One of my son’s objectives for this trip is to do some camping on islands, like he and his sister did up here in Seal Bay in 2010. We’ve got a couple of sleeping bags and his two man tent in storage just in case. We’re not talking “park for a week and cook all your meals” camping, we’re talking more like “have dinner with the family and sleep in the back yard”; no campfires or food.
The Maine Island Trail isn’t as high profile as a lot of the various parks and sanctuaries around here. It’s a sting of 190 (mostly) small islands covering some 375 miles of coastline, with about 1/3 of the islands being public. The Association has set up some of these small islands for public use, with limited use low impact camping being permitted on some of them. These islands are much more suited to the “back yard campout” style of camping we are looking to do, rather than the State Parks that charge a fair amount by the night but provide things like restrooms and firepits. Hay Island, where the kids camped two years ago, is one of these islands.
We picked Pretty Marsh Harbor because it was close to where we were (Southwest Harbor) and was right nearby John Island, one of the Maine Island Trail islands where camping was permitted.
The sail over was fabulous. There was a strong Southwesterly blowing, we saw some sustained winds into the low 20’s which is perfect for Evenstar. With sails reefed we sailed comfortably up wind as she galloped across the water. The only time we needed the engine (beyond the usual anchoring operations) was to cross the Bass Harbor Bar, a narrow channel near Bass Harbor Light, where the depths outside it when we passed at dead low tide were too shallow for us. The channel is narrow, and that day happened to run dead upwind so we motored for a couple of hundred yards before cracking off the sails and heading on a fast reach up Blue Hill Bay.
Pretty Marsh Harbor is very…pretty. It’s remote but not desolate, with a town dock around the corner and a walkway up the Eastern shore to a National Park picnic area. Anchoring is good, the first night there we were the only boat anchored; Friday another boat joined us.
John Island is tiny, less than half an acre. The permitted use is one party of two for no more than two nights. Obviously there are no facilities. It is a rocky bluff with a small crown of trees and vegetation and a site for a tent that offers a sweeping vista down Blue Hill Bay.
Our son is an avid camper, our daughter not so much and the rain that came on Friday along with her not feeling so great quickly damped her ardor for the adventure. So I grabbed the chance for some father-son bonding time and off we went.
We were pretty well equipped for our backyard-on-an-island adventure, but we left the yoga pads that would have mitigated some of the more aggressive rocks under our backs. Though no amount of padding would work on the rock we dubbed the “Cone of Torture” on my side of the tent. Stupidly we also forgot a camera, so I can only paint a picture with words.
With some spatters of rain and a threat of thunder and lightning in the distance, we were dropped off by dinghy to spend the night. We settled in with a deck of cards, our flashlights and the evening to talk together. The night was cool, and the island was quiet – on a rock this small nothing larger than a crab was going to be there without flying. A full moon lit the landscape; when I awoke in the middle of the night it was bright enough to read and the air was crisp and clear.
Yeah, we slept fitfully. It’s a rocky island and we didn’t have a lot of padding, but so what. It was a very cook night I got to spend with my kid.
