Harbor Island, ME

I had an 8 a.m. Spanish lesson on Saturday, August 3 but due to a spotty internet connection we had to stop after only 20 minutes. It was a rainy morning and we waited for the rain to stop before heading out.  Jonny first took Archie for a quick walk and dropped our contribution for the mooring into the attached canister.  We left by 10:45 in a foggy mist for the relatively short cruise to Harbor Island in Muscongus Bay.

We had recently purchased the latest copy of A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast which has proved to be invaluable to us.  There are literally hundreds of suggested anchorages all along the coast and it’s a pleasant challenge to decide which ones to select. They are each rated by their safety, beauty and access to resources so we can choose isolated spots or others that are near towns with restaurants, stores and other facilities.   Now that we have come this far down east we are prone to select more isolated anchorages and to choose places that we had not visited previously.

Harbor Island looked very appealing and we  arrived there three hours later. We found a really nice spot between Harbor and Hall Islands.  The water is very deep here and the tides are quite dramatic. We tried to anchor between two sailboats but the man in one of them rowed over to us to suggest that we would be safer to anchor a bit further away because we were so close to them and our trawler would tend to act differently on anchor with the tide and wind than sailboats do.  We appreciated his advice and we moved Zendo a bit further away and felt more comfortable doing so.

The Harbor Island anchorage was very beautiful,  probably the prettiest place we’ve stayed so far this trip. We took the dinghy in to shore and Jonny used this opportunity to try out the new rigging system he assembled for tying up the dinghy with Maine’s extreme tides.  The system worked well except for one minor issue - the dinghy anchor didn’t grab in the water. Oh well, live and learn!

Harbor Island is privately owned.  Their home looked like it stepped out of a painting by Andrew Wyeth.

The owners kindly allow visitors to explore the island along a path that winds through the island and along the coast. So that’s exactly what we did. It was a beautiful walk through woodlands and along a very rocky shoreline.  We hiked up to the high point of the island with a huge rocky promontory jutting out into the bay.  It was gorgeous!

Upon our return to Zendo I made a delicious vegetarian  dinner using the big cauliflower that had been sitting in our refrigerator for a while. I adapted a savory recipe to the ingredients we had on hand using tomatoes, olives, capers, garlic and wine and it came out great!  Afterwards, we had a quiet evening on board in our peaceful and lovely anchorage.