Our first destination after Hinkley’s was Buck’s Harbor. We had intended to anchor, but upon arriving in the small cove, we realized like most of Maine, that everything was taken up with either a mooring buoy field, or lobster pots, so we hooked onto a mooring and set up for the day. There was a small general store and restaurant within walking distance of the town, so I decided we’d do a quick provisioning and pick up some take-out, which turned out to be very delicious! Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures of this little outing, including the fact that I forgot to take off my lifejacket and was wearing it around the grocery store :).
The next morning, we decided to head toward Pulpit Harbor, but as soon as we had exited Buck’s and started to engage the throttle, something immediately went wrong. The throttle cable connector on the port engine had broken!! Unfortunately we didn’t have any spares of this part on pard, but David was able to rig up a quick fix while we slowly drifted in a large open expanse of water. We decided to change our destination to Camden and overnight order a replacement (and some spares) to Wayfarers. We headed slowly into the harbor and grabbed one of Wayfarers’ mooring buoys. As it turned out, John and Joan were also staying in Camden, so we ended up having them over to the boat for a happy hour that evening.
The next morning, David was clicking refresh on the UPS page every 10 mins or so, tracking the delivery of our package. When we neared the delivery window time, he called in for a free lift to the dock to pick up the package. Upon arriving at the dock, nobody at Wayfarers had seen the package (nor signed for it, since it was signature required). The UPS delivery status showed as delivered. After a few calls, we heard a message from the driver – that he’d “left it on the dock”. LOL – there’s 100s of ft of dock at Wayfarer and the package was 3in square, let alone he was supposed to collect a signature. After lots of phone calls and waiting, we ultimately gave up and re-ordered the item overnight. Sadly, it was now Friday, meaning that the package would not arrive until Monday. Since we were sick of dealing with Wayfarer (remember we’d previously spent a week waiting for them to haul our boat), we decided to have the package delivered to a different marina – Tenants Harbor. One good thing to come out of our stay in Camden was that we borrowed the marina’s courtesy car to drive for a huge grocery run.
John and Joan were heading to Dix Island for the weekend, which wasn’t too far from both Camden and Tenants, so we decided to join them. It turned out to be a beautiful anchorage. By the time we arrived there were already several other boats on anchor, and of course this being Maine, the whole space was also filled with lobster pots. We dropped anchor and set up for the weekend, though we were a little concerned about the proximity of lobster pots in our swing radius.
Dix Island has a very interesting history and is currently owned by a co-op of individuals who reside on the island with no electricity or infrastructure. The residents are nice enough to have marked a public path around the island (about a 1 mile walk). While on the walk, we ran into one of the residents, who graciously showed us her property which is one of the few remaining original structures on the island from where there used to be an active quarry. Her house used to be the maid’s quarters and the original house is now a ruin which houses her vegetable garden. She shared with us some of the history of the island and was very friendly.
Later in the evening, we joined John and Joan on Starlight for a sunset happy hour.
Sunday morning, we awoke to some fog and decided to hang around until later in the afternoon and hope that it would mostly burn off. Eventually it cleared enough and we headed out to Tenants Harbor. We’d been here earlier on our trip, but it had been so foggy that we hadn’t really even seen the Harbor -turns out it’s actually quite pretty!
David’s cousin, Kevin (who incidentally did the whole great loop ~6 years ago), was driving to Tenants to meet up with his parents and join them for a week of cruising. We all headed out to the Happy Clam, where it is apparently a de Regt family tradition to eat when at Tenants!
Our package arrived on Monday morning, and was even delivered to Highwind by the harbor master via dinghy. David was able to replace the broken part and restore use to the throttle cable – yay! Now we’re just waiting for a time in our work schedules to get on the move again.