Maine is an amazing cruising area.  There are island studded bays, small towns with good restaurants and historical centres, well-marked channels between islands, little tide and secluded anchorages. Many of the islands are clothed in pine forest which clings to the pink granite rock as it meets the shoreline. Maine does have fog, but that comes and goes, and in itself it can be quite bewitching in the way it shrouds the landscape and diffuses the light.  It also has lobster pots.

Lobster pots dominate your cruising in a way that I am sure is unique.  It is largely the sheer number - apparently over three million of them, partly the fact that there is no concession to keeping a narrow channel clear, but also that some of them are tied together in pairs – and woe betide you if your hull gets between them!   The concern is that you might get the floats that are tied to the pots snarled up with your keel or worse still with your propeller, causing damage to the shaft and stopping the engine (let alone damaging the lobsterman’s trade.  To avoid becoming paranoid about the field of brightly-coloured floats which bob and dip in front of you, you have to decide what your tactics are….  weaving around each pot can mean that you very quickly go off course and potentially get in to danger; with a catamaran you can try lining them up between the hulls, but the sheer number can make that impossible.  I have found that the best approach is a combination of being fatalistic and embracing the problem as if it were a computer game – a minefield that has to be negotiated, but if you get it wrong you will probably lose some points but get another life.  As it is, we have been very lucky to have been sailing in company with David and Heather who are on Sula – Discovery 55 Hull number one – as they have kindly dived down to assess the damage to our sail drive from a rope.

The number plates of cars from Maine have “Vacationland” on them. It seems that Maine is having one of the best summers that anyone can remember. Apart from a few thunderstorms at night and a couple of days of fog – it’s quite something when the only way to find your way back from the shore to your boat seems to be using your hand-held GPS – we have woken to sunshine and clear skies every day.  There is a great feeling of bonhomie: we’ve been to the Seven Seas Cruising Association get-together; we’ve had other yachties on board for coffee and for drinks and met fellow cruisers at the local play.  One couple invited us to join them at a restaurant and lent us a pilot guidebook (Taft), providing greater detail and historical cameos of the areas we are visiting. We’ve even had people come over to us as they recognised us from the article that has recently appeared in Blue Water Sailing magazine.  Today, not only have we been to a lobsterfest on Long Island that was recommended by a sailor, but we also had time to nip over to Swan Island to try the Chowder Cook-up that someone else was heading for.  We were warned about the height of the bridge over Eggemoggin Reach, but hadn’t accounted for the repair work that was being carried out – with scaffolding and sacking hanging from it we sailed under with just a tiny amount to spare above the mast – a heart rendering moment.

Over the last two weeks we have been meandering around the islands of Penobscot Bay and Mount Desert Island.  We have travelled over 200 miles as we have also gone further east to the more remote area of Maine’s Bold Coast, which neighbours Nova Scotia. (The water there is a mere 13 degrees C – the seals love it, but I’m not so certain.)  We have seen eagles nesting in the pines trees and ospreys nesting in the frame on top of marker buoys.  By cycling out to the rugged Schoodic Point, east of Mount Desert Island, we were able to see eiders and guillemots in numbers.

Acadia National Park, Mount Desert Island making up the bulk of it, is the second most visited National Park, with over 3m visitors a year.  There are several towns on the island, Bar Harbour being the biggest, but we enjoyed the atmosphere in both Southwest and Northeast Harbours, with their choice of good restaurants and shops, as well as the beautiful anchorage at Somesville, which is at the head of a fjord.  We cycled about 20 miles of the ‘carriageways’ which criss-cross part of the island, are free from motor traffic and which offer some great scenery.  Another day we hopped on and off the free shuttle buses, walked the coastal path and wandered around the very crowded Bar Harbour.

Mount Desert became fashionable as a resort for the wealthy in the mid-19^th century.  Statistics of a fire in 1947, which ravaged 25 square miles, give a hint of the scale of its former glory, as 5 grand hotels, 60 summer mansions and 170 year-round homes were destroyed.  Fire seems to be a tragic part of so much of the history around here, partly I guess because so many of the buildings are timber-constructed.  Unusually, in Belfast, many of the old buildings were of elegant brick construction, but even there one building was burnt twice in four years.  Nevertheless, Americans are very proud of their history and are very good at preserving their heritage.  Even on the outer islands that we have visited there is often a small museum to be found or an old house that you can take a tour round.  Small towns have signs dotted around the streets explaining the historical significance or original use of various buildings. One of the signs I saw on a building today said “Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.”  -  I think there have already been quite a few moments like that on our