Mellow Days Along he Bold Coast

We’d been working without much break since June. The guiding business had done well, and in addition we’d kept-on with some of the home improvement work, hedging our bets in case the kayaking work didn’t come-in. But it did come-in, so we worked every day, trying to keep up with it, the rest of the summer stretching ahead like marathons yet to be run. Finally, on Labor Day, we tied the Delphins atop the car and drove Downeast. We felt a weight lifted, just to be driving, a few days-off ahead.

We took a few kayak excursions off the Bold Coast, paddling it just the way we like: no need to get anywhere, just tooling along the steep rocks, exploring, looking for waves to buoy us over ledges or through chasms. 

Despite windy forecasts, the conditions were perfect for near-shore wave and rock play: small swell gently rolling-in, nothing too big. We did this each day, taking-on short stretches of the shore, retracing our routes as the tide changed, revealing a different set of features. It was the first time we’d paddled together in a while, the first time in a while either of us had paddled without a guest. 

On that first excursion I caught a wave between some rocks – one of those moments when you’re not sure if it will play-out like you hope, but a pillow of refracting wave bounced me along into a watery pile-up that left me in a calm pool when the wave went back out. I felt myself smiling, We’d felt worn-down enough on the drive up, that it almost came as a surprise, this smile. 

The new guiding business had evolved over the summer. I began with the idea we would simply be guides for hire, and try to avoid investing in too much overhead like boats and gear. But I suspected that this approach might take a while to catch-on, so I started offering scheduled day trips through Air BnB Experiences. This has gone well. I’ve offered regular trips in the Brooklin Islands and Stonington as well as the Cranberry Islands and a few sunset trips. The private trips and instruction filled-in the rest, including a few multi-day trips. Rebecca was further busied with her studio-gallery in Stonington, and filling-in at the Old Quarry shop. 

All this time we lived in our vintage (old) thirteen-foot travel trailer on a friend’s property in Deer Isle. It was tight, rustic living, but nice, despite this being a banner year for mosquitoes. I built a small deck with a screen room as a vestibule, which gave the mosquitoes a place to congregate and feel welcome before proceeding to the inner sanctum where we slept. Evenings found me rinsing gear and hanging it out, hoping it might be somewhat dry before I needed it again in the morning. We roasted vegetables on the grill as it grew dark and usually fell asleep exhausted. We’d wake with sunrise and think ‘what now?’ In those last weeks of August we looked forward to the four days off we’d planned way back in April. 

Anyway, that’s what we’ve been up to, in case anyone has wondered why this blog has been dormant. I feel less inclined anymore to write about trips with guests, and that’s pretty much all the paddling I’ve done for a while. I’ve had very little down-time these last few months. But I’d like to have a few more days like the ones we spent along the Bold Coast. We were in a rented cabin, and when we weren’t on the water, we stared-out at Grand Manan Channel, puzzling over the mysteries of this stretch of coast, watching the water surface for indicators about current direction. The seas were generally calm. It was foggy about as much as it was clear. 

In our kayaks, we just followed the shore, looking for passages among the rocks, riding occasional waves, gradually emptying our heads of clutter. 

Driving back to Stonington, where we would be cat-sitting for the next few weeks, we felt pleasantly drained, not quite ready to leave the quiet behind, but I also looked forward to returning to my work, which over the next week would include several full days and an overnight off of Stonington.

Notes

Looking for more particulars about paddling off the Bold Coast? Buy my book, AMC’s Best Sea Kayaking in New England. The Maine Island Trail Association’s annual guidebook also now includes some good info on paddling this volatile area. If it’s not obvious from my observations here, I think a great way to explore this area is to take smaller day trips, rather than the end-to-end approach that some paddlers follow when they want to ‘do’ this spectacular stretch of shoreline.

My article Dallying Downeast came out in July’s Small Boats Magazine. The article covers the same trip that inspired a forthcoming book… hopefully out soon. 

Want to book a trip with me or Rebecca?  Check-out our website or our listings on Air BnB Experiences.

Little Hen Island, Revisited

We’d just paddled across West Penobscot Bay from Stonington, our bows pointed to the tiny islet, and we were anticipating getting there: getting tents up, a snack, just absorbing the place. It was still early enough in the day that we could get out for another paddle, or perhaps just spend a few sunny hours exploring the island and its surroundings as the tide went out. We were also early enough that if someone else had beat us to the island – it was, after all, July 3^rd– we’d be able to find a different spot. 

Just then, a short catamaran – a Hobie 16-footer – shot out from the north, driven by a tailwind, right for ‘our’ little island. We both paused our paddle strokes. The sailboat was moving fast and would certainly get there first. I began to mentally imagine the other campsites we could go to instead. But the boat kept going, right past the island, over the shallow sandbars that would soon be revealed. We didn’t hesitate; we hurried to our landing and quickly began unpacking gear from our boats.

It reminded me of when Rebecca and I arrived here two summers ago. We’d paddled from Ram Island around the southern end of Vinalhaven. We were tired, anticipating some relaxing time in the campsite, when another group of sea kayakers arrived in our peripheral vision, also headed for the island. In denial, I simply didn’t look toward them until I’d arrived first, and then realized they were friends, and I felt a little bad, and of course, invited them to share the island with us. There were four of them though, and they went-on to Hay Island instead. 

This time was oddly similar, since we noticed, as M put up her tent and I strung my hammock, that the catamaran had arrived on the sandbar, and the occupants were unloading gear onto Tiny Little Hen (Middle Little Hen?- both my names) another small islet a couple hundred feet to the north. We were camped in the MITA site, but I guessed that the other, unofficial site might work better for them, since they could beach the catamaran and easily access the island: our campsite stood atop steep granite bluffs over the sandbars – we’d landed on the other side. It did certainly change the nature of our stay there, looking from our cooking spot at others camped so near, but other people’s presence is simply one of the variables that makes our experiences out there unique each time.

M took her time, exploring with her camera. After a while, we took a spin in the kayaks up the bay to check out the schooner Victory Chimes,which was anchored near a tall bluff. We landed and looked in vain for a trail I’d once followed to the bluff-top. Then we paddled back to camp. There’s a story here about when high tide came – a new moon spring tide that arrived at midnight. My hammock set-up was not so ideal, and judging from the flurry of headlamp-lit activity on the other islet, their site was not quite high enough… but I’ll keep this short and save it for another time.

As Rebecca and I had done two years ago, we liked it so much on the island that we decided to use it as a base camp the next day. That gave M a lot more time to explore with her camera, and we took a day trip out to Brimstone Island. Also, since it was July 4^thand a lot of people were out in boats, it took away our worry that we wouldn’t be stuck without a campsite. And we had it to ourselves the next night. All of this was part of a 4-day trip. On the 3^rdday, M and I paddled north, letting some strong currents push us up the bay. As Brimstone had been, it was a day of visiting islands with hiking trails to gorgeous vistas. We spent our last night on Pond Island, off Cape Rosier, and finished our trip at Bridge End, in Eggemoggin Reach. 

This was the first multi-day trip I’ve guided for my new sea kayak guiding service, Upwest & Downeast, and it was a wonderful way to start, made possible by a client who knew just what she wanted- part of which was to relax a bit, since work had been lately stressful. 

I realize there are some significant gaps in my blog output; it’s due to too much happening, rather than not enough. Getting Upwest & Downeast off the ground has been a consuming endeavor, and I’ve continued to work for others – on-call guiding and teaching as well as the ten-day guide’s class I teach every spring in Bar Harbor. I started the guiding service simply as that- a bare-bones service for people wanting to hire a guide, but I've added day trips for people without their own gear as well, mostly available right now through Air BnB experiences. 

Over the winter I focused mostly on my book-length account of our trip two summers ago, as well as an article about it that came out last week in Small Boats Magazine. In addition to all that, we still tend to make much of our living from other work. I sometimes ask myself if I need to keep writing this blog that has followed my paddling progress almost from the start. I’m not sure who reads it or cares. But the fact that I just now enjoyed recounting a little of last week’s trip seems reason enough to keep at it. I hope you’ll check-out the article in Small Boats Magazine. And the book is getting there, at this point mostly waiting for more illustrations.

Happy Paddling!

Michael

New Sea Kayak Guide Service in Maine

Rebecca and I have launched a new sea kayaking guide service. In February, with snow on the ground and ice in the harbor, “launched” seems an exaggeration. It hardly seems real, more of a concept expressed through a website and a few posts on social media, but it has been a long time coming. The idea for the service is a bit different than that of most outfitters; our goal is to provide clients with guidance and instruction just about anywhere on the Maine coast, and to keep both the overhead and cost of our services affordable. We’re aiming at a niche of paddlers who have their own equipment and could use our help to develop skills and safely expand their comfort zones, who want to learn by doing, by going somewhere. Or, simply, we’re guides for hire, and we know this coast well.

Lately, I’ve been revising the manuscript of Upwest & Downeast: Meandering the Maine Coast by Sea Kayak, an account of our 2017 summer-long paddle along the coast. The revising seems to be unending. I’ll get through the story only to begin again, removing vast sections and then, sensing something missing, write new sections afresh. It’s my second winter on this project, and Rebecca is working on a series of block print illustrations for the book. We’re quite obsessed, and it sometimes occurs to me that we’ve drawn-out our immersion simply because we like where it takes us, back to those long days, paddling from island to island, living that life. In some ways, I think that’s also why we’ve started the guiding service (which is also called Upwest & Downeast). It’s a selfish desire to spend more time out there. But like the book, it’s also a chance to share what we’ve experienced and help others discover it for themselves.

Rebecca and I have been guiding and teaching off and on since 2010. We were reluctant to plunge into the commercial side of the sport, not wanting to sacrifice the personal enjoyment it brought us, but it forced us to seek-out more training, to dial-in skills and take our paddling to a level we would probably not have otherwise attained. As a result, we get much more out of paddling. We’ve also experienced the usual ups and downs of the sea kayaking business, and realized that for us to stick with it, we’d like to cultivate those better experiences and minimize the ‘downs.’ So here’s a few ways we hope to do just that:

-       Each trip is private. We help you go on the trip you’d like to take. You don’t need to compromise with a stranger who might have different goals.

-       Every trip is a ‘go.’ We don’t put a trip on the schedule and wait for sign-ups. If you’d like more people for your trip, let us know and we’ll try to put you in touch with other like-minded paddlers.

-       Each trip is a full-day or more. There are enough barriers to just getting on the water that once there, we want to make the most of it, and we don’t want to rush. We can meander leisurely, or we can focus on putting-in some miles. We can explore islands on foot, lie in a hammock, play in the surf or take a time-out to improve our navigation. Or we can do awesome, big paddles.

-       We can go just about anywhere.  Take a look at our Destinations on the website to get an idea about our favorite places.

-       Guiding / instruction: it’s all the same to us. You choose what you’d like, but we’d rather do any instruction in the context of a journey: no ‘Quickstart’ crash courses. And if you simply want to paddle with no instruction, that’s fine too.

-       Our pricing is simple and fair: $300/day for up to two people. Beyond that, it’s $70 for each additional paddler.  If you get six people together, that’s less than $100 per person.

-       There’s no additional charge for overnights. For two people, a two-day/one-night trip is $600. Again, simple pricing. 

  

But here’s the catch. We don’t provide equipment or food. See paragraph #1: we’re guides for hire, not outfitters. Aside from helping to keep the price down, it encourages the sort of paddlers we once were ourselves: committed to the sport, seeking out new challenges and improving skills along the way to gradually build confidence. There are, of course, reasonable rental options in the area as well. Odds are we’ll eventually invest in some client equipment, but for now we’re going to keep it simple and see how it goes.

Warmer weather is only a few months away. Check-out our new website and get inspired!