Showing Off Maine

After Blue Hill, we set out for Southwest Harbor, with a stop at Little Cranberry Island for lunch and a short hike.

Islesford, the town on Little Cranberry Island, just south of Mount Desert Island, is mostly inhabited by lobstermen and women. Traps are piled high on front lawns. A mail boat plies back and forth from Southwest Harbor to transport people, mail and supplies. Also, barges come and go with trucks to distribute fuel and other needed commodities to the island.

Once in Southwest Harbor, we were excited to take Todd and Kathy to an amazing lobster dinner at Beal’s Lobster Pier. After a walk into “downtown” Southwest Harbor, we had to navigate our dinghy through more fog back to Fregata.

It’s incredible how one can become familiar with water after a few visits. You form a mental chart of where shoals, moorings and lobster traps are and navigating becomes muscle memory. That said, I always keep an eye on an iPhone chart plotter in the dinghy, having paid visits to a few submerged rocks in the past.

After Southwest Harbor, we rounded the southern edge of Mount Desert Island. Fog banks rolled in and out, giving us only a few boat lengths of visibility in the worse moments. What was interesting is that the temperature in the fog was in the 60s F (10s C) but as soon as there was a clear patch of sky, it shot up to the 80s F (30s C).

We walked Bar Harbor and finished the day with a nice meal at a restaurant in town.

Tomorrow we expect strong northwesterly wind with which to sail back to Camden!