West Penobscot Bay to The Basin

We left High Island Harbor late Monday morning and motored ENE from Muscle Ridge Channel across Two Bush Channel, heading for Hurricane Sound on the SW side of Vinalhaven and the rest of the Fox Islands. 

Two Bush Channel is extremely deep (our depth transducer recorded 398 feet!) and perfect for large ship traffic, but it also has lobster pots that use a double float system we had not seen before. A basic lobster trap consists of a large metal cage divided into several “rooms,” including a “kitchen” where the bait bag hangs and a “parlor” (for watching undersea TV?). There are small holes for undersize lobsters and crabs to escape, and there are also biodegradable rings that allow trapped lobsters to escape through a door eventually, if the trap is abandoned or cut loose from its float. One or more bricks are added to the cage to make it sink quickly and stay on the bottom. A warp or line travels from the trap to the color-coded float on the surface, so that each fisherman can find and pull his or her traps. 

Buoy and toggle on deep-water lobster trap

In the deep water of Two Bush Channel, many traps have two floats: a buoy and a “toggle.” The buoy is attached to the end of the line and the toggle float is attached farther down on the line and is intended to pull up on the pot warp and take the tension off the buoy; this allows a fisherman to pull the buoy aboard, without having the full weight of the trap on the line, and hook the line onto the winch used to raise the trap. Ideally, the toggle sits well below the surface and is not a factor for passing boats. But when the tide is low, or if the line lengths aren't perfectly adjusted for the depth, both the toggle and buoy float at the surface about 20 feet apart, with the line between them hung a few feet below the surface, perfect for hooking on a keel or propeller. Sue was idly staring at a float as we sailed by, and she was surprised to see it suddenly sink. A few seconds later, Curtis said, “&*@^#%, we've hooked a line.” Fortunately, the toggle line slid down, under, and past our keel, and everything popped up again intact at the stern, bumping harmlessly under the towed inflatable as we continued. Cilantro's propeller sits inside an aperture rather than being exposed at the stern, so unless we back over a line or spin the propeller sidewise into one, we are unlikely to really get fouled on it.

The rest of our passage across western Penobscot Bay was uneventful except for some good bird sightings: Curtis found a single Atlantic puffin floating on the water, and we came across a flock of 15 red-necked phalaropes feeding on a line of floating seaweed. Gannets were relatively plentiful (probably following runs of herring, according to Bob Steneck), and some of them dozed on the water ahead of us, taking to the air only when we came uncomfortably close.

The White Islands in Hurricane Sound

We were able to sail most of the way across to the Fox Islands on a light south wind, but we also ran the engine for a few hours to charge our batteries. Without alternative power sources such as wind and solar, we are still dependent on the engine's alternator to keep our amp-hours up. As we passed the south end of the beautiful White Islands, we turned north on a broad reach up into Hurricane Sound. Until a few years ago, Hurricane Island was home to Maine's Outward Bound school. We have seen several of OB's boats on our trip. They are open wooden boats that appear to hold about fifteen young people, one instructor, plus two rectangular sails and four extra-long oars for windless days. A simple tarpaulin is rigged as a tent at night. 

The Vinalhaven ferry roars past Cilantro (note the UPS
truck on the bow)

At the north end of Hurricane Sound, we rendezvoused with Bill Creighton on Toda, his 40-foot Pacific Seacraft. (We had met Bill through Mikey at Bittersweet.) Bill grew up around Vinalhaven and had given us the GPS coordinates of an anchorage he likes. As we were about to make a turn to the east toward the anchorage, the big Vinalhaven ferry came zipping south across our path. Sue, who was at the helm, determined we weren't on a collision course, but we were still surprised by the speed with which the ferry appeared on the scene and then left us in its wake.

Bill Creighton gives us a tour of The Basin

After anchoring along Conway Shore in about 20 feet of water, we hopped into Bill's inflatable dinghy, equipped with a 9.9-hp motor, and explored The Basin. This “magnificent tidal lake,” as the cruising guide describes it, has depths ranging from 111 feet to rocks awash at low tide. It would be clogged with cruising boats were it not for the narrow, rock-obstructed entrance through which the tide fills and empties like a river in spring flood. There seemed to be about a two-foot vertical difference between the water levels in The Basin and Hurricane Sound. It is possible but not easy to pass through the entrance in a sailboat at absolute slack tide (which, according to Bill, lasts only 96 seconds!), taking care to avoid the big rock in mid-channel, but otherwise The Basin is visited mostly by dinghies and lobsterboats. Vinalhaven locals say that the big schooners used to enter The Basin under sail and spend the winter inside, protected from fierce Atlantic storms.

The Basin's tiny southern exit

We left the Basin via its south entrance, beneath a car bridge that is too low to pass under at high tide but too shallow to navigate at low tide. We hit it just right (Bill has definitely done this before) and scooted into a harbor south of Barton Island, where we docked at Bill's father's cottage on the site of an old paving stone quarry. Schooners used to ground out here at low tide, lean against the piled rock wharf for loading, and then float off on high tide with their cargo to start the journey southward.

Paving stone pieces left from quarrying days

From this harbor, it was a quick dinghy ride back north to Cilantro and Toda. Before we returned to our boats, however, Bill took us back through The Basin entrance, now against a roaring ebb tide. We inched our way up-current at full throttle, sat at idle in an eddy above the entrance, and then surfed back out in neutral. Sue was covering her eyes at times, but she still managed to take some photos (and a video that we might post a link to when we get back to a Wifi connection). 

Surfing an ebb tide out of The Basin

Later that evening, at anchor next to Toda in a spot not written up in any cruising guide, we were reminded that there are countless gunkholes and anchorages to find and explore on our own, as long as we have charts and depth sounders to guide us in and evaluate the protection from wind and waves. We were just two boats in a lovely location, in the company of bald eagles, ospreys, black guillemots, and several hundred common terns. 

Placid shoreline in The Basin