Penobscot Bay is the second largest embayment on the East Coast. In all there are almost a thousand miles of shoreline including 624 islands and ledges. The largest and most populous of these is the island of Vinalhaven - only 12 miles from the mainland but another world.
I’m tagging along with the Thorfinn for the afternoon, hoping to get a long, slow, and close look at the western shore of Vinalhaven and some of the smaller islands around Hurricane Sound. Later I will head over to the big island for a couple of days to explore on my own by foot, and to meet up with a couple of specialists on island ecology - Philip Conkling for a ramble along the seashore, and ornithologist John Drury for a trip to the outer islands.
Just past the Rockland breakwater, the sails of the Thorfinn catch a southwest sea breeze. We glide past the lighthouse at Owls Head, past the Muscle Ridge Channel, and into the bay. An hour later we are surrounded by granite islands, dark spruce trees, and infinite lobster buoys, each connected to a trap, and each trap probably packed with lobsters.
We tie up at the dock on Hurricane Island. In the late 1870s this was a thriving community with a post office, bank, pool hall, bowling green, bandstand, ice pond, ball field, boarding houses, and dozens of cottages. Quarrying was big business at the time and Hurricane was known for having the finest polished granite. The fine-grained, gray-white granite from the islands was shipped down the coast and used to build the grandest buildings of the time: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the Lincoln Memorial, and many others. Around the turn of the century, concrete replaced granite. The quarries closed by 1915.
We spend the afternoon and early evening wandering around the mossy woods and overgrown fields, the old churchyards, abandoned quarries, and shoreline of bubbly granite.
