8/27/22 -- Southwest Harbor to Eastport, Maine (the end of the line!)(revised)

                     8/27/22 -- Southwest Harbor to Eastport, Maine (the end of the line!)

            Today was a big day, as we reached our final destination, Eastport, Maine, the farthest you can go up the East Coast without entering Canada. We'll start with a couple pictures of the West Quoddy Head Light, which not only marks the entrance into Quoddy Narrows from the Bay of Fundy, but also is the easternmost point of land in the United States.

The first photo shows West Quoddy Head in the left foreground, Campobello Island in the distance, separated by Quoddy Narrows. Campobello Island is in Canada (and history buffs will recall that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had a summer home here) and we actually circumnavigated Campobello Island to get to Eastport because I was concerned that the currents coming out of Quoddy Narrows would be too ferocious.

            And that was one of the main themes today -- tidal currents. This last stretch of the Maine coast is at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, which can have fifty-foot tides, and some of the enormous mass of water going in and out the Bay of Fundy passes between Maine and Grand Manan Island. We were fighting a 2-3 mph current a mile offshore in 200+ feet of water, and some places it got to be as much as 4 or 5 mph (such as passing the southern tip of Campobello Island in close to shore or passing close to Long Point a bit north of Cutler). My cruising guide cautioned that the current under the bridge in the Quoddy Narrows could reach 9 mph, and I didn't want to tackle that, so we went around Campobello, and that was nice because now we can say that we have taken Craunological II boating in Canada. 

            Another main theme for the day was emptiness. There are not many signs of civilization once you head north from Bar Harbor, and the farther north you go the fewer the signs. This is not cottage country; the cottages were few and far between. We saw only one other cruising boat on the way up (and of course it was a sailor). There were a few lobster boats out and about, but most of the time all we could see from our usual perch up on the flybridge was water, sky, rocks and pine trees. It was a bit unnerving for a couple of city slickers, but it was nice. 

            Eastport is a nice little Maine town, just 1,288 people in the last census, but they have a couple little restaurants, a brew pub, an IGA grocery store, a marine supply store, and half a dozen churches. They also have very large tides. It was 18' on the day we arrived. Here are two photos of the ramp down to the town dock at dead low tide on Saturday evening and then again about 3/4 of a foot short of peak high tide late Sunday morning.

            Despite all these nice features, Eastport unfortunately doesn't have a marina and they don't have much of a town dock. I was told by the teenage girl when we made our town dock reservation that while the town doesn't have a diesel fuel pump at the docks, we could get diesel by calling one of two fuel delivery services and they'd bring a truck down (which is how the lobstermen do it I since learned). However, once we arrived and I called those fuel companies I realized that we weren't going to get a fuel delivery (or even someone to talk to on the phone) late on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. And that leads to our third theme, which is fuel management. 

            I calculated that we had 85 gallons of fuel left, and that we had burned about 85 gallons getting from Bar Harbor to Eastport, and that posed a problem. (Our fuel tank holds 180 gallons, and you can't count on being able to burn every last one.) The simple answer was to use the ferocious tidal currents to our advantage on the way back, rather than fighting them like we did on the way up. I calculated that the fuel savings from delaying our departure on Sunday until high tide so that we would have the current pushing us -- and could go through Quoddy Narrows instead of around Campobello Island -- would save us about 20 gallons, so we could make it. It turns out that my calculations were pretty good, because we took 154 gallons when we got back to Southwest Harbor the next day. 

            I'll finish today's blog with a couple pictures of Canada. First, the Head Harbor Light at the far north tip of Campobello Island, and second the view across the commercial harbor at Eastport (at low tide) to Campobello. 

P.S. MacMahan to Eastport was about 229 miles the way we went (one might have shaved off 20-30 miles by making the shortest possible runs). That means our total mileage to Eastport since leaving Naples was 2,589. Throw in our trip up Somes Sound and call it 2,600 miles.

P.P.S. Janet took some photos along the way to Eastport. The first shows the west end of Shipstern Island -- obviously so named for what the striking granite layers resemble. The second shows the cliffs at Long Point (which is roughly across the channel tip of Grand Manan Island, Canada). 

And the second shows