Day 6 – North Haven to Camden

We woke up on North Haven, having slept in Andrew’s family’s house, packed up and rowed out to Isla for breakfast. Stephanie and her kids were coming to see Isla so we tidied up, but they must have been running late for their sailing picnic as they didn’t show up by ten or even ten thirty.

We motored out of the thoroughfare and straight back into the fog. Winds were light but we raised the sails, soon dropping the genoa and putting up the spinnaker on a run towards Camden. The fog cleared as we neared the wealthy port town (and our old high school basketball rivals) and we overtook a schooner, Lazy Jack, carting selfy-ing tourists back into port.

We sailed into the mooring field and turned up wind to find a place to drop anchor. The boats were packed in tight, we tacked carefully between them working to the edge of the field. As we reached it we saw a handwritten buoy marking a rock, and fell off the wind to steer clear below it, assured the nearly high, rising tide would keep us safe anyway. With a horrible, solid thud, the boat stopped dead, aground. Andrew quickly dropped the main and started the engine while I turned us upwind and we freed ourselves seconds later. Somewhat shaken, and contemplating the results of irreversibly damaging Isla one week into a trip for which I had quit my job, we motored back into the harbor to get our bearings (and maybe to escape the eyes of anyone who had seen us run aground). Whoops.

Heart beats calmed, and no immediate signs of leaks, we headed back to the mooring field and conceded to rent a transient mooring for the night. Upon rowing into the marina, we discovered Andrew had mistaken high for low in the tide charts, a difference of some eight feet of water given our proximity to low tide.  We should have noticed this, but dismissed the obvious signs because, ‘we had checked the charts’. 

Apparently this rocky area is somewhat infamous, and many sailors have had worse experiences.

We walked around Camden, bought goggles for a future inspection of the hull, and waited in town until our friends, Haley and Foster, arrived for dinner on the hopefully still floating boat. All four of us, and Caly, loaded into The Dingy and clenched the benches as each wave and wake threatened to sink the overloaded bathtub. 

We grilled hot dogs and sausages, drank summery beers, took in the sunset, and talked about the first few days of the trip. Andrew rowed them back into shore after dinner and let Caly relieve herself as usual. Back in The Dingy, Caly decided to look in the next dinghy, and put her front paws on it, back legs still in ours. The boats spread apart and Calypso, terrible swimmer that she is, fell between them into the water. Andrew pulled her up from below the surface, found a hose in the boat yard, washed her off, and rowed back.