Cruise Summary -- Maine 2018

We left the Harlem Yacht Club on July 4 and returned on September 4, 63 days later. But seven of those days were spent off the boat on a car trip to Quebec City while an addition to ILENE's keel was attached. So the cruise itself was only 56 days, considerably shorter than our Nova Scotia cruise of 2017.

The events of each of those 56 days, the delightful and the ugly, have been reported in 33 posts to this blog -- details and highlights. This posting attempts to describe the forest instead of the individual trees -- by statistical. as well as subjective approaches.

The 56 days are the sum of  45 passages (to 44 destinations - two visits to Rockport Maine) plus eleven lay days. About eighty percent passage days. Some of the lay days were weather related. One of them was devoted to the round trip visit to beautiful Monhegan Island, by ferry, a highlight of our summer. Our lomgest stop was three nights - in Belfast, associated with Witty's illness. We like to keep moving.

Among the 44 ports were 15  that provided the thrill of entering a new destination and 29 old friends; so almost a third were new ports.

The nights: no overnight passages like the three last summer. The vast majority of our nights were spent on moorings: 40  (ten of them were free!). Only 14 were on our anchor and two at docks. One of the docks was at Sandwich Mass, which seemed a necessary place to stop and has only docks. The other dock was at the Great Island Boat Yard in Casco Bay, where ILENE was hauled to permit her keel to be re-soled. At docks our kitties get frisky so we seek to avoid them.

How about the mileage, which added up to 1079, round trip. Roque Island, the furthest destination , is only 356 miles from our mooring at the Harlem as the crow flies, which would mean 712 crow miles, But the shortest locical course, without going in and out of ports and backtracking is probably about 450 miles on e way compared to our 539 miles each way.

Here is a chart showing the distribution of our days, passages and miles into the three segments of the trip:

SEGMENT	MILES	DAYS	PASSAGES	MILES/PASSAGE
To Maine	324	10	8	40.5
In Maine	407	35	27	15
From Maine	348	11	10	35
Total	1079	56	45

No matter how you slice it, it is about 300 - 350 miles to get to Maine from New York City.
By driving through the nights this could be done in about 70 hours, less than three days. We took a more leisurely pace with about nine passages each way ending up using one third of our cruise in the coming and going phases, but we saw some very nice spots along the way, taking our time to smell the coffee. Still, we did an average of about 35 to 40 miles per passage on the outbound and return passages, compared to only 15 miles per passage in the target vacation area where we spent two thirds of our time.

And the food: Lene puts out the three squares each day subject to occasional meals off the boat.
During the 56 days we had one breakfast (on Monhegan Island), four lunches and 17 dinners "out".

We do have a few prejudices: toward moorings, against docks and in favor of healthy boat cooked food. But subject to these, the patterns simply emerge when I count things up at the end, rather than with set targets.

Subjectively, first. what went wrong:
1. I somehow left our clear plastic cockpit enclosure "walls" at home, and the Club burgee too. I was sorry about the burgee but it was such a warm summer that the cockpit enclosure was not missed.
2. I put water in the fuel tank, necessitating a tough job this winter.
3. Witty's illness put a crimp in our style- the reason for the second visit to Rockport Maine, and we hope he gets better soon and that the motion of the boat did not contribute to his pain.
4. The biggest problem was the light winds. We did a lot more motoring than we wanted to.
5. The transformation of nice places into berths for superyachts to the exclusion of sailors like us was a problem to which I do not have a solution.

The positives:
1. People whether it is unexpected accidntal unplanned rendezvous with boats associated with our Club -- four of them.
meeting with old friends or making new ones, we are social animals and enjoy being with other people in port.
2.  We escaped the brutally hot New York City summer.
3. The new ports we visited -- and there are so many more.
4. The new addition to the bottom of the keel has been a big success in making for a more comfortable ride.
5. We got back alive and safe.

This blog will continue with many fall sailing activies already planned. Thanks for reading.