Aboard No Boundaries
July 31, 2009
The cruising life is full of surprises. Some of them have not been pleasant, some have been quite comical, and a few are simply wonderful blessings.
This week, we had a surprise that turned out to be a real blessing.
We left Camden, Maine, Thursday morning, bound for Searsport. Our objective was to visit the Hamilton Marine store, a primo destination for any and all marine supplies. According to the cruising guide, it was located 1.3 miles from the Searsport town landing. We have been surprised more than once by discovering that anchoring is forbidden today in places where our six-year-old cruising guide says it is allowed. We thought our best course of action was to contact the harbormaster by radio as soon as we got near Searsport and sort out the details.
As we approached the Searsport harbor, I tried to call the harbormaster on VHF channel 16. This is the channel almost everyone monitors in the nautical world. Most harbormasters monitor it, even though they may prefer to be called on some other channel. However, nobody answered. The cruising guide information for Searsport was confusing, because it said the harbormaster would talk on 16, 9 or 10, but we tried all those channels without success. Thinking that we might have been too far away, we waited until we were actually entering the harbor and tried again.
This time, we heard back from the Belfast harbormaster. He though that “Wayne” might be busy or we might just need to try again. That comment confused us, too, although we later came to understand the situation.
At this point, Larry decided that we should go to Stockton Harbor instead. Stockton Harbor is separated from Searsport by a large island and a breakwater that prevents traffic from going between the island and the mainland to get from one harbor to the other. To get to Stockton, we had to turn around and go back out of Searsport harbor and into Stockton.
We quickly fell in love with Stockton harbor. Although there are houses on the shore, as well as a little landing and a small mooring field, it is a large, well-protected harbor surround mostly by trees. Again, however, we were concerned that there might be rules for anchoring here that were not in place at the printing of our guide book. We tried to reach the Stockton harbormaster on channel 16, and again, we received no answer. We were about to anchor anyway when we saw a boat moving in the mooring field. A boat in motion needs someone on board as a general rule, so we thought we might get some information from the captain of that boat.
We reached his boat just as he reached his mooring. We called out to him, telling him that we were trying to find out if there were any restrictions on anchoring and also if he could tell us how to get to Hamilton Marine from there. He called back that we could anchor anywhere. Then he said, “Hamilton Marine isn’t far. It’s actually in Searsport, but I could just drive you there.”
I was so dumfounded that I said, “You’re kidding!”
He shouted back, “No. I’m not kidding. Just meet me over at the dock and I will drive you there. I have an errand I need to run, but I will pick you up at the dock in a few minutes.”
We could not believe our ears. This man who did not even know our names was going to rearrange his day to drive us to Hamilton Marine.
We hurriedly anchored. According to the guide book, the bottom was sticky mud, and the anchor bit in quickly. We were getting the motor mounted on the dinghy when the harbormaster pulled up in his boat.
“Welcome to Stockton Harbor,” he called out. “We hope you will enjoy your stay here.”
We asked if there were any special rules for anchoring, to which he replied there were none. “Bruce told me you would be coming in to the landing,” he said. Then he told us which landing to use and welcomed us again. I was still nervous about our failure to reach him by radio, so I said, “I’m sorry, but we tried to reach you on 16 before we anchored.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I had the radio off.” He was a very informal harbormaster.
At the dock, Bruce Suppes introduced himself and his son. We got in the car and he drove us to the store. As we were riding along, I said, “Do you think we can get a cab to bring us back?” Bruce replied, “Oh, I’ll bring you back. Don’t worry about that.”
He dropped us off, and went to take care of some personal business. Shortly he returned.
As we rode with Bruce to and from the harbor, he told us about the Searsport harbormaster. Searsport is a very small town. The owner of Hamilton Marine is actually the harbormaster, and he is also a pilot for commercial ships in Penobscot Bay. On this particular day, Bruce happened to know that the part-time harbormaster was piloting a big ship down Penobscot Bay. So it wasn’t odd that we received no response. Probably nobody would have cared if we anchored wherever we liked in Searsport, but if we had gone there we would not have met Bruce Suppes.
When we got back to the harbor, we thanked Bruce again, as we had done over and over along the way. “You are very welcome,” he said. “Just pass it on.”
This experience was so delightful, that when we went to the SSCA Gam at Isleboro, our antennas went up when we heard that one of the attendees was from Stockton. After the event had broken up, we dinghied over to the boat from Stockton. We told him that our experience with his town was so good that we were pretty sure anybody from Stockton was a great person. Blake, aboard Alert, assured us that he was, indeed, a great person!
The truth is that there are a lot of wonderful people in the world, but not too many of them would or could step out of their own day to be so kind to anyone as Bruce was to us. He acted as if it were nothing special, but it was truly a blessing and a surprise to us. We want to make sure that we do pass it on the next time somebody needs help from us. It would be a shame to let a blessing like this one grow dusty with disuse.
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