Day 35 – Rogues Roost
The wind was strong when we woke and we could hear the surf breaking on the other side of the peninsula, some distance away. I cooked heavily buttered English muffins in the cast iron pan and put on water for Andrew’s coffee. The beautiful green hulled yawl at the end of the cove, a Hinckley, left her mooring with two older fellows already sporting foul weather overalls on deck. I waved as they motored past, and one called out, “there was a little debate over whether you’re a Cal 39 or 40”.
“A 36”, I answered, thoroughly impressed they knew Isla was a Cal in the first place. The 36 looks very similar to the 40, the top of the cabin especially, but is obviously, marginally, closer in size to the 39, so both fair guesses.
Shortly after they left a smaller boat followed them out, but not an hour later returned to the Roost. The skipper mimed huge swell with his arms as he passed another boat. Despite ample space to our south, they dropped anchor worryingly close to ours, perhaps underestimating the scope of our rode. Andrew asked about the conditions and they reported swell three meters or more, explaining they had never once turned back before. I sat about catching up on nearly a week’s worth of journaling while Andrew cleaned and organized the cabin.
After a few hours of boat work and my comparatively useless journaling, we rowed to shore with the intention of climbing a nearby hill. There was no clear way to the top, and so we dove into a thick variety of shrubs and scrub trees, pushing through branches as the dense vegetation obscured everything beyond a ten foot radius. We climbed a series of rocks to survey our surroundings and to stay roughly on course. After much crouching and high stepping through the brush, we found our way to taller rocks surrounded by vegetation which mercifully stopped at waist height.
We climbed one of the large boulders glacially strewn atop the hill and took in a clear view of Rogues Roost, the islands behind, and the open ocean. From our viewpoint Andrew ran with excitement to a line of overgrown double track, fading back into a sea of green. We followed the trail over the hilly terrain for a few miles, spotting blueberries, owl pellets, hair balls (from a wild cat?), a mix of animal tracks, a good sized toad, a lumbering porcupine, and most incredibly, a large number of wild pitcher plants. The carnivorous plants were mixed into peat moss, waiting to drown unsuspecting insects in their digestive fluids. Who knew they lived here?
The wind was very strong atop the hills, Andrew’s hat was thrown fifty feet off his head on one occasion. As we fought back through the vegetation, Andrew noticed that the boat that anchored next to us had moved and picked up the mooring the yawl had vacated that morning. We rowed past them on the way back to Isla and saw a black buoy floating above our rode that hadn’t been there when we left.
The skipper of the, now officially, poorly anchored boat came over in his dinghy to let us know they had dragged anchor and snagged our rode. The buoy was holding their line to the surface. The snag, or their failed retrieval, must have pulled our anchor up momentarily as Isla had reset some distance downwind. “I can’t wait to roast these amateurs in my journal later,” I thought to myself while I pulled up the Rocna so they could retrieve their anchor. “They probably even run aground in places other than Camden or Jonesport.” We re-anchored while the guy returned to his boat; he hoisted his dinghy up, cleverly covering the transom, so I couldn’t note the name for future shaming.
Andrew started fishing and thirty seconds later had two mackerel on the line, he kept the larger and released the other. He fished for a while longer, and with the luxury of choice, selected a second for consumption. I put out a mackerel head on a line once again, and though it returned noticeably smaller, no luck.
Andrew ate his mackerel snack while I ate my favorite, peanut butter, granola, and milk. When it was time for a real dinner we made soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. The wind lessened as the sun set, promising better conditions tomorrow.
