Portland, Maine

Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Tue 4 Sep 2007 18:14
43:38.546N  70:15.067N
 
Here we are in Portland.  We arrived on Sunday (9/2) after a really short hop (6 miles) from Chebeague Island.  This is the first time we've been tied to a dock since August 12 when we were in Halifax.  We've noticed that it's noisy at a dock, and there are people all around.  Remember what I said about the boaters we've encountered that always seem to be in a good mood?  Not 100% so here.  Maybe its because its Labor Day weekend and for most boaters, the summer is over. One sailboater arrived a few hours after we did and we could hear him cursing halfway down the marina channel.  I had a flashback to a Sopranos episode because there were so many f-words flying around.  Anyway, it seemed the marina had put us in the dock space he thought he was going to get or something of that nature.  He ended up putting his boat in the slip next to ours, so we're not sure what the fuss was all about?
 
We've been here two nights and plan to leave later today (Tuesday, 9/4) when the tide brings in the water we need to float out of here.  It's a bit shallow.  I've included pictures to prove it.  The first is our depth meter at low tide.  See how the needle is pointed to 0?  If the depth meter could read negative, it would, because we were actually sitting on the bottom with the water down at least a few inches on our waterline.  As usual, I was worried thinking we were going to tip over or something, and Don was completely calm about it and went to bed while I sat and watched the depth meter go to 0 the first time we experienced low tide here.  Now that we've experienced low tide four times and haven't tipped over, I'm as confident as Don that we'll be fine.  The second picture was taken from our boat looking out at the marina channel and the neighboring water (what there is of it) at low tide.  The dots you see are birds.  They are not floating on the water like they usually do, instead they are standing on the bottom.
 
The first night we were here, we walked across the harbor bridge to the more fashionable side of town (we are on the south side of the harbor and the restaurants, etc. are on the north side).  After a nice walking tour of the old industrial warehouse waterfront area, now swank restaurant, shopping and tourist area (Buffalo could learn from this), we walked back to the marina.  As we were walking over the bridge, we heard really loud music coming from a party boat (or 'booze cruise' as we used to call them when in college we would go on the party boats that cruised Boston harbor) as it passed under the bridge.  This was at about 8:30pm.  We didn't think more about it until 1:30am that night when we kept hearing an incredibly loud noise.  Now, our marina in the less fashionable part of town, is situated right in the path of incoming and outgoing airplanes to the Portland airport, so at first we thought we were hearing an abnormal number of airplanes arriving at 1:30 in the morning.  After getting up and peering out our cabin port [non-boater translation: bedroom window], we could plainly see a Coast Guard helicopter hovering with a giant search light (about a billion candle power) pointed at the water not too far from our boat. It was so close, we were getting waves from the wash created by the rotor blades.  Next, three Coast Guard boats rushed out to the scene, milled around for a bit and then left, as did the helicopter.  In the morning, the helicopter was still searching the harbor, and continued all of yesterday, until sunset.  Apparently what happened was that a 24 year old man fell off the party boat (the story is that he leaned back on one of the lifeline gateways and it wasn't latched causing him to fall backwards into the water).  The kicker is that this person is a member of the Coast Guard.  Unfortunately, he hasn't been found.  Not surprisingly, this episode has put a damper on the usual Labor Day revelry here in Portland harbor.
 
As mentioned above, we'll leave later today to head further south down the coast of Maine.  We plan to make a few stops along the Maine and New Hampshire coast, and then head straight for Provincetown on Cape Cod.
 
Anne

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