After all the stress of the trip up river, mooring the boat alongside was nice and easy, but just at that moment it started to rain, so by the time she was secured, we were soaked! The town of Thomaston is very small, we took a walk up the hill to the town, had a beer in the local bar, and checked out the menu in the only restaurant in just 1 hour! 

 This pic is a little grainy, but I think you can get an idea of the amount of lobster pots in the river!  It is like someone has sprinkled the water with dolly mixtures!

 

As it turned out, we were the 'winners' of the inaugural coal pot regatta, but by default as we were the only ones who came!  The only other boat who have entered are going to be a week late! 

As usual on a boat, a few things have broken since we left Antigua, or need some sort of fix so here was a good place to stop.  Of all our jobs, the most important was the holding tank (poo tank!!) attached to our stern toilet.  This has been blocked a few weeks now, and all our attempts at poking things down and using vicious chemicals have failed to resolve the problem.  Several attempts at sucking and poking later with all kinds of plumbing kit on Monday morning still failed to dislodge the blockage, so the only option was to haul her out.  This happened first thing Tuesday morning and, when the plumbers checked underneath, they found that some kind of fish or something had got int the tube and had blocked it.  A further bit of poking and the power washer soon saw to that, and the water was free flowing again.  I think after all the wash outs and pump outs, we must have the cleanest holding tank in Maine! After a quick power wash on the bottom and sides, she was re-launched, sparklingly clean again.

As I said, the reason for visiting Thomaston was the coal pot regatta.  So on Monday afternoon in the interest of entering into the spirit of things, we lit the coal pot and started to make our cake.  As we thought it might be a lengthy process, (it was), we decided to start the cake on Monday rather than leave it until Tuesday, and what a good idea that turned out to be - four hours later we had a cooked cake.  John being the crew's chief fire tender had drawn the short straw and had to sit with the pot while it cooked to try and make sure that the pan didn't either boil dry and burn the cake, or boil over and put the fire out.  The responsibility became too much after a while and he had to resort to a beer to keep his spirits up.

 John preparing and lighting the coal pot

 The cake cooking and simmering! (Unfortunately due to unforseen circumstances, no picture of the finished article is available as yet, (actually I forgot!), but one will follow soon!

 The lobsters, the dogs were quite inquisitive, but fortunately didn't really have a taste for lobster 

Despite making only half the mixture in the recipe, I still had more than enough mixture and rather than try and make a second cake on the coal pot, which would have taken us past midnight, I put the remaining mixture in the oven, which took about 30 minutes to cook!  On Tuesday night we were invited to Cabot and Heidi Lyman's house for a lobster BBQ, as part of the 'regatta', and took the cake along.  One of the conditions of the regatta was that we took along something made on the pot - the cake itself was a success, a bit of a strange texture, (the coal pot version was almost slightly rubbery), and not at all like the one Aunty Issa had made for us in Antigua, but I guess that her years of practice probably had a lot to do with that! The oven baked one was also quite sticky, similar to a banana bread, but again quite good.  Cabot and Heidi have a wonderful house with a large deck overlooking the St George's River which was the perfect place for a cook out.  After the main course however, we were driven indoors by the huge bugs that Maine is famous for.  We will have to remember that the bugs here aren't just ankle biters like in Antigua, they fly at head height, and bite anywhere, so you need to spray everywhere!

  This is a picture of Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth, and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century. It depicts a woman lying on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house.  The woman in the painting is Christina Olson (3 May 1893–27 January 1968). She is widely thought to have suffered from polio, a muscular deterioration that paralyzed her lower body, although other diagnoses, in particular Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, are also possible. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across a field while watching from a window in the house. Wyeth had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson, using her and her younger brother as the subject of paintings from 1940 to 1968. Although Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting, she was not the primary model — Wyeth's wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting. Olson was 55 at the time Wyeth created the work. (Taken from the internet - obviously!!!)