Flashes of Panic

My parents, planning to spectate at next weekend’s Shipyard Cup, wanted to move Whitecap around from its usual mooring off Birch Point to the Robinhood Marine Center in Georgetown. This allows them to hop over to Boothbay by crossing the Sheepscot and going through Townsend’s Gut, rather than hauling around Cape Small and Newagen. Heading East from the New Meadows river can be quite a slog even in a powerboat, due to the rough water off the mouth of the Kennebec, where the mountainous island Seguin sits like a turtle Manitou Kinnibec can’t quite swallow.

My father, uncle, and I cast off from Birch Point about mid-morning Saturday on this task, stopping for geocaching-by-dinghy once in the Basin and again on the Boothbay side of the Sheepscot. I took a lot of pictures, got a good bit of sun, piloted the boat in from Reid State Park through Five Islands and over to Indiantown Island, set the anchor (or, as my father puts it, “dropped the hook”) and weighed the anchor (quite a chore considering how well it was set,) sat on the bow as we came through Goose Rock Passage to Robinhood and watched the Pink Lady pass inside the ledges on its way to Boothbay (“Local knowledge,” shrugs my father,) hooked the mooring at RMC and rowed the dinghy in to the dock.

I’ll see if I can post some pictures over the coming week. They describe it better than I am.