Around Crabtree Neck

When it comes to planning a route, circumnavigations often feel like the most natural goal; just go out there and paddle around something. Or paddle off in one direction and return from the other. If you spend a lot of time staring at charts, potential circumnavigations start to pop-out at you in less obvious places . “I wonder if I could do that,” you think. “Can I get through there?”

Crabtree Neck is one such place.  At the head of Frenchman Bay, the neck is essentially an island. True- at its northwest corner, this island is separated from the mainland by a shallow creek that narrows down to as little as twenty feet wide as it passes beneath the Route One bridge- maybe less at low tide. The half-mile long creek -indicated on my topo map as a tidal flat- is called "Carrying Place," and if we didn't time our arrival right, it would live up to its name.

 
Coming from the open ocean, the tide pushes water into the four-mile wide slot of Frenchman Bay, then further narrows-down into several bays and estuaries, including the two that flank Crabtree Neck: Skillings River and Sullivan Harbor / Taunton Bay. The “/” between Sullivan Harbor and Taunton Bay is Sullivan Falls, where Falls Point constricts the flow into a gap only a couple of hundred yards wide, resulting in accelerating currents, sometimes up to ten knots. So predictably, that’s where we’ve paddled, opting for adrenaline over exploration.

This time, with the temps in the high twenties, it seemed a better day for scenery. We launched at the falls on an outgoing tide and paddled off toward Hancock Point. The mountains on Mount Desert Island dominate much of the view here. We paddled toward them, out through Sullivan Harbor where they rose behind Bean Island. That view must have been partly responsible for the establishment of the summer community on Hancock Point in the late 1800s- that and the railroad that ran to McNeil Point, where steamers would then take passengers to Bar Harbor. We admired a few of these old summer cottages as we rounded Hancock Point and headed up the Skillings River. The tide had already turned, so we would have a push upstream.

 We paddled on calm water, but the wind shifted around to the south and started picking-up. Nate pointed-out that in the last summer alone, three people in small boats had capsized and died in this area- two in kayaks, one in a skiff. It was easy to imagine how the conditions here could change quickly, with plenty of fetch to the south and currents passing in and out of the river and MDI Narrows to the west. We now had the current and the wind behind us.

 

In November, 1944, a German submarine surfaced just off Hancock Point and made it to within 300 yards from shore where two Nazi spies landed in a rubber dinghy. The spies made it to New York and were eventually caught, while a few days later the submarine sank the Canadian steamship SS Cornwallis near Mt. Desert Rock. We probably stopped for lunch at the same beach, known on the National Register of Historic Places as “Nazi Spy Landing Site”.

The river constricts from a mile and a half to about 400 yards off Pecks Point and the current increases. Nate and I weren’t too far apart, but he caught the mid-channel current and quickly moved ahead; it took a few minutes to catch-up. We took some twists and turns, following the eastern arm of the river north, where it passed beneath an old railroad trestle and narrowed into Carrying Place Inlet. The current pulled us toward a bridge where Route One passed overhead. We scraped a few rocks, plowed through some ice sheets, and then we were through, spat by the current into Taunton Bay.

We were now paddling against the current, which picked-up just north of the Route One bridge. We rode some eddies along the edge, and charged upstream, gaining one point after another until we were back at the launch. 

Now came the job of warming numb fingers and toes. I like paddling whenever I can, but it felt good to get the boat loaded-up and sit in the car with the heater blowing warm air. I'm missing that trip to Florida this year. Paddling in drysuits for 9 to 10 months of the year, and lighter cold water gear in the summer, we almost forget what it's like to kayak in shorts and t-shirt. On the other hand, we haven't been worrying much about animals that can eat us. There's always ups and downs, I guess.

The Jordan River

 

In the car, I had been listening to a new radio station. They never played commercials, but between most of the songs, a retro chorus would sing-out the call letters and an announcer claimed “ten thousand songs in a row.” They dug pretty deep to find songs that the classic rock stations hadn’t already beaten to death. So, as I pulled-up to the seaplane ramp in Trenton, I had a disco tune firmly stuck in my head. When this music first came out I hated it, but now I couldn’t get enough. The beat is a bit quick for kayaking though; I could envision a swiftly-paced paddle ahead. Fortunately, when I moved the car to the parking area, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” came on, a tune that had been rotating off and on through my mind's playlist ever since the President sang a few lines of it during a speech. By the time I launched, Al Green was firmly entrenched; it promised to be a groovy paddle.

I headed up the Jordan River, a tidal inlet stretching several miles north from its mouth at the Narrows. The forecast called for increasing southwest winds, so the river seemed a good place to avoid them. Even out on Mount Desert Narrows, the water appeared calmer than it had been in Stonington. For the first mile, I paddled along undeveloped shoreline- deciduous trees and eroding soil beneath the plateau of Hancock County Airport. I hoped a plane might land or take-off- a strange thrill perhaps, but why not? Last March in Florida, I took a long floating break off Boca Chica Key to watch as one fighter jet after another shot into the sky. Not this time though; I kept time with the Al Green tune as I paddled upriver, passing a few houses, finally taking a break beneath the close-cropped pastures of the Bar Harbor Golf Course (in Trenton, not Bar Harbor). What strange places paddling takes us.

 

I pushed through some ice and headed up a creek that oxbowed its way through a muddy salt marsh. In another hour or two as the tide went out, much of this area would be reduced to mud flats, but I was curious about what lay upstream and how far I might get. There were sheets of ice to break through, and as I proceeded, sharp turns to make as the creek grew more narrow.

Finally, beneath a bank in someone’s back yard decorated with prominent “No Trespassing” signs, I came to a turn I couldn’t get around. I stopped for a moment to admire the yard decor: a couple of rusting semi-truck trailers and a cabin cruiser resting on its side as though dropped there by a hurricane. So this was the head of the Jordan River.

I got out, picked-up my kayak and did a 180-degree turn and headed back downstream. The tide had gone out more than I expected, and in some spots, the creek was barely wide enough for my boat. There was another tributary to check-out, but with dwindling water, it seemed prudent to get downstream while the getting was good. After I passed the shallowest areas, I took a break and ate my sandwich in the sun. 

The wind had picked-up from the south, blowing straight up the river, where it clashed with the current, raising a few small waves. It took some work to get back out to the Narrows, where I circled around to Hadley Point and over to the Twinnies and Thomas Island. The Twinnies, a pair of small islands connected by a bar, are part of the Coastal Maine Islands National Wildlife Refuge, largely to protect the eagles that nest there. The eagles probably like it because the shallow bay to the north (mudflats during my visit) attract many many birds. As I drifted nearby, an eagle sat on a rockweed-draped boulder, eating one of those many birds as a few crows paced around it, heckling for a piece.

By then the wind had picked up even more and I felt a bit cold. Across the Narrows, a mile away, the seaplane ramp made an easy landmark to paddle toward. Al Green’s soulful crooning in my mind had been replaced by the hiss of wind and crashing waves, at least for a little while.

Placentia, Black Islands

 
With a forecast for an unusually calm day-  hardly any wind and temps up to forty, Nate and I launched in Bass Harbor and paddled straight out to Placentia Island. Not long ago I read “We Were an Island,” by Peter Blanchard-  the story of Art and Nan Kellam who lived alone on Placentia Island for 35 years. In 1949 Art left his job in the aerospace industry in California, and the couple bought the 522-acre island for $10,000- a little less than what they sold their home for. They made the two-mile trek to the island in a wooden dory, and built their home from the remains of a homestead that had been abandoned for nearly a hundred years.

We landed at a gravel spit and followed a trail uphill until we came to the remains of the Kellam’s home- just a foundation marked by a bronze plaque. The Kellams donated their island to the Nature Conservancy, who is letting it return to its natural state. They left the porch swing though, in the process of slowly rotting into the ground: a good spot to sit and ponder the Kellam’s time here.

As often happens, we progressed along Placentia's southeast shore without expectations and started having fun. I'd paddled past this shoreline before, but in the getting from Point A to Point B mode. I'm finding it harder to fully enjoy that "just getting there" approach. I like to move-in closer to shore. The experience of close contour paddling close-in is an entirely different experience from paddling even a hundred feet out. You experience a bit of the land as well as the sea (as Nate is doing in the photo above- there was much more water there just a moment earlier).

From a ways out, the shore often presents a unified band, but close-up, there's often plenty of depth to that band, and that's where it get's interesting. On Placentia, we found bluffs and beaches. Off the southwest tip, as the incoming tide built-up speed, we found an eddy that curled back on itself and the incoming swell. This whole group of islands is subject to strange, tough to predict currents as the tide moves in and out of Blue Hill Bay. After a break on Little Black, we proceeded up the east shore of Black Island where we found some nice slots in the pink granite shoreline (above and below).

With minimal swell, this was a fun spot. With a bit more, it might be tough to paddle so close to shore. I've been paddling along a lot of shoreline lately. After some places I think "that was interesting enough," but I know I may never return. Others, like this, I feel a sort of urgency to get out there and discover what it has to offer. The current and the conditions obviously make it a dynamic, quickly-changing place to paddle, very different from one hour to the next. In that photo above, just wait another twenty minutes and we could paddle through that slot. The chart lists tide rips north of Black, but at mid-tide we found nothing- we'll have to try it on a falling tide.

The Kellam's two-mile trip to Bass Harbor in their dory often took around two hours. Ours was quicker than that, but if there's one thing to learn from their example, it could be the merit in slowing-down. They took the better part of a lifetime to get to know one island, and I suspect that in the end, there was still more to discover. So these are notes from just a few hours in their neighborhood. More, I hope, to follow.