Leaving Mount Desert Island

Friday 13 July: leaving Mount Desert Island, via Winter Bay, to Stonington
Today we start migrating back south, we have 4 days to get to Boothbay Harbor in the mid-Maine coast, where we will leave Cloudy Bay while we go back to Europe.
A bit of a late morning today, and we don’t up-anchor till midday. Wind is good enough, but bang on the nose and we have to dodge hundreds of fishing floats, so motoring is all we can do. Lots of logs floating and rafts of weed too, plus the odd seal here and there.
On the chart we see there is a lobster coop in Winter Bay, so we head there to see the place and hopefully get some lobster. 2 hours later we are anchored in front of the Winter Bay Yacht Club and dinghy ashore to find the coop. There are lots of lobster boats in this bay and the coop is a very local affair. The lobster is only $6 per pound.
We only have a small cooking pot and we take it ashore to match the size of the lobsters. We joke saying “we only have this pot and 36 dollars cash, what can we buy for it?”. The coop shop has plenty of lobster, and we buy 2×1.5lbs soft shell lobsters which perfectly fit the pot, wriggling ontop of each other. OMG, we cannot wait to steam them!
After we bring our catch back to Cloudy Bay and store it in the fridge, we go to WBYC to have a beer and hoping to chat to some of the members, to get recommendations on where to stop on the way to Boothbay. To our disappointment, we get a brutal “no you can’t come into the club unless you pick up (and pay for…) a mooring buoy”. Hm, our rudest encounter yet. Yacht clubs here really are not very welcoming. And to think what reception a foreign yacht would have in ANY UK yacht club…
So we return to Cloudy Bay’s beer, up-anchor and move on, gently giving a very British 2 finger salute to the YC as we motor away. 30nm to go till our planned stop for tonight, so we’d better get moving. We attempt to sail, but the wind drops soon after and the engine is back on mid afternoon.
And so we weave our way past Mount Desert Island and through several other outlying islands, dodging thousands of fishing bouys all the way – what a pain they are. They even lay them thick in narrow channels, with total disregard of other people using the waterways. Are fishermen the same all over world? All believing they have 100% rights over all the territory they fish in?
The scenery is stunning, as we pass the numerous granite rocky islands covered in trees with shoreline houses occasionally between the trees. But it’s hard to look around when we are concentrating so hard on not getting a lobster pot line around our prop!
Finally we arrive to the fishing town of Stonington. Clearly this town, unlike Bar Harbor, is a real fishing town – no whale watching boats or cruise liners here. We anchor adjacent to the town at sunset then set the gas alight to boil our 2 lobsters.
Surprisingly they are still wriggling as we take them from the fridge and put them to sleep in the pot, with lid on so we cannot see them complaining the water is too hot. 15 mins later out come 2 very pink lobsters and soon we are tucking in. These were “soft shell” lobsters, meaning that they had only recently grown their new shells. So the shell was soft and the meat inside apparently small – we guess they make their new shell planning to grow into it. But they are very sweet and very tasty, all washed down with wine as the twilight sets in.
A lovely evening in a peaceful setting.