8/24/22 -- Camden to Stonington to Southwest Harbor

                            8/24/22 -- Camden to Stonington to Southwest Harbor

            We woke to fog yet again, but it wasn't very heavy, so we proceeded as planned to run to Stonington for lunch and then to Southwest Harbor for dinner and a marina for the night. But first we had a lovely breakfast at the Castine Inn, so we ended up with three lovely meals in three lovely -- but very different -- towns. And the cruising in between meals was glorious, so this was really a red-letter day (even though it was overcast all day). John forgot to mention that all this eating out has led to our pants being a bit tight...

            We started our day with breakfast at the Castine Inn, which features a nice mural of the town in the dining room: 

            After breakfast Ted and I went to the Wilson Museum, which is a quirky but fascinating sort of micro-museum founded by John Howard Wilson. Remarkably enough, there is no Wikipedia page on the guy (although there is one for a Scottish rugby player of the same name), but you can read about him and the museum at wilsonmuseum.org. The girls did some shopping and chatting with the locals, and we met them at the dock. We encountered a few squads of Maine Maritime Academy students marching back from the docks as we headed for Craunological II.

            We left Castine at 11:20 and pulled into the town dock at Stonington at 12:45. Stonington is a very busy working harbor full of lobster boats who barely make room for the recreational boaters, but it is very authentic and very charming. We walked into town and found a promising lunch spot at the Harbor Cafe, which turned out to be a great local spot. Ted and Julie and I all had lobsters for lunch and Janet had a fish sandwich. All were fresh and delicious. 

            The photos below show Craunological II at the town dock in Stonington, the Harbor Cafe (with the town hall to its left), and the town dock again with Crotch Island in the distance, which has a working granite quarry (one of the few remaining in the area) barely visible in the distant left.       

            We got underway again at 3:00 and pulled into the fuel dock at Dysart's Great Harbor Marina at 4:30. The slip they assigned us was full of 100-plus foot yachts, so our walk to and from the marina office and the head and laundry facilities was fun. Ted and Julie had about a mile hike to their hotel. After they checked in, they came back to the boat for cocktails and then I called a cab for a ride to dinner at the Claremont Hotel. I didn't allow for the fact that the cab had to drive down from Bar Harbor, which takes half an hour, so it was well after eight by the time we arrived. But dinner at the Little Fern restaurant at the hotel was definitely worth the wait. We gave our cab driver a nice tip and she waited for us while we ate, so it was quick getting back to the marina. 

            The following photos show some of the mega-yachts that were our dock mates at Dysart's Marina. The first shows the 137' Marie out of Newport, RI which has been retrofitted a few times since she was built in 1930 but still has the wonderful lines of the original hull. We docked right across from her but didn't manage to get an invitation aboard. We did get to see her owner (or the captain) take her out the next day standing on the bridge with his remote control, which was pretty cool. We liked this one best. The next photo shows the boats along our dock walking towards the marina. The big white yacht on the right is the 118' Everglade out of Marco Island (built in 2020 in Taiwan). The third photo shows our pier from the marina office, with the 146' Castlefinn out of Bikini in the Marshall Islands (built in 2010 in the Netherlands) on the right, a 70' Marlow Explorer in the center (with a blue hull but no name), and the 149' Carson out of the Cayman Islands (built in 2015 in Maine) at the far end of the pier. You can find out a lot about these mega-yachts -- and sometimes their owners -- just by Googling their names. The final photo shows the 35' Craunological II out of Naples (built in 2021 in Kent, Washington) in the distant left across from the Marie and behind a 70' Hinckley sailboat. (You can also make her out in the distance in the third photo.) We were in very upscale company, but we didn't get to meet anyone or take any tours. 

These sunset photos show the evening fog rolling in over the marina -- and also show that most of our dock mates were not mega-yachts. The marina just happened to put us on the pier with the big girls, which was quite fun.