Moorglade's Voyage - Kennybunkport to Newburyport

Kennybunkport to Newburyport

Moorglade's Voyage

Ted Wilson

Fri 14 Sep 2012 01:00

Our position is 42:48.801N 70:52.068W

We have left Maine behind today, passed through the coastal waters of New Hampshire and arrived back in Massachusetts. It would not be right to leave Maine without some comment on Lobsters and their traps. Lobsters seem to be surviving the intensive fishing of the last two hundred years, while all the other fish stocks in the gulf of Maine have collapsed. The 1988 lobster catch was 21.7 million pounds rising to 30.8 million pounds in 1991, 38.9 in 1994 47 million in 1997, and reaching an amazing 62.3 million pounds in 2002. This years catch has broken all the records resulting in very cheap lobster in the markets and restaurants. Of course to catch all those lobsters you need a lot of traps, currently there are well over 3 million lobster traps on the Maine coast and traps mean buoys, which is a real nuisance if you happen to be cruising the coast. Constant vigilance is required to avoid them and one hears many tales of fouled rudders and propellers. The last thing you want to be doing round here is diving under the boat to free the prop, the water is very cold. Although marketing lobsters around the world is big business, the catching of them is still very much in the hands of small family operations. They seem to have unwritten agreements about territory but occasionally lobster wars break out particularly if intruders are involved. The lobstermen in Maine have been following self imposed conservation practice for over a hundred years. They not only reject small specimens, but also return large breeding females to the sea.

Mainers are also trying to find ways of stopping the spread of coastal urban sprawl along the central and down east coasts.

The passage today was again uneventful with the prevailing SW wind strengthening a little through the day so although the sky was clear the temperature dropped as the day progressed.

We headed into Newburyport at about 4pm over the shallow bar were the ebb tide and slight swell made conditions unpleasant. We pushed the ebb up the shallow river following the well marked, twisting channel. Docking options were not clear so we ended up on a town mooring ball. It proved to be quite an uncomfortable night with Moorglade lying to the tide and the strengthening wind pushing us over the buoy. In the morning I realised we had been pushed right over our buoy which had submerged in the fast tidal stream and with the wind strengthening further, there seemed to be no way of sorting things out. I needed to take the load off the mooring and spin Moorglade against the tide. As we had as yet had no value from our Towboat US subscription I decided to hail them. They turned up in about 15 mins and we were just getting a line across and deciding on a plan of action when the tide/wind equilibrium changed and with quite a violent spin our mooring buoy freed itself.

With that problem sorted we could head into town for a while. The Maritime museum took most of our time, not only was it very interesting but the docent was very chatty and time passed quickly. Kay did find time to buy a few needed items of food.