Dix Cove

Wednesday morning awakened us to blue skies and beautiful Maine weather.  We decided to explore the little islands in the cove, but needed to do so during low tide.  This area is completely covered with water, thanks to the 12 foot tidal range at high tide.

What a beautiful place!  We are so fortunate to be able to experience it.

And, just what do you think these two "bottoms up" guys might be doing????

Collecting mussels! Lots of them, like 10 pounds worth! 

Low tide exposes the mussel beds.  Arnie did check the "red tide hot line" at the Maine Department of Marine Resources.  They said the mussels are from a good area and to enjoy them!  Right now they are in a bag behind Arnie & Margie's boat, hanging in the fresh, cold water, and cleansing sand and mud.  Arnie has promised to cook them tomorrow night.

The Dix Cove islands were once important, booming granite quarries.  The small island of Dix alone supported 2000 granite cutters and 150 buildings.  The quarries were worked until WW1.   These huge slabs of stone were cut by pounding small rods into the stones at appropriate places and then inserting wedges between the cuts.  Pounding on the wedges forced them deeper, resulting in nice clean breaks in the granite.  These are not minor stone pieces - the largest columns cut from granite quarries in this part of Maine were for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC.  The four columns each were 64 feet long, 8 feet in diameter,  and weighed 360 tons!

The cut granite was shipped from man-made wharfs such as this.

We spent most of the morning exploring the islands.  Around noon we took our boats to Rockland for the Rockland Lobster Festival.  Marge and I did some "retail therapy" while Arnie and Luke checked out the local boat store and did grocery shopping for us.  The day was capped by lobster dinners at the festival.