In between clam digging season and working on the Polaris Jack sailboat rebuild, a group of us took a boat ride to one of our local downeast Maine islands for a picnic. This is the island where the Sail Polaris lobster bakes will be held, but since Polaris Jack was stuck on shore with medical problems, we cheated and took my friend Donna's boat, complete with an outboard motor.
Low tide on a downeast island. The tides here change an average of 2' an hour.
Originally, I'd harbored hopes of having Polaris Jack in the water by the summer of 2023, but the work the boat needed was exhaustive, and I needed time to do it right. Plus, clam digging season had arrived, and I had to go back to pulling clams out of the mud in order to dump more cash into that money-and-time-hungry little sailing vessel.
Summer on the coast of Maine is work season. After years of working aboard lobster boats, in the end I found clam digging to be a better fit. It's quiet, and you work alone. No loud, nasty diesel engines spewing exhaust in your face. Clamming is a short, intense season, and when July comes around you put your head down and butt up--as the locals say--and you work, and that's all you do until Labor Day hits. You clam and you eat and you sleep. Try to recover. I stuff calories down my throat as fast as I can. I soak my hands in ice water, my back and legs in cold salt water, and my head in the occasional yeast-barley-malt water. Ice, saltwater, and beer. The holy trinity.
Clamming is a 5 hour work day (3 hours or so actually in the mud), which is pretty short, but I compare it to getting the shit beat out of you while running a race. Every day.
Back to the story.
We motored out of Eastern Harbor with a boatload of friends, meandered through a remote archipelago of granite-ledged islands, slowed to gaze at a bunch of seals, and found a protected little cove to anchor in.
No one else in sight. No lobster boats, no summer homes. Just us, the rocks, and the water.
Most of the islands around here are undeveloped. Some may have a small, shitbox camp, but mainly they're rock and tree, seaweed and fern. And a handful are owned by conservation groups like Maine Coast Heritage Trust and the Downeast Coastal Conservancy, both small, local groups endeavoring to keep this last stretch of undeveloped coastline the way it's always been. For more info on those two groups, check out their websites below.
There flat aren't many places left where you can stand on the shore at night and look out at a dark horizon cut only by stars and waves and perhaps the flash of a buoy off Nash Island Lighthouse. Or the distant swirl of Petit Manan Lighthouse. I've sailed up and down the east coast a few times, and other than South Carolina's Low Country (Polaris Jack's home) and Georgia's barrier islands, this place is pretty much it.
One of the few times anyone has seen the legendary Nash Island sheep shearer, bowl maker, Patagonia clothing model, and ultra marathon runner, Donna Kausen, on her butt. Look closely, though, and her watch will tell you that she'd already taken close to a million steps that morning, and her heart rate had reached that of a humming bird.
Enough with the tangents. The tide waits for no one, and the water was draining fast when we arrived at our little island, spilling from atop the sand and rock bar the connects two small islands so that, at low water, the two granite heaps become, for a short while, a single island. The water was clear and cold, with braids of rockweed and tendrils of kelp swishing in the currents.
Because we had Donna's outboard boat (the term outboard refers to an engine), we were able to land the bow on the beach in order to unload people, food, dog, and duffle. Then Donna motored back out to deep water, threw her anchor overboard, and rowed her little skiff back to shore to join the group.
A boat ride to an island, the best local ingredients--and some cheeses from afar--a cook fire, and a sunset. You got to wonder what everyone else is doing on a day like that.
While the smooth granite ledges that surround most of these local islands make for great exploring--rock hopping, tide pools, gardens of seaweed, beach combing...--none of us did any of that. We all just sprawled on the ledges, rested and enjoyed the hot sun on the otherwise crisp day.
And we ate.
Downeast Maine is a local food epicenter, and there's no better way to cook than over an open flame on an island. I'm still not sure how the food situation will evolve on the Sail Polaris charters, but I'd like to add an alternative--or an addition--to the traditional island lobster bake for those folks (like me) who experience the world via what goes into their mouths. Fresh caught mackerel and clams, mushrooms and zucchini and tomatoes, homemade sourdough rye called Vollkornbrot... not bad.
Poet and Hollywood sensation, Matt X, leads the group back to the boat. By the time we left, a chilly ocean breeze had kicked up.