August 24 — Day 46 — Long Cove to Round Pond — 19 NM

First: two views of ILENE on a mooring in Round Pond, which is much smaller than Long Cove. Measured by by dividers on the charts, the Cove’s useful deep enough water is roughly .3 NM by .5 NM. In Round Pond, the mooring field’s useful circular (hence Round Pond) area has a diameter of only .2 NM. Our journey, four hours, was all with engine, though we were able to get a few tenths of a knot from the small jib on the westbound part of it, the  crossing of Muscongus Bay. 

Our first problem this morning was that a part of functionality in the chart plotter was inoperative. Normally two lines are projected from the bow of the image of the boat on the screen. The blue one shows which way we are going from moment to moment and the purple one sort of averages out the jerky motion of the blue one. Once on course the two lines get closer together. When rolling, the GPS receiver, at the top of the mast, 63.5 feet above sea level, waves madly  and the blue line goes from one side to the other, every two seconds or less. The purple reflects the actual course. But in a turn, we know which way we are going frim the Blue line. This morning no blue line. It is not needed but useful. Raymarine’s tech rep staff’s phone number is in my cell phone and a call and the pressing of three buttons as advised restored the blue line. The only remaining mystery is how I had accidentally turned it off.

The exciting part, but not really, was in Davis Strait, which was not as narrow as it seemed. We passed and  rounded many islands and shoals including Old Hump Ledge:

The tiny black dots on top are the birds whose excrement turned the rocks below them white— sort of like The Blauses off Hart Island at home.

We got in a two mile round trip walk to where we thought the man who rented us our mooring was; he later came by The Anchor, where we had dinner. There are also two competing lobster pounds in town, an antiques shop, a variety store and a post office. Tomorrow looks like rain and if so we will get wet. Early reports of Tropical Storm Franklin add a bit of anxiety into next week’s plans; hopefully it will blow out to sea or only dump some rain on us.