Marblehead to Gloucester, MA on our way to Portland, ME

After a pretty horrendous summer of sickness, as we're calling it, we hopped aboard Shawnee to motor/sail up to Portland, Maine near Maine Yacht Center.  maineyacht.com   Maine Yacht Center has by far the best maintenance and repair operation on the east coast.  We've visited quite a few and this place is great. Brian Harris runs a good shop for indoor and outdoor storage.  We took 2 days for the 14 hour run.  First night in Gloucester, 2 hours from Marblehead.
   Drew at the helm.

  We started from our Marblehead mooring on Friday, Sept. 14th in the afternoon and had  patchy fog.  Sometimes it was pea soup.

Just wanted you to hear an authentic fog horn...kind of a soothing sound.  This is when buoy bells or horns are helpful.  At times visibility was about 30 yards.  That's when you follow your instruments and watch the radar screen in case something big is up ahead.
On the Ipad Navionics we are the red arrow.  It shows our projected course; the red line is our track and the blue is the course we set.  The Garmin 547 has the true course that we follow exactly with radar overlay.  It feeds the autopilot and is another screen at the helm.

It was very patchy and then some moments it would lift completely so we could see.  Other times we were floating on grey sky and sea.  The sea temp was about 64 and the air was 77.

 A lobster boat and the wind turbines on shore.

We motored into Gloucester's Eastern Point Yacht Club inside the breakwater and picked up an empty mooring ball about 5:15 in the sun.  They take reservations through the app Dockwa -- $50 for our size boat.

The launch came around at it's last delivery of the day, stopped just long enough to say, "Pay through Dockwa." and sped off.  No welcome or description of services.  Later we looked on the website and saw that they have dinner in a nice clubhouse and other facilities.
Here's a nice typical New England summer home with dock and fishing boat just off our bow.

And at the end of the easy windless, sunless, calm day always the sunset over Gloucester.

 We had a nice dinner on the boat.  The next morning we were up at dawn for the 12 hours to Portland, 6 to 6.
          sunrise Saturday, Sept 15th.

Eased out of the breakwater area passed the lighthouse and many flag buoys that so many cruisers complain about. 

It is so easy for boats with deep keels to get caught on these lobster buoy lines.  You may have auto pilot but you must watch constantly for these.  We have a full keel and protection over to the rudder so it doesn't affect us.  We have run over these.
  Again you can see the sunless, waveless, windless weather.  Again we had periods of No Service on our phones and no visibility because of patchy fog. Still temperature was mid 70s.