Funny thing about sailboat masts and bridges: no matter how much clearance you actually have, when you're standing in the cockpit looking up it always looks like you're not going to make it. Of course, the people who think to put bridges in our way do try to provide information on how much space is under them, even at various states of the tide. But still every so often the situation is ambiguous, and you're not sure your mast will fit. Lots of people just hold their breath and take their chances in these situations, like these folk in this video here.

If you watch closely, you'll see they get some sensors scraped off their masthead. Which, obviously, is not the worst-case scenario.

Just past Small Point at the western boundary of Casco Bay lies Popham Beach and the entrance to the Kennebec River, which, as I've mentioned before, is where I first started messing around in boats as a boy. We usually visit friends there during the summer and this year decided to sail Lunacy over for a weekend. We also decided, on the sperm of the moment, to stop at Seguin Island for the night before negotiating the river entrance the following morning.

There were several reasons for this. First, it was getting late and the tide, which runs very hard in the Kennebec, had starting ebbing with a vengeance. Second, Seguin is a nostalgia-laden destination for me, and I've always enjoyed putting in there. Lying three miles out to sea, it once marked the outer limit of my nautical universe and spending a night there still feels a little like a trip to the moon. Finally, just three months after our daughter Lucy was born, Clare and I took her out for a two-week cruise aboard Sophie, my old Golden Hind 31, and Seguin was one of several places we went ashore with her. We thought, therefore, it might be fun to take her again, now that she is all of five years old.

Our hurricane forecasting capabilities are now so excellent we normally have many days to fret over the advent of potentially catastrophic tropical weather. The much heralded approach of Hurricane Earl provides an excellent case in point. We here in the Northeast have seen him coming for about a week now and just two days ago things looked dire enough that many folk decided the only prudent thing to do was to haul out as many boats as possible.

Back then it seemed likely that Earl would still be a Category 3 storm by the time he got up here and that he might even make landfall somewhere in New England. But now it seems clear he will be Category 1 devolving into a tropical storm as he brushes past east of Cape Cod sometime tonight. For those of us north of the cape, who will now be about 200 miles west of his projected track, what this likely translates to is nothing worse than a semi-respectable nor'easter.

We've already discussed the awful proliferation of lobster pot buoys along the Maine coast. What we haven't discussed is how they interact with different sailboat hull forms. This subject suddenly seemed interesting to me (again) after I caught a buoy while sailing Lunacy twixt Chandler Cove and Portland harbor a couple of weeks ago.

Lunacy's hull (seen above during her construction back in 1985) had thus far, during my tenure as owner, successfully shed all pot buoys and warps we had run down together while sailing. The front of her long fin keel is raked aft at a nice 45 degree angle, her prop protrudes directly from the back of the keel, and the root of her nearly vertical rudder skeg is right aft and very near the water's surface. When motoring I carefully avoid pots for fear the turning propeller may somehow catch a line, but when sailing I have assumed I am immune. With Lunacy's MaxProp feathered, I always reckoned the skeg was the only feature that might foul a line, but that its root was high enough that any trapped buoys would pull right through.

This thing sure does look a bit bug-like, doesn't it??? No need to get out the Raid, however. Tis but a figment in the imagination of one Yelken Octuri, a French designer whose day job is color-coordinating plane interiors for Airbus. It would appear he does not find this job entirely fulfilling. In his spare time he seems to have an awful lot of fun coming up with wild and creative conceptual designs for futuristic aircraft. Two of these--the Flying Yacht you see here and a design for a Sailing Aircraft--were featured in an exhibit at the Air and Space Museum in Paris earlier this summer.

I stopped in for the night at Cliff Island on my way back from Malaga during my Mini Solo Cruise, and we stopped there again during a family weekend on the boat soon afterwards. I first checked it out just last year, but since then I've anchored or moored there repeatedly, as it is very conveniently located. Like Chandler Cove, it is close enough to Portland that I can reach it on a whim. It is also right next door to Jewell Island, which is one of the most popular cruising destinations on Casco Bay, thanks to its many trails and ruined WWII fortifications. The anchorage at Jewell, however, is pretty tight. Cliff Island makes a great easy-to-reach default destination if you get shut out there, or if an inopportune wind shift forces you out at some godforsaken hour.