Round Pond, Maine

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Sat 7 Sep 2013 04:02

43:56.5N 69:27.2W

 

Friday 6th September

 

Friday began in the worst possible way every way you look at it.

 

I was sleeping in the forepeak (we will gloss over Sarah’s noisy snoring here..) and at around 0300 hours she was woken by the sound of heavy footsteps on the back deck.

 

She initially assumed it might have been me but got up to check and called out through the companion way entrance. There was an intruder on board and he made his way quickly back down the stern of the boat and got back into his dinghy. Sarah watched him and challenged him but he simply sat in his dinghy staring back but not making any movement or any sound. She immediately called me and I came up with a torch but by now his dinghy was sitting about 20 yards away and out of the effective range of the torch. I too called out to challenge the man but got no response. I turned on our deck lights and went to fetch our searchlight but since we had not used it this year it was uncharged and therefore useless. When I came on deck again he had vanished silently and we could not dicern where he had gone but were thankful that he had chosen to go rather than continue the stand-off. We then felt that we had been wise not to cause a big commotion with a fog horn and further lights as this is a country where guns are all too readily to hand and we had no idea how benign or otherwise this man might have been. If armed, his response to our searchlight might not have been rewarding!

 

Obviously we were both very shaken by this experience, however we did not contact the police as the call would have been routed to a 911 centre and the concept of our being anchored in the middle of a remote bay and reporting at 0330 hours an intruder who could have come from and returned to just about anywhere was not going to make for a good report, especially as they would have no means of getting out to talk to us anyway.

 

We were happy that he had gone and we both felt that he was not a further risk to anyone, but as Sarah had initially been woken by voices she now rather assumes that this was him perhaps just talking to himself.

 

We have reported this all to various sailing contacts including a member of the OCC whom is very much at the centre of the community at Maple Juice Cove and he is very clearly on the case along with the community for whom this is the worst possible news. His first email to us included the lines:

We have not locked our houses in 35 years nor our boats or cars . One reason is that in this small area we respond to situations like this. I have never heard of a boarding here in Maine in 69 years of cruising this coast. . Can you describe anything about the person and especially the dinghy -was it a fisherman's type of pram or perhaps a RIB or inflatable. Was there an outboard? If so what type?  We know just about everyone's dinghy around here. We all would like to have had a chance, and it is our obligation, to make sure this does not happen again to someone else. Hopefully you will help.”

 

We know that this is absolutely the case and along with all other cruisers on this east coast of America, we have never ever felt that security was any sort of an issue and whilst there is no avoiding the fact that this was a frightening and disturbing event, hopefully it was a one off incident but it has left us both very shaken.

 

So having not had a lot of sleep we were pleased to watch Friday dawn as a beautiful day with a gentle westerly breeze. We checked in with the Magellan SSB net (mostly antipodean boats…) and told them about our misfortune.  What was particularly sobering was the report that followed from one of the Australian boats that last night one of their friends had been shot dead by an intruder, but this had happened in Venezuela.

 

We were obviously resolved not to stay in maple Juice Cove any longer and so Balvenie and ourselves raised sails and headed off on our planned passage further westwards. In the event we had a long tacking match with the two yachts beating down the narrow river trying to maximise our speed and headings competitively whilst also having to avoid the forests of lobster pot buoys and random lobster boats. We used Flossie for a while as best we could, but the wind headed us and so as we had to make endless tacks, we resorted to just the hard wind jib and the main. The lead changed hands a few times before we both emerged into the more open seas and we were confronted by a rising wind that was now gusting 25 knots. Tacking still involved battling with the tide, the shoals, reefs and ledges as well as the ubiquitous multicloured pots. We were probably just lucky I suppose, but we now feel that a pot is not considered as close unless it is actually bouncing down the side of the hull and threatening to ensnare us at which point things would become seriously tricky!

 

The tacking match continued until both boats resolved that we still had a considerable way to go to round the long offshore headland and we both needed to reef and in our case we also had to stow Flossie, so common sense broke out and we hove-to for a while and sorted ourselves out before we both turned downwind to rush down the Muscongous Sound to Round Pond. This is a very tight but beautiful town anchorage and we both squeezed in and dropped our anchors. In no time at all we were approached by a lovely small yacht that sailed in behind us, that welcomed us to Round Pond and shortly after picking up their mooring buoy,  the owner and his wife rowed over to give us a fuller welcome and offered to either lend us their car or drive us around tomorrow and show us the area.  An offer that we and Balvenie have accepted as the weather is about to turn bad and we expect to be stuck here for a day or perhaps two.

 

In the evening we went over to Balvenie for drinks and ended up staying for dinner, looked round their wonderful boat and heard a lot more about their on-going circumnavigation.