Delightful Scale Up!

Rumor has it that Andante enjoyed some wonderful evening sails without us!  Good to know she was enjoying herself.  We came back to find  Chris had taken excellent care of our good ship.  Thanks Bro!

Saturday was a beautiful day for a wedding.  Chris' daughter, Julie married Mike Kimber in a lovely outdoor ceremony on Yarmouth Island.  I gotta say, this family knows how to do weddings.  Their black lab was part of the ceremony as he walked down the aisle alone with the rings tied around his neck.  We never would've tried something like that with Chessie.  One whiff of something, especially the numerous deer that roam the island, and he would've taken off like a shot.  No wild eyed dog marred this ceremony.  It was very special and so good to catch up with extended family. 

We dropped the mooring line at 7am Sunday morning in some of the thickest fog I've ever encountered.  Pea soup?  I'd call it clam chowder.  Fog is so disorienting.  It's impossible to tell where the horizon is.  That may sound silly.  Just keep your chin level and look out and you're at horizon height right?  Wrong. It's hard to tell what's up.  Fog often hovers around land.  It'll be clear at sea and you'll sail into a thick fog bank or conversely you'll sail away from fog enshrouded land into beautiful sunlight.  

Maine has a phenomenon called a "scale up".  We started calling it a "delightful scale-up" and delightful it is.  Basically it's when the fog lifts.  We've had those heart stopping  moments of seeing a dark smudge in the fog reveal itself to be trees on land surrounded by rocks!  Turned the tiller over as hard and fast as possible because we thought what we were seeing through the fog was waves breaking on rocks only to find out it was a flock of birds.  Hey, better to be safe than sorry.  In our seasons of sailing in Maine we're usually the only boat we see the whole time without radar.  It'd be nice to add it someday . . . 

The fog stayed with us as we negotiated the shipping lanes into Boston.  We went through our new can of compressed air that made up our fog horn and reached for another can only to discover that it took a different nozzle, one we didn't have.  We still had the outbound traffic lanes to get through.  Necessity is the mother of invention and Russ came to the rescue.  Drilling, tapping, and copious amounts of duct tape secured a new nozzle to the new can and we were back in business.  

Whew!  or should I say "BEEEEPPPPPP"