Day 17 – Eastport

We woke up without a clear objective for the day and wound up staying in Eastport. We spent the morning back in town, stopped at the library, and picked up some more groceries. On the walk back, we tried some mustard samples at a mustard mill museum. They were far tastier than you’d expect from mustard, but artisan mustard wasn’t in the budget. Later we walked over for a better view of the container ship still in port, and debated how close we could get. There were signs around the property suggesting we’d find ourselves in some sort of unpleasant experience with security if we wandered too far.

Back in the boat yard adjacent to our mooring, we saw the owner of the Fisher 30 working on her teak trim and so we stopped to ask about the cartoonish looking motor sailor. The kind woman let us climb up her ladder to look around the bizarre English boat. It looked something like a mix between a small barge, a fishing boat, and a ketch. She had cruised for 17 years with her husband, starting when she was 21, and she was happy to chat with us for a while.

We got back to the dock and Andrew rowed out to grab the fishing gear. We spread out on the huge dock and jigged with sabikis, not a single bite. I suspected it was too early in the afternoon. While we were fishing, the harbor pilot glided his boat into the dock, and we gave a hand with the lines as he and his wife hopped ashore. He must have been returning from guiding the container ship out of the bay. We ate a late lunch and hung out on the boat for a while, happy to be out of the sun.

As the sun set I fiddled with Isla’s rat nest of wires hoping to fix the lights in the v-berth. I had to concede after a while that I had no idea which wires ran up to the v-berth, nor any real idea of how to figure it out. I did manage to reinstall power to everything else, only after first inexplicably killing it. For my efforts, I learned nothing about the v-berth’s connections or the tangled fire hazard surrounding the fuse board.

While I was growing frustrated with that, Andrew had gotten the fishing gear out again and this time hooked three mackerel. He got out the “mackerel whacker”, our handy flooring hatchet, and whacked them. I cleaned the three while he pursued a fourth, and I threw one of the heads on a bait hook in hopes of landing something larger.

The light was fading so we went below deck to finish preparing the fish for dinner. Andrew grilled sweet potatoes while I panfried the mackerel; the whole meal was excellent. After eating I went back above deck to find something had snapped the bait line. We were excited and disappointed; we speculated as to what it could have been and if we would have still had room to eat it.

While we were cleaning up Andrew looked out the port side and asked with alarm, “Are we drifting?!” I looked out and saw the lights of the harbor pilot boat, tied to the dock, growing closer at an alarming rate. We stood frozen for a second, totally flustered. A low hum reached us and we then realized it was in fact the harbor pilot boat moving, not us, but nearly silently. It appeared some kids were taking it out for a nighttime joyride, but we weren’t sure. We watched them slide around the aquaculture nets in the dark and leave the cove.