Boat works in Portland

Gregor Rex
May 21
2 min read

Coming off a great sailing start in 2025, we are spending another month in Portland to complete our current boat projects (antifouling, anode replacement, new waterstay, de-rust/paint water tank, power supply, welding, the annual de-rust/paint and more).

Physically it is a strenuous time and mentally we are challenged, as the weather window for painting is a long time coming and our time ashore is somewhat extended. In the end, everything works out fine.

On top of all this, our fridge (compressor) breaks down and can no longer be repaired. Thank goodness we get a suitable model here in the USA and manage to get the old one off and the new one on board.

On Christine's birthday, the Aegir comes out of the water and we celebrate these events in the evening in our temporary home - an apartment in Portland. Delays due to the weather meant that we spent the last week ashore on the Aegir again and organized ourselves with water canisters on board and gratefully used the shipyard's infrastructure (shower, toilet, washing machine). Climbing the long ladder to the shipyard's toilet at night is a bit of an adventure, but thanks to the good lighting on the site, it's no problem.

We are extremely satisfied with the work, the infrastructure and, above all, the professionalism of Portland Yacht Services.

Just for a change, we enjoy a new culinary highlight: fiddleheads. Here in Maine, the young fiddleheads are collected. Wash them well, cook them and then serve them with garlic butter and vinegar - delicious.

In Boston, we meet our next visitor (Gregor's sister and brother-in-law) - without Aegir. The four of us take a rental car and an apartment. Then we set off on our joint sailing trip to Canada from Portland at the end of May.

The rest of our route this year has also kept us very busy. We were planning to sail the Northwest Passage. However, this plan will have to wait a while. One thing we have realized is that we don't want to skip Labrador (Canada). There is no one urging us to get to the west coast so quickly. So now we're really looking forward to Northwest Greenland, Baffin Island, Labrador and another winter on the east coast, but this time in Nova Scotia, Canada.