Catching the trade winds: Eagles, canoes and mosquitoes

We have been worse than ever at posting on the blog, but I bet you have all guessed the reason why - we have been busy busy busy for the past few weeks! Even without charters scheduled for the month, we have been cleaning, fixing and improving, and then starting again. Big Bird has been staying on her beach waiting for us to come sail her, but we betrayed her and took care of the big yacht instead... Until we swapped the Discovery 67 for a slightly smaller version, namely the brand new Discovery 58.

Here is a Discovery we could actually afford!

With the owner arriving this Saturday, we hadn't exactly planned on taking a road trip last week-end, but our friends Chris and Crystal finally convinced us to join them on a camping/canoeing overnight trip between Maine and New Hampshire. We arrived at the river at 5:30 on Saturday and loaded up the canoes before paddling away.

Let's get amongst it!

Go girl!

Little did we expect the scene that we discovered in the first turn of the river: a giant camp with blasting sound systems, trucks, beer cans everywhere (especially in the river itself), and half passed out people on various flotation devices (whether from the sun or from the drinking was hard to tell). Needless to say we paddled through as fast as we could, slaloming between the seals and whales that were trying to hang on to our canoes. After passing another of those giant rave party style beach camps, we arrived in a quieter part of the river and started gliding nicely on the water with the last rays of sunlight.

The first beach camp - too bad you can't hear the music blasting...

Yes, this does say "Cirrhosis on the river"

We paddled until the sun went down and found a nice beach to set up camp. Chris started setting up the tent, while Crystal went to collect wood and Bill started a fire. Unable to move around too much on the sand, I took the job of one-footed official photographer. We rapidly got the bug spray out as we got attacked by oversized mosquitoes and all kind of lovely flying insects. Thanks to Crystal we had a delicious dinner - since of course the boys had taken all kind of fishing lures, but forgotten the rods!

As we woke up early the next morning, the river was drowned in fog and made an eerie sight... We cooked breakfast on the stove and packed the tent before getting back on the water. Of course the boys had to stop to try one of the rope swings hanging from a tree, and even tried to catch fish with Chris's pellet gun. America!

Bill is now officially a canoe Captain

Chris's very stylish jump

And Bill right behind

Fish hunting... Wait, what?

Peaceful sight as we arrive at our destination...

To finish this long post, here are two more pictures taken in Newport harbor on Friday morning, as the Coast Guard Tall Ship named the Eagle was coming into port. I took pictures of her as she sailed past us, unaware of the fact that the man who designed our boat was on board and taking a picture of us at the very same moment!