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We ended up spending a full week on the hard at Hinckley. They ordinarily don’t allow people to stay on the boat while it’s in their yard, but with all the hotels in the area closed, we didn’t have a lot of options, so they graciously let us stay there and use the restrooms/showers after hours for the week.

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While we were fixing some of the windows, we noticed some other windows having issues too and dug into those, and I decided to get a new sonar installed, which stretched out our time ashore a bit. But they did a great job, were super easy to work with, and in the end it wasn’t too much more expensive than going to a no-name shop in the middle of nowhere. You could tell the workers there genuinely had pride in doing good work, as well, which was reassuring as they were busy putting large new holes through the bottom of our boat. Stuff we had done:

• Our bow thruster had continued to be doing poorly ever since coming to the east coast, and after replacing the motor unit. They came to the same conclusion that I did — it just needs a second 4/0 wire run, and to clean up some of the crappy factory wiring while they were in there. Our bow thruster now finally actually moves the boat around!
• Adding a through-hull to be ready to install a watermaker. We’ve ordered a Spectra 340c (14 gallons/hour nominal) which will be here in a couple weeks to install. We’ll head back to Hinckley to have them install that when it shows up in the mail.
• Raw water pump replacement — our other pump was leaking, and apparently requires you to own a bottle jack to jack the motor up to replace, which is a tool I don’t keep on board…
• 1000 hour service — we’d already done most of this preemptively at ~900 hours before starting the loop, but we had a couple last items as we passed through 1000 hours worth doing.
• Bottom paint — the diver who checked our boat in CT was amused at our near complete lack of paint, so it was time to fix that.
• Fiberglass repair on the transom — The previous owners had installed some fishing supply trays incredibly hackily, so they leaked into the boat. Patched it over fully and sealed it up.
• Installed a Garmin PS51-TH forward-looking sonar — after months on shallow waterways with questionable charting, and looking like we’re going to be doing it for at least another couple years, I wanted some insurance.
• Repaired several leaking windows — Meridian hacked the windows into the boat, didn’t use enough caulk or bedding, and many of them needed re-sealing from scratch. Good times.

The joys of boat ownership. 5 figures of repairs, and only 1 new toy to play with…

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We were dropped back into the water on the 16th, and immediately headed over to Bunker’s Harbor, a little spot that sounded good on the ActiveCaptain entry, but in reality was barely wide enough to lay out enough chain to safely anchor in. As we tested the anchor, it jumped once then “set”, which led me to believe it was just catching on rocks at the bottom. With steeply shelving rocky sides, fishing boats waking the shit out of us all evening and night, and very poor cell reception, we weren’t thrilled with our choices. The next morning, we quickly retreated and headed back west to Winter Harbor on the other side of the peninsula, getting a buoy from the Winter Harbor Yacht club for the weekend.

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We took advantage of their launch service (a little ferry boat that will take you to/from shore) to bring the bikes ashore and bike around for a gorgeous Saturday. Hannah ended up finding a winery+distillery that was ~15 miles inland, so we biked up to there and braved extensive mosquitos to find that they were something rather interesting — a fruit-based winery. But, unlike the fruit wines we have had in the past, these were actually dry and semi-dry wines based on fruit. Really wacky flavor profiles to have something that smelled and mostly tasted like a pinot, but was made from apples. They also had several interesting liquors, including a lovely rum. So, we ended up strapping a case of wine and spirits to one of the bikes to head home. We left the bikes on a bike rack out front of the yacht club, grabbed the batteries to charge, and headed back to the boat for the night.

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Sunday, we wanted to bike over to the offshoot of Acadia NP that’s on this other peninsula and do a big loop ride around it. We had a lazy morning, headed to shore to grab the bikes, and found my bike’s rear wheel resting on the ground, completely deflated. Having never patched a bike tire in my life, it was time to learn how. Knowing this moment would someday come, I had a little tool bag with all the wrenches and allens needed to repair the bike, a small patch kit with plastic tire wrenches, and a tiny tire pump. The process turned out to be pretty simple. Being next to the ocean, once I pumped the tube back up a bit, I dunked it in the water and immediately found the pinhole leak. The super-cheapo Chinese stock tires on the bike gave no resistance to just being pushed back onto the rim with my hands, and we added a Mr Tuffy puncture resistant liner before reassembling. In not too long at all, we were off to the park.

We had a lovely day biking around the park, even though the trail up to the summit of the little “mountain” at the center of the park was closed. Some rangers interrogated us about our bikes and what class they were, which at the time I didn’t know. We later looked and found out they are class 2, which are not allowed off the paved roads in the park, so we couldn’t take an interesting-looking route through the center of the park. We consoled ourselves with ice cream just outside the exit of the park on the loop road, and the patch held up all day!

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While we were far less concerned about dragging anchor and destroying our boat, the Internet wasn’t very usable in Winter Harbor either, with either AT&T or Verizon. As such, on Monday morning, we ended up heading back over to Bar Harbor (the tourist town we biked to on the 4th) for some reliable internet for working for the week, where both AT&T and Verizon have pretty strong signals, and set up permanent residence on one of the city’s mooring buoys.