Friday, August 9, 2019

Tenant's Harbor, Maine

We left Rockport Tuesday morning August 6th and cruised to Tenant's Harbor, Maine.  This is a VERY small town with a general store and two restaurants (one of which is only open part of the week).  We had a mooring ball in the harbor for an overnight.

Tenant's Harbor

Susan coming to collect our mooring fee

Dinner Tuesday night was at the East Wind Inn

We have been seeing these black and white water fowl (I assume some kind of duck) on our travels here in Maine.  I took some pictures of one while in our mooring at Tenant's Harbor.  If anyone knows what they are, let me know.  They are quite cute.


Evening from our mooring on Tuesday August 6th


Unfortunately we were fogged in the next day on Wednesday and there was also no space for us at our desired next stop-over.  Due to these factors, we extended our mooring an additional night.  While watching the fog we saw a lobster boat coral a school of bait fish in the harbor and net them.  They conveniently did this right in front of Southern Style.

Lobster boat pulling in it's net with bait fish.

Then another boat came alongside to assist.

They scooped the fish out of the first net with a second smaller net and put the fish in large barrels.  This is an example of boater TV.  We watched this process for probably an hour.


The entire day Wednesday was overcast and extremely foggy.  We also started to get some small rolling waves coming into the harbor making the boat roll side to side.  It was not terrible during the day, but over night Wednesday into Thursday morning it was really annoying.  I just could not sleep well and Keith also said he was not looking forward to another day on the mooring here with the rolling.  The fog had lifted pretty well Thursday morning due to some periods of heavy rain.  However, the wind was up and the ocean was a bit rough.  We did get a call in the moring that there was an available mooring ball in Damariscotta.  This town is about 14 miles up the Damariscotta River and would be very protected.  It was just a matter of getting there.  We decided to make a go of it.  We made it from Tenant's Harbor down the coast to the Damariscotta River safely in about two hours.  We had to do a combination of running slow and fast because of the waves (4-8 feet) and the lobster pots, but we made it.  Once in the river it was nice and calm and our mooring ball was a good deal.  A local let us have the mooring at no charge for two nights.

The big reason to come up the river is to try out "Damariscotta" oysters.  They have large oyster farms up here and we have scene the oysters on almost every menu in Maine.  Schooners Landing has "Free" oysters on Friday night, so we are going to see how good these oysters really are.



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