The Sunbeam’s arrival at the Maine Maritime Museum was magical. The sun was out, the sturgeon were jumping, and the beautiful life size sculpture of the schooner Wyoming shone in the late day light. We even had someone to catch our lines at the dock! It could not have been better. When Erica, our Chief Development Officer, asked us to host an open house at the museum in Bath I was excited to visit a new port, but I then had some logistics to tackle.
Your gift to the Maine Seacoast Mission makes you part of all we do.
First order of business: How far is it? I can determine this most accurately by plotting the route on the Sunbeam’s navigation computer, but the Maine map on my living room wall can provide surprisingly reliable estimates in a pinch. After determining that it was about an eleven-hour steam from Northeast Harbor, I needed to find a safe place to dock while there. In comes Google Earth. It is astonishing how much information can be gathered from an aerial photograph.
One can usually see shoal spots and any dockage facilities are clearly identifiable. I can even determine more mundane details such as how far our steward Siobhan must walk from her car with the groceries. With this image up on my computer, I then called Jason the museum’s facilities manager, and we talked through the best dockage locations and other local conditions such as river current which can run as fast as six knots on the Kennebec River. He suggested arriving and departing at either high or low tide, which provides a short respite from the current.
The day of the trip: We departed Northeast Harbor at 5:00 a.m. which I calculated would place our arrival in Bath right at the 4:00 p.m. slack. Engineer and first mate Storey and I opted for a one-hour on, one-hour off watch cycle to keep it simple and us fresh. The off hour is a great chance to catch up on boat chores while we are a captive audience and sometimes in need of some physical activity. That day was “dungeon thick” fog, which is ordinarily a bit of a nuisance, but given that the seas were flat calm we were able to travel offshore, outside of any significant boating traffic. The trip was routine until we arrived at Popham Beach – the mouth of the Kennebec.
It was still foggy. As I turned up the river, I had to slow down to four knots because of the limited visibility. One’s mind can come up with any number of scenarios on a narrow river such as meeting a 550-foot destroyer from Bath Iron Works headed out for a sea trial. Our slow speed would give us a chance to react and get over into shallow water if such a vessel were encountered. (A destroyer draws thirty-five feet of water- we draw seven. Crazy!) The radar normally would show such targets, but the river is a different animal given the blind twists and turns.
This leaves AIS (a marine transponder) to show the location of large ships, although I have seen situations where military vessels have this technology disabled for security reasons. All this quickly became moot when we passed Fort Popham where the fog lifted, and the temperature shot up from fifty degrees to seventy – a change from an oceanic to an inland climate in less than a mile. The hour winding our way up the river was astonishing. We saw seals feeding on fish, numerous birds, and a much-welcomed absence of destroyers. As we approached the dock in Bath, I had a little internal celebration that all my planning paid off. Jason caught our lines, and I walked up to visit the Wyoming, humbled by the generations of captains who have sailed up the river before me.
