June 4 — New Friends From Across The Pond

       A blue hulled, fifty-foot cutter-rigged, aluminum sloop, “Stenno”,  had been on a mooring two boats from us for a few days. It’s name was revealed to me by AIS. Our Chief Launch Operator told us she was a guest boat from Scotland, here for a repair to a sail. She has the appearance of a cruiser (the white above her deck just forward of her hast is another boat moored further away. Lene met the owner in the club  and we agreed to meet there that evening. When two or more cruisers meet and talk, it is called a gam. But they have cruised far more extensively than ILENE. 

They are not from the mainland of Scotland but from the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland.

        They have been out for a year, heading south through the Irish Sea, with stops in the Canaries, Madeira, the Azores, Morocco, and the Cape Verdes (I hope I got those places all in their geographic logical sequence) before hoping across the Pond to Tobago and thence up the islands to Florida and up our coast. With a 60 foot mast, Stenno cannot use the intracoastal waterway so all passages were outside. 

       Alistair’s wife is due here any day now for a visit and Alicia, a high school graduate, is a rather accomplished sailor, and will enter the U. of Edinburgh this fall to study medicine. They have had a crew member as part of the team, who, is leaving, to be replaced by another man flying into Boston. They are planning to meet him in Provincetown RI and drop him in Shelbourne NS from which he will make his way to Halifax to fly home. 

       I was very pleased to be able to provide them some local knowledge of Provincetown and Shelbourne. Alistair is retired from a career as a dock builder and both of them were interested in Bella Bathurst’s “The Lighthouse Stevensons” (reviewed in this blog several years ago) about the building of Scottish Lighthouses by three generations of the family of Robert Louis Stevenson and lighthouses and Scotland in general.

       Boaters have a natural affinity for each other that makes acquiring them as friends very easy.