Days 73-75, August 29-31 -- Three Days With Yael: The Goslings, Jewell Island and Portland -- 20 NM

We had three lovely days with our niece, Yael, who is about to graduate from college. The only problem on the three short passages in the western half of Casco Bay was lack of wind. Clockwise from the top are South Freeport, The Goslings, Jewell Island and the City of Portland.

Yael and Ken arrived at about 10:30 and we loaded Yael's stuff aboard. Then up to Freeport for a mini clothes shopping spree for Yael and Lene. The Bow Street Market is a classy but not pricey supermarket where we provisioned, forgetting only butter, a non-essential, and plastic cutlery, needed by Yael's observance of the kosher laws. The latter was remedied at the Harraseeket Lobster Company, adjacent to Brewers Marina: I asked to buy five each of their plastic knives, forks and spoons, but they gave them to me, gratis.
Ken took off on his long drive back to New York and we left Brewers dock at 4 pm. On the way to the Goslings, I took a slightly longer but more traveled and buoyed route. Along the way we saw the head of a sealion which passed us swimming the other way. I had told Yael that we might see them and felt that this "promise" had been met. The anchor set well in mud, 22 feet below us. Only four boats in the anchorage.

We enjoyed keeping kosher with a Yael. She brought a pot, used for non-meat dishes and a pan for the chicken cutlets she brought and the Hebrew National hot dogs we had.

Her cooking knife was dull but I remembered that in the fall of 2010 I had acquired a fish filleting knife that was keenly sharp and had never been used for any food and hence was kosher. Frying the blueberry-mango-sweet potato pancakes was another challenge. We could not use the frying pan Yael had brought, because the pancakes had milk and the pan had been used for the chicken -- meat. But we had brand new disposable aluminum roasting pans and one of them did the trick. What about the spatula? All of ours had been used at various times over the past ten years for milk and for meat and hence could not be used. What to do? Well the paint scraper had never been used with any food and after thorough cleaning, it served as the spatula.

We took a ride in the dink

to the island where we had seen lots of seals in 2013, hoping that they had not found some other roost in the interim. We were not disappointed.

We went past the islet, cut the engine and drifted past it. These are not rocks but a portion of the seals.

(I will add a five minute video when I get better wifi. The audio is marred by my unsuccessful attempts to shush my two passengers.) Eventually, as the video shows, wait for it, most of them were spooked by our closeness and jumped into the water. Here are about 40 of them swimming

and a few brave  (or lazy) ones who stayed ashore.

I did put up sails during the passage to Jewell Island, but they did very little good. On our first drop, the anchor did not grab and we moved slowly toward a pair of rafted power boats. So we hauled and set her again, successfully, in 20 feet of water. There was one other sailboat and this home made trailerable ketch with larboards came in later.

The Punchbowl is an unusual geological formation on the NE side - the strata of rocks run vertical around the round basin.

We missed the concrete WWII observation tower and ended up at the southern tip of Jewell, where I had never been before during the four or five times I previously visited the island. There we met the only two people we saw on the island, a pair of men who had kayaked over from Peakes Island, quite far for kayaks, it seemed to me. Why were they planning to camp so far apart, I asked. "Well, my tent is on the only flat ground and his hammock needed the trees."  All told, I estimated our walk at about three miles through wooded trails.

We used full main, small jib and motor  for the passage to Portland, and chose  the  Passage, between  the  Islands. We were close reaching on port until about a mile before the passage in light air. Then, suddenly, there was strong wind but on a starboard close reach. We tacked sharply without changing course!

Then an afternoon's walk in Portland to the 1807 observation tower that Yael and I climbed, with a resulting good view of the Harbor,

the nearby Jewish Museum,

and a walk through the old town downtown area including a stop at Starbucks.

There we separated and I visited Hamilton Marine to get several small items: proper bolts, washers and nuts for the swim platform door, a better shackle for the mainsail's gooseneck, an oil filter, a postcard, boat soap, a part for the Magma barbecue to replace the one that had oxidized, and stencils to paint the registration numbers on the dink, because the stick-on numbers look crappy.