Back River Blue Heron

I am going to have to get a longer lens,
like the contributors to the great Spanish birdwatching blog Miradas Cantabricas. But these will do for the moment. These shots are taken right out back at our place in Friendship. The last shot is of the house from my skiff.

Delivery & Launch

Darrin and crew from Carpenter's Boatshop in Pemaquid delivered, on moving-in day in Friendship, my Monhegan skiff, and Marilyn's Adirondack chair.

The bank of the Back River, more on that later, is the kind of environment in which Water Rat and the Mole thrive in The Wind in the Willows, which opens with the famous soliloquy to messing about in boats.

Volvo: Fleet closing in on Boston

With Ericsson 4 487 miles from Boston, with a 36 mile lead over Telefonica Blue and the trailer - Telefonica Black 618 miles from the finish, the fleet will probably reach Boston on Monday.

Here's the 2d viewer.

Bowsprite: Schooners of New York Harbor

Bowsprite has a collection of water colors, and specs on the principal passenger-carrying traditional sailing craft now working New York Harbor. Here is the oldest - South Street Seaport's iron Pioneer. For the rest of the squadron check out Bowsprite.

Qingdao harbor - tugs, warships, and lifeboat racing

Tugster likes to get up close and watch the tugs push freighters around. Here's a shot of a warship getting pushed around - in Qingdao, China. There's some sort of friendly gathering of warships there for a multinational naval parade.

Highlights include a lifeboat (吊船) race, and a stubby Chinese nuclear submarine.

Images: China Daily

Schooner Mary E hauled out on City Island for maintenance

The 100 year old schooner Mary E, which long called Greenport home, but now sails from Port Jefferson, is on the hard at Consolidated, at the opposite end of Pilot Street from City Island Y.C. where I keep North River 2.

Looks like painting, new prop and rudder from what I saw yesterday.

Goliath Crane and Allie B arrive at Black Sea port

All the way from Quncy, Mass the Allie B and its tow - the Brooklyn Bridge, laden with the Goliath Crane, arrived April 16 in Mangalia, Romania. The whole voyage can be seen here on George Graham's site.

Issuma: Why I am hugging the coast of Brasil

Richard Hudson in Issuma is single-handed now, 2000 miles up the coast from Montevideo.

He explains the currents and conditions that led him to take the risks of sailing quite close to the coast, with its hazards of high traffic, and the lee shore if the wind shifts to the east.

Volvo: Across the Equator - a tight pack

All 7 boats have crossed the Equator. Telefonica Blue, which did the last 4000 miles of the epic Qingdao to Rio leg without a headstay, showed its speed by being first at the Fernando de Noronha scoring mark - the equatorial island off the Brazil coast. The next 5 boats were separated by only 14 miles DTF across a stretch of the South Atlantic as they passed over to the north. 3500 miles to Boston.

The usual silly celebrations occurred at the crossings.

Here's the 2-D graphic showing race position.

Whales and Lobsters

Whales and lobster don't have much to do with each other, what with one scurrying along the bottom grabbing anything they can and the other scooping up mouthfuls of krill shrimp and zooplankton salad. The Right Whale about whose survival marine zoologists worry is the species about which Melville waxed in Moby Dick , Chapter 75 : " the Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years".

But the lobsters ply the same waters as the giant mammals and so, to avoid entanglement, the lobstermen have been forced to buy sinking line, some of which which we see coiled up here at the base of the traps stacked up on the dock at Simmons Wharf in Friendship during the off-season.

The Gulf of Maine Lobster Fishermen's rope exchange program helped many lobstermen with the replacement of old - perfectly usable - line with new - whale-friendly "sinking line".

One might get the impression driving the coast that lobstermen have an idyllic life, picking up lobster traps here and there about the rivers and bays, on sunny summer afternoons. That would be wrong. October, November, December are big months and the crustaceans lie in deep water 25 miles out to sea where lobstermen (and they are nearly all men) bait, set, tend, and haul the traps, band, and finally sell the product of 500 - 800 traps per license holder.

Images: drawing - Bowsprite; Photos: line exchange - Gulf of Maine Lobster Fishermen.org; Simmons Wharf - Friendship, ME - gwc