is so beautiful that the fact that we spent only one night there is a shame.

Alpha Girl and Whitty spent every day and night on board EXCEPT for the 12 we spent at a dock.  Where they go at night is anyone's guess, although we tend to think they do not go far!  We now think they enjoy being on the boat more than being in our NYC apartment; and maybe I do too!

Of the 91 nights aboard, only one, the last, was spent on an overnight passage, from Jamestown RI, back to City Island. All of the 90 other nights we were secured to the land. Of these, more than two thirds, 61, were on moorings (eleven of them free!) with only 17 on anchor and only 12 (in six ports) at docks. So this was a low-rent vacation. We did spend one night off the boat, in a hotel in Cohasset MA, where our room overlooked the boat on its mooring, the hotel constituting a craving that Lene wanted to fulfill. At docks, they charge extra, normally $10 to $20 per night for the privilege of hooking up to the Marina's electricity. We never hooked up. Despite the fact that our 12 volt cigarette lighter type plug was charging our laptop, cell phones, iPads, and Kindle most of the time except at night, drawing electricity from our boat's batteries, we never had to plug in to shore power.

We enjoyed dinners in friends' homes on three occasions, in Essex CT (thanks Bob), in Provincetown (thanks Mark et al.) and on Mount Desert Island (thanks Barbara).  Of the other 88 dinners, 38 were enjoyed in Restaurants and 50 aboard. And only 15 lunches and six breakfasts were consumed off the boat. So of 273 total meals (three per day) only 62 were not had aboard ILENE.

We met up with nine sets of people who we had known before, and had six sets of people aboard who we had not known until we met them on this trip -- fifteen sets of guests, all told. Some merely sat in the cockpit and took a tour of the boat and others sailed with us, including sleeping aboard.

How were our days distributed among the states we visited? Starting closest to home: New York - 5; Connecticut - 3; Rhode Island - 3; Massachusetts - 23; New Hampshire - 4 and Maine - 55. With 19 days before arriving in Maine and 18 after leaving, we spent 55 of the 92 days (60 percent) in Maine waters.

We attended seven live performances of plays, concerts and dance recitals and four movies, for a total of eleven. And we visited 21 museums, some of which held interest for less than an hour and others for most of a day.

If anyone is interested in sailing to Maine, and has questions, just ask away!