Sorento, French Harbor, Bill, and Buckle Island

We sailed to Sorento, ME. Not much there except a walk around town and to the local lobster Distributor. This is the intermediary between the lobster docks, and the restaurants, grocery stores, etc. This place stores 60,000 lobsters at a time, some as large as 16 pounds (from Canada, not the US... we have size laws)
Anyway, we bought a whopping 2 pounder for only $10, off to the boat with friends Gail & Eric, who also bought a lobster, and a great lobster dinner!. oh, but to GET to the boat... a 15 minute walk from the lobster pound... well, we had already met 3 motorcyclists from Canada. One of them graciously gave Luke a quick trip to the dinghy, lobster on ice in our backpack.

From Sorento, we went to Frenchboro, on Long Island. En route we saw the sailing vessel Mary Todd. She's the only 4 masted schooner in Maine. Just beautiful!

At Frenchboro, we tried anchoring but managed to only pick up seaweed. Note the small "clip" at the top of the picture? That's our 66 pound anchor... the rest is about 10 ft of seaweed.

Anyway, took a mooring in the small basin of Frenchboro, along with mostly lobster working boats.

Frenchboro is a small community - 2 lobster stores, a church, school, and museum - plus walking trails throughout the island,

leading to beautiful vistas of the rocky shore

complete with a nice chair.

The tidal difference here is 12 feet between low and high tide. At high tide, the docks are all at water level...

From Frenchboro, we made a difficult sail in dense fog to Somes Sound. Miserable trip. The big challenge is avoiding the lobster pot floats tied to their associated toggle floats when they appear out of the fog only a hundred feet way - in bunches.

Somesville is about six miles inland, about as far as you can get in the Acadia area.

Safe from wave surges and high wind gusts. Hurricane Bill turned out to be just a lot of rain, no more than a few wind gusts to 25 kts. We were grateful.

From there, we made the quick trip to Buckle Island, a private island with great, mossy, public walking trails.

The trails went around the island, sometimes leading to beautiful sea vistas.

We saw our first seal basking on a rock!

The trails sometimes lead from dense forest areas

to sunlit meadows. Someone with a great sense of humor installed this door on the trail. It opens from a dark forested part of the trail to the meadow and seaside rocks. A sign on the door says "the door from dark to light".