Sea-cliff hunting (and gumby sailing) along Downeast Maine

Fog thickened by the minute, and the weather radio call-ed for an evening squall. Scanning the chart, I saw Birch Harbor, a narrow bay the GPS placed right in front of us. “I’m gonna head in,” I called to my first mate, Jared Ogden, 37, a tradmaster and family man out of Durango, Colorado. He steered Capella — our 27-foot sloop — toward what I hoped was shore. The boat was big enough, probably, to weather a storm . . . were it not piloted by two landlubbers. It was mid-June 2008, and we were one day into a weeklong sea-cliff-climbing and sailing trip along the coast of Downeast Maine.

“I’ll read up on anchoring,” said Jared, leafing through Sailing for Dummies. Motoring blindly through the mist, all I could really figure was we had the cliffy Maine shoreline, studded with seaweed-covered boulders, to starboard, while to port lay thousands of miles of open ocean. We puttered for a few more minutes till we reached the back of the harbor, where the GPS said the water was four feet deep. I tried to make a tight U-turn, but when the wind broadsided us, I suddenly lost steerageway.

“Watch out!” yelled Jared. Peering into the haze, I saw the outlines of jagged rocks directly ahead. In a panic, I cranked the throttle. The boat sped up — straight toward the boulders. Between the rising tide and a building wind, I had managed to catch us against a lee shore. It looked like we’d soon be ramming into Maine itself — just as my friends had predicted.

Where Mountains Meet the Sea
I proposed this trip to Jared in August 2007 in Greenland. To explore the fjordland of Cape Farewell on the island’s southern tip, we’d arranged to rent a 10-meter v-hull as a floating basecamp, though we’d somehow ended up with a 10-foot boat, a pathetic match for the area’s monster seas. Jared grew up in New York and western Mass — and was, he alleged, “no slouch as a sailor.” Reared in the landlocked Boston suburbs, I didn’t press him for details. (Jared’s sailing résumé, I would later learn, consisted of a chartered trip in the Caribbean when he was a kid, plus a few laps across a pond in a Sunfish.) Leaving Nanortalik that August, we took to sea in a dinghy overloaded with climbing gear.