7/26/06 (Wed.): We had a great day off. We packed a lunch and headed out early (about 8 AM) for our 5 PM Puffin cruise. That’s right—we left in the morning for a cruise that didn’t start until 5 in the afternoon (and it was only about an hour away). The reason for that is that we’ve discovered we thoroughly enjoy getting there as much as the destination.

We went to Damariscotta first. It’s a nice sized little town with a pretty downtown area that we’d visited once before in the pouring rain. We did a little shopping in Reny’s (pronounced “Rennies”), which is a chain of very small department stores. For those of you old enough to remember dime stores, Reny’s is like a dime store merged with a Walmart, but small like a dime store. It’s a great place to buy household goods, linens, clothing (they carry brand names) and hardware. The town is on the Damariscotta River. The name is a Native American word meaning “plenty of alewives” (a kind of fish). We wandered around the town and the riverbank for a while.

Then we headed toward Fort William Henry and Colonial Pemaquid State Historic Site in Bristol. This area was settled by Europeans in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and inhabited by Native Americans long before that. The fort has been partially reconstructed.

The Fort House was built in the last part of the 18^th century. It didn’t really have anything to do with the fort except that it was built near it. The ruins of 14 stone cellar holes can also be seen with a sign explaining what archaeologists believe each building was used for.

There’s also a cemetery with gravestones dating back to the early 1700’s. There was an art class visiting the site and we enjoyed loo

king over their shoulders at their work. We had lunch at a picnic table overlooking Pemaquid Harbor and Wiley fished for a while. I took a little snooze.

Our next stop was a spot we’ve been to before—Ocean Pond. We wanted to try to catch it at low tide so we could explore the tide pools, but once again it was high tide. The beach is a field of large, round boulders that makes it very difficult to walk. At least it wasn’t foggy this time!

Finally, we headed (the long way around) for New Harbor and Shaw’s Wharf where the Puffin Cruise docks. We took a gorgeous ride through the area around Round Pond.

There was an old stone school and numerous small farms that looked like they’d been there for centuries.

This old barn's foundation was made of ancient rocks. There were sheep grazing in the pasture below the barn, and a couple of them had on what looked like canvas coats! I have no idea what to make of that!

This tiny patriotic shed sat beside the road with no other buildings in sight.

We got to Shaw’s Wharf quite early and enjoyed watching the lobster boats come in. This is the first time we’ve ever watched the entire process.

The boats come in one-by-one, as though on a schedule (and maybe they were). The lobstermen wore orange rubber overalls and knee-high boots.

The dock master met each boat and gave them a stack of crates. The crew, usually 2 or 3 people) counted about 40 lobsters into each crate and hefted the crate onto the dock.

The dock master (quite an elderly gent, dressed in dress trousers and a golf shirt) weighed each crate and then ran a line through the handles and floated the crate beside the dock.

Eventually there was quite a long line of crates.

After all the boats had come in (about 7-8 boats), the dock master went to the other end of the dock and used a big winch to lift the crates up to a waiting refrigerated truck.. We watched 30-35 crates loaded into the truck. Some of the crates also went directly into the nearby restaurant’s cold storage room.

We were the first to board the Hardy II. It took about an hour to cross Muscongus Bay, which was studded with 72 islands. The captain kept saying how nice and calm it was, but the boat was rolling and heaving pretty impressively in my opinion. I didn’t get seasick, but I certainly wasn’t tempted to partake of any of the food they were serving on the lower level! One of the island we passed had a lighthouse (Franklin light) on it, and we could see why a lighthouse was important—the waves were crashing mightily on the rocks of the island.

We saw a couple of harbor seals and many seagulls and cormorants on the way to Egg Rock where the puffins are nesting. There was an Audubon naturalist on board who explained how Audubon Society and Nature Conservancy acted together to restore the puffin to this area. Puffins had been hunted nearly to extinction in the early 1800’s in this area. Scientists took chicks from Nova Scotia and raised them on the island so that they were imprinted on it and would return to nest. They also had to rid the island of seagulls, which feed on puffin eggs and chicks, and they put up decoy puffins to lure returning birds. It took 4 years before they finally found a nesting pair on the island. We saw several puffins floating in the water quite close to the boat. My pictures didn’t come out well, but the collage is from Audubon's website. Visit the website -- there's a live camshot of Egg Island so you can see exactly what we saw. http://www.audubon.org/bird/puffin. Check it out! Puffins are not as big as I thought—I’d always pictured them as being like small penguins, but they’re actually about the size of a small seagull.

It was almost 8 PM by the time we headed home, and most of the restaurants in Damariscotta were closing up. We had planned to have a seafood dinner, but we were so hungry by the time we finally found a pizza place in Waldoboro that we devoured our pasta and garlic bread with gusto.

Altogether, today was another memory maker in our continuing great adventure