Perry Creek Cove to Long Cove

Day 26: July 24, 2015

Another peaceful night in a beautiful cove.  We slept well.  We kicked off another great day with blueberry pancakes and good hot coffee.  We were a bit disappointed in North Haven. We had planned to stay in Perry Cove for another day but decided to do a bit more “guck holing” before we had to head back toward Ohio.  This island, Vinalhaven, is quite large with a lot of interesting- looking pockets in which we can drop our hook so we went exploring. 

Entering Leadbetter Island Narrows

We left Perry Cove at about 9:30 and motored on glassy water down around the west side of the island. We passed interesting islands like Leadbetter, Fiddlehead, Dogfish, Hurricane, Lawrys, Cedar, and Crane.  We passed through Hurricane Sound along which were beautiful rock formations.  We ended up in Long Cove.

 

Long Cove is a lovely little spot that is well protected.  We wove in and around a number of these islands to get back in here.  Two other boats were already tied to mooring balls when we arrived and water depths that are suitable for us for anchoring are

Rocks near Fiddlehead Island

limited.  Since there were 5 or 6 unused mooring balls, we decided to try the “we will use it until someone tells us to move” philosophy.  We looked around and found one in a nice location and tied on but after looking at this particular ball, we noticed it had “PVT” painted on it and we thought that it may be that the owner really didn’t want us to use it.  So, I got into Dink and rowed around until I found one in which the paint was so worn off that I couldn’t read it and we moved.

 Eagle  loosing a fish  Photo by Richard Leighton

Our anchorage in Long Cove

Later, as I was reading in our guide book about this place, the author pointed out that this was a very popular cove and boaters come in, hook on to the balls and are then surprised when the owner comes around and demands an exorbitant fee for its use.  So, we spent the rest of the day wondering if the next boat coming in would be the owner.  By bed time, he had not arrived.

At one point in the afternoon, we heard some racket from a flying bird and looked up just in time to see an osprey attacking a bald eagle that was carrying a fish.  In the encounter, the eagle dropped the fish, attempted to retrieve it but had to move on because the persistent osprey continued the attack.  The eagle finally landed in a tree about 100 yards from our boat.

 Our goal was to do some exploring in the dinghy but the wind began to blow and thunder clouds followed by rain put a damper on those plans.  We spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening back in our books.  

We enjoyed our evening meal of faux noodles and spaghetti with meatballs.  We washed them down with cool beer and, indeed, we had our Tillamook cheese as our appetizer.