Day 25-York River to Cliff Island

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(Yawn) I didn't sleep much last night: the strong current in the York River made the  plastic mooring ball knock against our hull every few minutes. I tried ignoring it, but ended up making many trips outside to the bow to adjust our mooring lines to try to

keep the ball steady. Because it was a swirly current nothing really worked.  Should have gotten a mooring farther back in the cove, I guess.

Today dawned bright & sunny & cool, a beautiful day...except no wind. AGAIN.  We enjoyed traveling up the coast regardless. We had more amazing very close-up whale & seal sightings.  One of the whale views was less than a boat length in front of the bow, and a small earless seal just drifted by on his back maybe 5ft from our port side. It was so cute!   We passed a lot of lobster boats


and picturesque lighthouses.
And let's not forget to mention lobster traps with their colorful floats attached- this is what the approach to tonight's anchorage looked like.
It was challenging to thread a 38ft long 21ft wide sailboat through all that.

We ended the day at Cliff Island in Casco Bay.
It's a "H" shaped island that gives good protection from too much wind (not that that is our problem!).

The geology of the land & beaches has changed yet again. Shorelines are now massive shelves of granite with little or no topsoil. The cove we are anchored in has a very interesting outcropping  at the waterline.
It is sedimentary like shale, but is hard like granite, and has embedded deposits of pink quartz. The layers run vertically, so who knows what seismic event turned them on their sides! But most interesting is that they look exactly like wood. I mean *exactly* like wood.

The sand is so fine it's like clay, and when the water stirs it upyou can see it glitter. The shells look different; many are bright purple or yellow.
Another dramatic change is the magnitude of the tides. At home on the Chesapeake there's about 18" change between high & low tides. Here it's 10 feet. Anchor at high tide at a pretty spot, and by low tide granite ledges appear in unexpected places, so checking the charts is very important. But unlike the Chesapeake, there are no sand bars or tapering depths leading up to islands. The water remains deep until very close to the shore.

This little guy is a willet; he was standing on top of some floating vegetation scooping up bugs for his dinner, totally ignoring us.

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