Northeast Harbor on Mt. Desert Island

Here's a couple of photos of Northeast Harbor off season. I understand during season its one of the busiest in Maine, and off season, well its still a lot busier than anything we see in NC. You can see us pulled up to the dock in one of the shots while we are filling up our water tanks and pumping out our holding tank.

Well, with the particular winds we were having, and with the little swell that was making it in, our anchorage in Southwest Harbor was just downright uncomfortable. So we decided to try out Northeast Harbor also on Mt. Desert Island. Northeast Harbor is considered the boating center of Mt. Desert Island and no anchoring is allowed here, only mooring. So we picked up a mooring at $25 a night at N44 17.787 W68 17.000. Its pretty convenient here because we are quite close to the docks, the bus stop, and the town…and we have some wireless every once in a while. We are so close to the docks, we could sit and watch the staff serving dinner to the guests on the megayacht at the end of the nearest dock…no, they did not invite us over for coffee.

There’s also something here we’ve never seen. You usually have docks attached to the land, and then mooring buoys out in the water; up here in the northeast it seems that every harbor is full of mooring buoys with little or no space to anchor. The mooring buoy is attached to a large chain, attached to a granite block “anchor” weighing around a ton. The new thing for us here in Northeast Harbor is a mooring dock…there are lots of docks out in the water which are about 10 feet wide by 50 feet long with a boat along either side, but the dock must be moored just like our mooring buoy is. I’m not sure if I would care for it, because one of the great things about mooring buoys is you don’t have to fuss with any lines. Maybe they have some of the amenities that a landbased dock has like power or water, but we can’t tell.

Oh, I would be remiss not to mention the harbormaster here. Our treatment by harbormasters so far on this journey has been from toleration to scorn, but the Northeastern Harbor Harbormaster was so friendly and went out of his way to be helpful that I wonder if he isn’t a closet southerner.

We are thinking of leaving Thursday afternoon and arriving somewhere in Massachusetts on Saturday morning, but we aren’t going to make any predictions anymore. We’ll let you know where we are when we get there (except of course, for Mom and Dad, we’ll call you and let you know exactly when we are leaving and what our course will be – safety first).