Our Summer Cruise 2018

 

Sunday, June 17

Slept well in the tree house and spent the morning grocery shopping ( a large bill) in Blue Hill; and spending more money at Hamilton Marine, the boat store in Searsport. I picked up my new solar panel being stored by George and Cynthy's and began the installation. All went well and I had the panel mounted on the rails by the time it was to quit for the day and enjoy a glass of wine with Dean and Charlotte. George and Cynthy returned from a short weekend cruise about this time so he was interested to see how I had done as he was in the process of adding two panels on "Ellie Belle" his 32' Nordic Tug. Unfortunately, they have a generator problem and will not be able to join us for the first part of our trip but will meet up with us later somewhere.

 

Monday, June 18

The sun was up early out here in NE Maine, around 4:45 am and we were not too far behind it as the sunlight streamed into the back of the back of the boat with rays reaching down to our stateroom.

Home is roughly 1000 miles west of here but in the same time zone as Maine with a sunrise almost 1.5 hrs later. Michigan was originally in the Central Time Zone, a one hour time difference, based on the railways establishing time zones in the late 1800s to eliminate crazy schedules along their routes. The Zone extended as far east as western Pennsylvania. Michigan summer sunsets were before 7:00 pm! A group of Detroiters organized the More Daylight Club with the aim of giving people more daylight to enjoy their summer evenings. To achieve this, they proposed moving the eastern part of the Zone into the Eastern Time Zone, gaining an extra hour of sunlight . The idea was regarded as crazy at first with not one Detroit precinct supporting it in a 1908 vote.

But the More Daylight Club kept up their advocacy — and gradually attracted allies to the cause. Some automotive companies were persuaded on the promise of more summer evening pleasure drives. (Not Ransom E. Olds, founder of Oldsmobile, who was downright offended by the campaign: “It seems grossly unfair that Detroit should embarrass other municipalities and citizens of Michigan by the adoption of other than legal time,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Free Press.) Retailers, on the hope of more daylight for evening-strolling and window-browsing, jumped on the bandwagon. Others were intrigued by arguments about lower crime rates, improved public health, or electricity bill savings. The More Daylight Club’s members eventually included Detroit Tigers co-owner Frank Navin; John Francis Dodge, of motor company fame; police commissioner John Gillespie; Walter Campbell, President of the Belle Isle & Windsor Ferry; and prominent business leader Dexter M. Ferry of the Ferry Seed Co.

In March 1915, the More Daylight Club submitted to the City Council a petition signed by 25,000 people in favor of the move to Eastern time and a few months later, the Council voted to move Detroit to Eastern Standard Time. Though some doubters (including the editorial page editors of the Detroit Free Press) still thought the move to EST was nonsense and would be ignored, institutions were quick to adjust. Retailers posted their new hours (same as the old hours, but on EST), steamers adjusted their schedules, the Post Office announced that it would move its clocks an hour forward.

Detroit had seceded from Central Time.

Cities across the state eventually followed Detroit’s example: Lansing, Grand Rapids, Battle Creek and Port Huron all eventually moved to Eastern Time, and in 1931 the state legislature voted to adopt Eastern Time as the uniform time zone for the state.  However, the battle over Daylight Savings Time was long fought by Michigan and even today efforts still persist to keep the state on permanent Eastern time.

It will take a while to adapt to the sunrise difference and then we will be up in Canada with another time zone to work with.

One advantage of waking so early is that I got an early start to the day's work. By 7:00am I was at Espositio Welding in Surrey to pick up my new project on the boat, a prop cage. This is a cone shaped device of welded bar that surrounds the boat's propeller to deflect anything from hitting or tangling in the prop - especially lobster trap float lines. After last year's experience of winding a line around the prop and the continual vigilance needed to avoid floats, almost impossible in any sort of waves, it seemed like a worthwhile addition. Many boats here have cages, and although fuel consumption at high speeds suffers quite a bit, at our typical travel speeds, the impact should be a good trade-off; we will let you know.

Work continued on installing the solar panel and by the end of the day, it was complete and generating power. We now have over 800 watts of solar and hope this can just about eliminate the need to run our generator, at least for battery charging. We will still use it for heating and making water and high electrical loads but will help minimize running time.

We did some trial fit-up of the two halves of the prop cage and found some minor interference with the bottom of the hull so it will be back to Esposito's tomorrow to have him tweak it a little.

Tuesday, June 19

Rays in the eyes again but at least I got the cage to Surrey early and while some minor rework was being done, I took the opportunity to drive some of the back roads along several bays to Blue Hill. East Blue Hill, not much more than a name on the map was quite scenic at low tide and I spent a while taking photographs for potential paintings. I came across their small one-room Post Office that still serves the community and saw that they had added a small plaque to commemorate the last Postmaster, Ronnie Conary ,who had retired in 2000, after 63 years in that position!

 

 

 

The cage was ready in a couple of hours so back to the boat where it was fitted quite easily apart from the last two bolts into the bottom of the hull which should have been a matter of drilling two holes through about half an inch of fiberglass. After the second drill bit dulled in about 1/2", I knew something was wrong. It turned out, after a phone call with Nordic Tug, that to deaden prop and rudder noise they had poured a 6" thick mix of sand and resin in the area I was trying to drill through; and it was as good as concrete. Fortunately Judy had gone swimming at the Y in Ellsworth and was on her way back and found me a long masonry drill bit in town saving me a couple of hours. That ended work for the day.

We joined Dean and Charlotte in dinner at George and Cynthy's along with Brion Rieff, the owner of Brion Rieff boat Builders in Brooklin. If you are interested in wooden boats check out Brion's website at www.rieffboats.com Brion used to live onsite at Atlantic Boat. Cynthy conjured up a vegetarian lasagna with many types of mushrooms - delicious, and a blueberry pie that finished a great evening.

Wednesday, June 20

With great difficulty, I very slowly drilled my two 7" holes; oh I wished for my big hammer drill at home, 30 seconds each instead of 20 minutes. Of course, I now needed very long stainless steel bolts - not easy to find. Ended up an hour away at Fastenal who had the threaded rod but when I arrived found a note on the door "Gone for the Day". Backtracking, I tried several other places with no luck; Esposito's suggested the Surrey General Store. Now Surry is a blip on the road to Ellsworth with just a couple of businesses, a church and a Post Office. Not feeling that success was likely I found a huge hardware store that rivals most I have been in. Yes, they did have stainless steel threaded rod in 3/8" - how many did I need?

Once back at the boat, I made short work of the final bolt-ups and the cage was secure while the Admirals sat in the shade. Now to test it in the water!

 

Thursday, June 21

We were washing the boat at 6:30 this morning and were done by 9:00 almost ready to go in to the water tomorrow if the weather cooperated with us. Hamilton's beckoned for a few items I needed but Dean had a long shopping list for the two projects I had on his boat, solar power and an inverter/charger. That took up a good part of the day with another replenishment trip to the supermarket in Blue Hill. The weather did not look good with rain and high winds forecast for Friday so we postponed our launch until next week. Dean's solar panel was still on a truck somewhere between Pennsylvania and Maine so it was a good decision to delay. Our additional solar panel has been working well keeping our batteries charged although we had have a power cord for the real thing hooked up.

A relaxing evening as we were close to ready and a good sunset was enjoyed before an early bedtime.

Friday, June 22

Good decision to delay launch as it was cold, windy and wet; not a day to sit on a mooring ball. While Judy went swimming at the Y in Ellsworth, I did some minor boat jobs and we got the dinghy lift off the boat and returned it to its correct orientation so we could hoist the dinghy up over the weekend. Not feeling like cooking, we all went in to Blue Hill early and ate for the first time at the Barncastle Hotel. It had a good reputation but we had never tried it: glad we did as the food was excellent and the beer very good.

Dean/Judy at the Barncastle

At the Bagaduce Music Library next door, we enjoyed a folk music concert with Larry Kaplan from Connecticut whole played 6 and 12-string guitars and sang.

 

The Library is quite a unique venture started many years ago with the purpose of accumulating and lending sheet music of all types. It has over a million pieces in the library and almost half are the only original copy.

Saturday, June 23

Good weather returned but Dean's solar panel is still somewhere; not at Home Depot in Ellsworth where it's meant to be. In the meantime, we set to work running the wiring for the panel, installing the charge controller, circuit breakers, and hooking up to the batteries. Not too difficult a job as running the cables was relativley easy compared to when I did STB's install and had to take the ceiling and most of the trim down in the pilot house. In between doing this, I also worked with George on his solar panel installation which was going well.

By lunchtime we were done with solar until the panel arrived and work on the inverter/charger began. This is a large box about 24" long by 12" wide and 5" thick. It's purpose is to take battery voltage of 12V DC and step it up to 120V AC like you would have in a residence so that normal items such as toasters, computers etc. can be run for "limited" amounts of time while not connected to power from the shore, i.e., at anchor or on a mooring ball. Because the voltage is being stepped up by a factor of around 13, an inverter uses a lot of power out of a battery bank so needs to be replenished. The solar panel will help greatly. The charger part of the system is a high output battery charger, probably 4 times as powerful as Dean's existing charger allowing him to recharge his batteries from the generator relatively quickly. Hopefully, Dean will not need to run his generator as much in the future and have better access to AC power.

Since this is a big box, fitting it in to Dean's small engine room space was a bit of a challenge but we managed to suspend it from the ceiling in a frame Dean had constructed during the week. Wiring was the main job as we had numerous cables to cut (some over 1/2" thick), crimp lugs, insulate the cables and attach them to various devices. All went well but we ended the day with more work still on the cards for tomorrow. George's work was almost done as well.

Where Does This One Go??