Winter Migration

Tuesday September 17

Last night hit 39 degrees.  The leaves are changing color.  Helen’s charters have slowed down dramatically.  It’s time to think about leaving for our trip.

This morning we have the heater on and mugs of warm tea to take the bite out of the cold air.  As we sip we talk about our plans.

The past two years these signs would have signaled that it was time to start considering our migration from mooring to dock, and by mid to late October we’d find ourselves in a slip.  Then, we’d hook ourselves into shore power and run a small heater on cold nights.  Our commute would include a walk up the docks instead of a chilly row.  By mid-late November we would have said goodbye to the sailing season, and we would have pulled off our sails, taken down our masts, and erected our canvas winter cover.  The cover would protect us from wind, rain, and snow, create a bugger zone of still air, attract condensation from the cabin and instantly raise our indoor temperature by a few degrees.

But not this year.

This year we will extend our sailing season.  We will chase fall down the East Coast, heading south with the weather.  The goal is to land somewhere where we can be comfortable without the winter gear we are leaving behind.  We don’t necessarily want to leave Maine’s winter—we love the winter, we love our winter routine, and we love the winter sports nearby—but our sailing season is short and we want to allow Evelyn to take us on an adventure.  It will be fun to see new places, explore the coast, and continue sailing.

We’ve refrained from making a plan.  We don’t want to set dates, destinations or times because we want to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, we want to make smart decisions related to wind and weather, and we want to enjoy ourselves.  It’s hard to resist the temptation to make some plans, but so far we are doing well.  We don’t know when we are leaving or where we are going.

We have replaced plans with a few general goals to help guide us as we sail:

1.       We want to enjoy Maine as much as possible, spending as much time sailing here as we can, until weather urges us to move southward while conditions are still favorable.

2.       We want to sail as much as possible, especially in places like Maine that we want to explore more slowly.

3.       We are excited to sail up the Delaware Bay and into the Delaware River, where we learned to sail as children.  The day we sail past the Red Dragon Canoe Club, which hosted the Delaware River Sailing School where we spent so many summers learning and teaching will be a very special day.  Sailing past Burlington Island and on towards Florence will be another special experience.  And rowing ashore in Florence to walk up the street and visit our families is going to be incredibly meaningful.

4.       We want to wander through the Chesapeake.  I am looking forward to visiting Chestertown, where I went to college, via the water.  And so many of my friends from WAC are now living along the Eastern and Western shores that I hope that as we sail I can visit those friends I haven’t seen for too long.

5.       Eventually we want to pause somewhere warm.  We are leaving our winter gear behind so we need to stop somewhere where we won’t miss it.  Where exactly matters less because warmth is relative to here, and we’ve enjoyed our winters aboard in Maine.  So it doesn’t need to be too warm.

6.       We don’t want to go so far that we can’t turn around and sail back to Maine in the spring.

7.       We want to anchor as much as possible.  When possible we want to stop at night, instead of moving forward through it.  And we want to anchor instead of mooring or docking to keep our costs low.  But in the event of a storm, we will do whatever is safest.

8.       We want to enjoy ourselves and fall into a rhythm of waking dawn to dusk, exploring in the peapod in the mornings when wind is light, sailing through the late morning and afternoons, reading, writing, walking ashore and enjoying other pastimes we love so much but don’t always make time for.

-------

Pulling away from the docks in Northeast Harbor...
let the adventure begin!

I wrote the above journal entry and never had a moment to post it because the next few days were a flurry of activity as we prepared to head off.  That very day we began cleaning and organizing Evelyn, and later that evening we worked on the peapod*, figuring out the waterline and painting on the bottom paint.  The next day we had two great charters, and that night fastened gunnel guard to the peapod—she was launched hours later at midnight.  The next few days we sailed and worked, and Helen’s last sail for the season occurred on Saturday, just days after writing that journal entry.  Sunday brought rain so we organized our storage unit and then had dinner with friends, Monday was Helen’s downrigging.  Tuesday we spent doing all the laundry we possibly could, while organizing and packing/unpacking Evelyn.  (Because we’ve now lived on her for two years, we’ve found that in preparing for our trip there was more unpacking of unnecessary items, and less bringing things aboard…)  Wednesday was spent doing errands, a huge grocery and supply shop, stowing of all the food, followed by dinner aboard with a friend.  Thursday brought the final wave of organization, final trip to the storage unit to empty the cars, final (for the time being) walk in Acadia, dropping the vehicles off in the boatyard where they will be stored for the winter, and dinner with a friend who then drove us back to Northeast Harbor.  The next morning we enjoyed a nice, hot shower, filled the water and fuel tanks, and raised sails outside of Northeast Harbor. 

It had been a whirlwind week and a half, but by 10:30 Friday, September 27, Evelyn was sailing and our
adventure had begun. 

So far…WONDERFUL!  I’ll share the details soon…

*I still want to post about the peapod and other late-summer activities, but I’ll do that at a later date.  First I want to catch up to the present because we are now off on our adventure!