Sept. 5 – Sawyer Island, ME

Coastal Maine Botanical Garden's Mooring

“The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can’t.” —Christopher Paolini

Owl's Head Lighthouse at the western tip of Penobscot Bay

Weather dominates your life when you’re a cruiser and we have been very lucky this summer, we’ve had beautiful weather almost every day since leaving the Chesapeake in July. We’re still watching the storm Hermine…it can’t seem to make up its mind if it’s a tropical storm, a hurricane or just a disturbance. At the moment it is only causing us high seas here in Maine.

We decided to take advantage of the descent day and begin moving west. We left Penobscot Bay and headed back to the Sheepscot River. The day was clear and we had little wind, but the ocean swells were a bit higher than I like…definitely one of the rolliest days we’ve spent on the water. There were high surf warnings all along the Maine coast…effects from the storm moving closer to New England. Our destination was Five Islands. We picked up the same mooring ball we had about three weeks ago and tried to settle in, but the ocean swells were making it very uncomfortable. So we decided to move further up the river to Sawyer Island where we had stayed when we visited the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. It’s a great well protected harbor with free wifi, decent TV reception and a nice little restaurant nearby. It’ll be a great place to wait as Hermine decides what she is going to do.

A few pictures I took today...it's hard to show what it's really like when the seas begin to roll. It never seems as impressive in pictures as it does in person.

Coming into Five Islands was a little rougher than the first time.

The seals have been a little camera shy this year. This is one of the only pictures I've been able to get.

The best thing about tropical weather is the beautiful sunsets they produce.