Bartlett Island

On Saturday afternoons we’ve been going to the pool in Bar Harbor for practice. The tough part, often enough, is loading and unloading boats in the wind and cold and worrying about icy roads; we’re not usually tempted to go for a paddle outside. This time though, with temps in the thirties and not much wind, we decided to do both: ocean in the morning, pool in the afternoon. We launched at Bartlett Landing, on the northwest side of Mount Desert Island, and set-off around Bartlett Island at high tide.

 
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I’d brought along the little point-of-view video camera, and we experimented with different set-ups as we made our way toward the south end of Bartlett Island. Ice coated much of the steep, shore-side granite, and at high tide we could cruise alongside, our progress a bit slowed by the desire for video.

I don’t bring the little video camera on every trip. The great thing about such a camera is that you can turn it on and it does the work while you continue paddling. Of course, after you’ve downloaded copious amounts of footage-- which takes time as well as storage space on the computer, you reign-in the shotgun approach and try to get footage that counts.

 

 
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One of the reasons I paddle is that it puts me in the moment. Any kind of multi-tasking is a challenge to appreciating the moment: even thinking too much can be a form of multi-tasking, like wondering about how I might write about this, if I should blog about it. It takes you away, spreads your attention thin.  

Does shooting video make it more challenging to be present and attentive to the moment? You are essentially looking for little pieces of experience to save for later, an artifact to bring home, as if that is the object of your quest, rather than the quest being the reward in itself. But using the camera could actually make you focus more completely on the moment. Certainly, taking photos and video does slow me down sometimes when I might be apt to just go cruising-on. I slow down to consider how something looks and end up looking far more closely, thinking about it, appreciating it.

 
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I’m not sure that doing something without cameras makes it a more pure endeavor, and I probably won’t find out any time soon, since I’m fairly addicted to image-making. The trend of posting on Facebook adds a whole other level to the question that I think I’d better stay away from for the moment, since we’ve got an island to get around here.

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The real highlight of the trip was the ice: the tall icicles in Dogfish Cove, the long expanses of thin skim ice we plowed through along much of the western side. In the distance, seals climbed aboard an ice floe. Paddling through the ice was hard-going and a bit surreal: the constant crunching sound against our hulls, the paddles penetrating just enough to move forward, leaving alternating holes in our wake. I worried a little about breaking a paddle, and a little less about damaging hulls, but we made it through okay, finally taking a quick break on The Hub before hurrying, with the tide, back down Bartlett Narrows to the launch.

Cobscook Bay / Bold Coast

Just east of Machias, Route One stretched onward in my headlights, a tunnel of pavement through a blur of shadowy, swaying trees. On the passenger seat atop a heap of charts, my VHF, switched to the weather station, delivered the bad news in a computer-generated monotone: rain, wind, big seas. I felt tempted to turn around and head home-- I could be there by midnight-- but I had two days off and wanted to make the most of it. At the very least, I thought, I would camp at Cobscook Bay State Park and go for a hike in the morning.

That day I’d paddled in Machias Bay. The forecast had been just about as foreboding, but I found my way to the launch at Starboard Cove and convinced myself that it didn’t look too bad out there. A sandbar connecting Starboard Island to the peninsula created a long crescent of breaking waves that I followed out to the island. Then I ducked my head down and paddled directly into the wind toward the castle-like home on Foster Island. Grazing sheep looked up as I approached and made my way around the ledges. South of the island, where the current squeezes through Foster Channel, the waves grew and steepened, and I turned back toward the bay. Ahead, a seal jumped nearly out of the water, and I turned the video on just in time for the next leap.

 

I spent the rest of the afternoon bouncing over the waves among steep-sided islands off Bucks Harbor, where bluffs of yellowish-reddish stone dropped straight into the ocean. Across the bay, the 25 radio towers on Cutler Peninsula glowed in the late afternoon sunshine. 

 

I woke in my tent Sunday morning to the sound of rain pattering on the fly. The weather forecast had not improved. I’d hoped to paddle from Cutler along an exposed stretch of the Bold Coast, but it would have to wait for a calmer day. In the meantime, I could continue my exploration of Cobscook Bay. I made coffee, packed quickly and drove to the Reversing Falls Town Park. I arrived just after slack, the flood just beginning, with currents already swirling and forming small waves. 

 

The previous week, I’d paddled through here a little after slack and continued around Falls Island, the chock stone island that divides the current and creates Cobscook Reversing Falls on the north side. I’d noticed a truck with a boat trailer parked at a stony beach just to the east, so I decided to find that beach. I drove down a rutted dirt road and emerged at a gravel and rockweed beach. Perfect. I launched about an hour after slack.

 

The current that now ran upstream of the falls didn’t appear too strong yet, so I set a ferry angle and headed across. A ferry angle is a compromise between pointing into the current and toward your destination. In a strong current, you may be looking at a calm eddy on the other side, but your bow points upstream. As I neared Falls Island, I had to paddle harder and harder, my angle turning ever higher as I felt the current build. It was all I could do to stay upstream of a rocky point, where the current would grow even more, perhaps faster than I could paddle against.

I took a breather on the other side and resolved to make my return crossing at a bigger expanse further east, where I hoped there would be less current. But now I let it take me downstream in a different direction. Patches of whitewater appeared here and there, and as the current built, boils erupted unpredictably. I’d feel my boat start to spin and I’d brace for a moment before continuing. I took a break on the end of Coffin’s Neck and ate my sandwich, watching another constriction for a few minutes, realizing that I would probably have trouble getting back against the current. Time to turn around.

I made my way east, to Denbow Neck, where I could progress, as much as possible, along the edge of the current. The water level seemed to have gone up quickly, and I began to worry that maybe I should have parked the car in the woods, instead of on the beach. The predicted wind and rain arrived. Now I was really having fun.

The gap between Leighton Point and Denbow Neck is almost a half-mile wide, but it is still a constriction, where greater Cobscook Bay starts to squeeze into its narrower fingers, and accordingly, the current accelerates. And here I was, at its mid-current peak; a swath of foaming whitewater extended all the way across, below a haze of misty air. I picked a range- a convenient spruce lined up between two ledges like a rifle sight, and started across, adjusting my angle here and there to maintain the range. All went well until about two-thirds across, when the real current began and I quickly drifted downstream. This is when you just focus on an efficient forward stroke and hang-on. I hung-on, I got there, adrenaline slightly elevated, and made my way toward the car, which still had a good 4 vertical feet of dry beach below it.

Later that day I took a hike out to Boot Head on the Bold Coast. While there was still a bit of wind, the sea looked fairly calm.

Here's a video from my previous trip Downeast:

Duxbury Massashusetts: Salt Marsh & Sand

I had a painting to deliver to Duxbury, Massachusetts. I probably could have let UPS take it, but after reading a bit about paddling there, it seemed a perfect excuse to do it myself and spend a couple of days off the island. After six hours of driving, I delivered the painting and scoped-out the launch: Powder Point, right next to half-mile-long Powder Point Bridge. It was late in the day, and a bit windy so I took a long walk on the beach before heading back to camp at Wompatuck State Park.

The next day, I launched a couple of hours before high tide-- it was still a bit windy-- and headed up into Duxbury Marsh. We don't get much marsh paddling around Stonington, so it was a big adventure for me to take a random turn into a channel and lose myself for awhile in the maze-like passages through the grass. I came to a few dead-ends or turns I couldn't make and had to back-out-- all part of the fun.

As high tide approached though, I got serious and headed up the Cut River. It was unclear from charts and Google Earth if I could get through the river. I'd driven over a bridge a few hours earlier and seen only a dry, muddy creek. It seemed worth trying at high tide though, so I could circumnavigate Duxbury Beach and Gurnet Point. And if I could get through the creek, I didn't know how long it would be navigable, so I could be committed to paddling another 12 or so miles, much of it along the 7-mile stretch of Duxbury Beach; it would either be a short day in the marsh, or a long day going around the beach.

It turned-out to be a long day. I made it into Green Harbor and followed the breakwater past the beach out to open ocean. After a few bumps at the breakwater, it turned fairly calm. The beach even sheltered me from much of the southwest wind. The day had started-out rainy and the forecast was for more rain and wind, so there weren't many people. Duxbury residents can get a permit to drive on the sand, and on  a nice day, hundreds of Jeeps and SUVs are usually lined-up side by side, tailgates lowered toward the open ocean. I had no problem finding a secluded stretch of sand to eat lunch.


At the end of the beach I passed around Gurnet Point, where a lighthouse rises above a small community of homes looking out to sea. It turned a bit bumpier out along the edge of Plymouth Bay, and I could see a big stretch of shoreline-- the power plant in Plymouth, wind turbines rising behind Duxbury. And as I rounded Saquish Neck, the tide had turned against the wind and I found myself briefly in a small tidal race.

I returned to Powder Point late in the day and drove straight home.

The Cranberry Islands

Despite our Tuesday through Sunday gallery hours, it's tough for Rebecca and I to close on a mid-summer Monday for a day off together. Our busy season is short, and the winter is long, with just as many bills. We usually look out at the people walking down Main Street and imagine it in a few months time, when the crowds thin and the paddling is at least as good, and we choose to work rather than play. But it is possible to sneak away early in the day for a paddle and just not think about all the money we're not making. That's how Rebecca and I found ourselves in the Cranberry Islands last Monday.

We launched in Manset and headed out to Great Cranberry Island, where we arrived at high tide-- in time to explore The Pool, a large tidal basin on Great Cranberry's east side.

We ate lunch on a MITA island and went on to Little Cranberry, where we played for a bit in the one-foot surf along the southern beach.  If the waves roll in just so, it hardly matters how big they are-- you can still catch a nice ride. The trick is staying on the wave, not getting ahead of it. We rode them in again and again. Finally, as the tide fell, the wave shape changed and they became harder to catch. Time to move on.

On to Baker Island, where we took a walk up to see the lighthouse and the remains of the community that existed there long ago.

We headed back around the south end of Great Cranberry and north through the Western Way with the current behind us. It's so much better to end a trip with the current behind you. It left us with just enough energy, as the sun began to set, to dawdle a bit in Southwest Harbor so Rebecca could photograph some of the boats. Not a bad way to end a long day off.

The next day I discovered that Nate and I are on the cover of the August issue of Maine magazine (see "Guides Class" from May 12). In the photo, we're having dinner with students and guests on our guides class camping trip. We're silhouetted by the sunset, but trust me, it's us. There's a nice article on the inside too-- even mentions this blog. Thanks to writer Sandy Lang and photographer Peter Frank Edwards.

Here's a video from the Cranberry Islands:

South Islesboro Islands

As often happens, plans for the excursion happened quickly. Peter and I were talking one day, speculating about getting away the next. I sorted through my mental file of trips I wanted to do and chose one in the MDI area, but by the time we left Stonington with kayaks strapped atop the car, we were headed south to Lincolnville. I knew Nate had been going back and forth on the ferry a lot lately, since his kids had been visiting grandparents on Islesboro, but I didn’t expect to run into him.

 As Peter and I passed in front of the about-to-embark ferry, I pointed the video camera and turned it on, just as I noticed someone waving from the bow. It took a moment to register: Nate, his wife Casey and Kili the dog. We pulled ahead and the ferry started moving. It was one of those strange moments that make the thousands of contorted miles of Maine coastline feel a little more intimate.

photo by Nate Hanson

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Peter and I pointed to Philbrook Cove on Seven Hundred Acre Island and tried to keep a range. The tide was rising and the current should have been moving us north, but the 5-10 knot north breeze won-out, pushing us south. Despite the breeze, the day felt calm and warm—my first day of the summer without a dry suit.

photo by Nate Hanson

 We followed the shore around Seven Hundred Acre Island, passing a couple of small cottages. Ahead I saw the tell-tale water surface slither that otters make. I turned the video camera on and drifted toward them. One of the otters stuck its head above the surface only feet away, right in front of the camera- a great, almost comical shot. As it turned out though, when I thought I’d turned the camera on, I’d actually turned it off after leaving it running for about 7 minutes. So we still rely on memory for some of the fun parts. And I do lots of editing.

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There’s a learning curve to the video, for sure. I’m aware that eventually, all these amateur paddle movies will probably look about the same to anyone but me (perhaps even to me) but for now I’m not concerned- just having some fun with it.

  Our paddle took us down through the Ensign Islands, around the southern end of Job Island and back north past Minot and back to Seven Hundred Acre Island. Seven Hundred Acre Island is privately-owned, apparently by descendants of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, whose house still stands on the eastern point near this structure, which I think is the miniature castle he built for his kids.

Around Islesboro, the recreational boats far outnumber the work boats. It feels like just about everyone is on vacation. And for the day at least, so was I.

Warren Island (right)- the beach just below site #7

 We followed the shore of Warren Island, where a few campers were arriving in kayaks at the State Park Campground. A short distance away, we paused beside the lighthouse on Grindel Point, took a bearing for Spruce Head and started across West Penobscot Bay. The outgoing current had increased- maybe about 2 knots- and we kept a steep ferry angle to avoid getting swept down-current.

We arrived back at Lincolnville as the ferry once again departed, then drove home drinking iced coffee from Dunkin' Donuts, scheming about getting to the islands we didn't quite reach this time.

Sullivan Falls

I don't think I'm running out of things to say about paddling; I'm just having some fun with these videos. They probably take about as much time to edit as it does to write a blog entry. And I think they might convey what happens at a place like Sullivan Falls better than I can do with words.

Having said that,  I'm new at this and I hope these videos will improve. The other day at Sullivan I managed to get there without charging the battery, which conked-out early in the game. And keeping the lens dry is next to impossible, so there were a few shots where the paddler appeared to have been edited-out by a big drop of water. Oh well, another challenge.