Muscongus Among Us

It is FREEZING up here! Whatever made me think that this was a good idea?

Rick and I left Provincetown in the morning for an overnight passage to Maine. My desire to get up to those northern waters led us to skip Biddeford Pool as well as Portland and just sail straight up to Penobscot Bay. About twenty-four hours later, here we are in a little place called Tenants Harbor.

In our overnight trip we covered about one hundred and thirty miles, and it feels like we are in a whole different world. For starters, it feels like we are suddenly in an arctic climate. Throughout the daylight hours of that passage we went from sunny and hot, to sunny but cool, and then by late in the day it was downright cold.

Just let them try to take that drink out of my cold, dead hands...

By this morning when we pulled in to Tenants Harbor it was raining and completely fogged in. Welcome to Maine! I’m sure it’s really beautiful, but on a day like today who would know?

Marooned inside a boat on a foggy, soggy day, I’m desperate for something to occupy my mind and I turn to Rick’s charts and maps of the Maine coast. Let me just say a thing or two about the place names around here. Now, maybe I’m just unfamiliar with these names and they’re really no different from the ones we have down in Maryland. But they sure sound funny to me.

There are the descriptive names like Black Head, Grindstone Neck, or Croch Island.  There’s a teeny little point of rock in the middle of the water called simply, “The Brown”. The brown what? It’s not like there’s another set of rocks called “The White” or “The Grey”. I can only guess as to how Mosquito Harbor got its name, but we’re definitely not going there.  Then we get to some of the Native American names, like Eggemoggin Reach, or the Passagassawakeag River. Passa what? My favorite is Muscongus Bay. Seriously.

Last year at a restaurant in Portland, my father-in-law asked me if I had ever had a special English pudding called “Spotted Dick”. I told him no, but that it sounded more like a disease than a dessert. I kind of think Muscongus falls in that category too.

Whatever the names, we’re stuck here until the weather improves, hopefully tomorrow. Luckily, our boat came with an as yet unused heater, so after repeated attempts to light the thing, we break down and read the manual. Thank God it works!