Sabago Lake State Park, Portland and Bath Maine

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Sabago Lake State Park, Portland and Bath Maine

Postby Tom&Shelly » Wed Sep 22, 2021 7:36 am

From Boston, we went to southern Maine. To tell the truth, we wanted to go all the way to Acadia, but the Summer is short, and since neither of us have been to Maine at all, we decided to stick with the southern part this trip. We found a nice state park on a large lake: Sabago (pronounced, we learned, with a long a)

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Saturday in mid-September, it was nearly full. We stayed an extra few days and practically had it to ourselves. They shut down the campsites on that side for the season on 15 September, the day we left.

I sort of regret: we are more tourists looking at the sights in an area than pure campers, picking the campsites to relax. Our only excuse is that this is a big country, and we have much to see before we get old!

From the park Portland and Bath are each about an hour away. We visited Portland, particularly the Portland light (1st pic) the first day, and walked the town

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We took a sailing cruise the second day (no pictures--I didn't want to risk my camera). It was a real sailing ship with two masts and a crew of 3.

The last day was my favorite: we went to Bath and spent the day at the Maine Maritime Museum, which included a boat tour. The museum is one of the places where sailing ships were built, and I think I learned a lot (more than I knew) about how they were built. This was the size of the largest sailing ship they built (and, I believe, the largest that ever was built)

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They told us the 7 "masts" should actually be about 56 feet higher, but then the FAA would require hazard lights to warn airplanes. Also, a docent said, these were the size of the light poles donated by a highway department in Florida, when they redid some bridge's street lighting.

The museum also includes some older boats, a working blacksmith shop, and some of the shipwrights tools, which would be familiar to woodworkers with an eye to how our forefathers did it. It was interesting to me that they didn't build the sailing ships from plans. Rather they made a half-hull model, and took the measurements from that. We could probably do teardrops the same way.

The cruise went around the Bath Iron Works, and the host seems to know a lot about what is going on there. Not sure how BIW feels about this. I noticed they did have a security boat between us and the dry dock the whole trip. Saw several destroyers of two classes being worked on

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Tom
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