Clean up on Eye-el a Hoe

Path of circumnavigation around Isle au Haut

I always have problems with French place names in the United States.   I’m never sure how they get pronounced locally and often get made fun of.   When I was on the border town between New Brunswick and Maine, if I said “Cal-lay” for Calais, I’d get hoots of derision, when everyone knows it’s pronounced “Callous”.   I just want to see what happens to a Mainer when they go to the English Channel and arrive in “Callous”.  

Well, Isle au Haut presents a real challenge here.  If you were a true francophile, it would be pronounced “Eel Oh Oh”.    But then the curator at the Museum of Natural History at Harvard, who hails from Machias Maine, says it’s pronounced “Eye-el of Haught”.    But around Stoninginton, the closest point of approach to the place, it’s called “Eye-el a Hoe” – like “Idaho”.    Go figure.  

So, another paddling trip with Dan Carr.   This one started off with a MITA Island cleanup trip scheduled for Saturday, May 14^th.     A classic jumping off point for Isle au Haut and the archipelago of granite ledged islands off Stonington is the Old Quarry Campground, run by Captain Bill, so we were scheduled to meet up there.

The drive up to Old Quarry was excruciating on account of the weather.   On Friday the 13^th (of course!), it rained in buckets endlessly.    I quietly told myself that the storm would blow itself out and that meant that the weather for the trip would be pleasant.   When I got off the Maine Turnpike on to the local roads, I noticed that the wind picked up substantially.   On the bridge over Eggamoggin Reach to Deer Island, my car got buffeted around by the gusts, and there were big whitecaps out on the water – not terribly auspicious.  

When I got to the campground, I met up with Dan.   He suggested that I might want to sleep in my van overnight.   Ha!   I’d been thinking about nothing but that on the drive up.    We hit a local restaurant and had some lobstahs and hit the sack.

On Saturday, we were up early.   Captain Bill, who runs Old Quarry was in for quite the shock, as the quiet winter and spring suddenly turned into the busy season and he was swamped with folks running around, making demands. 

The plan for the morning was to go clean up some MITA (Maine Island Trail Association) islands.   The poor islands off the coast of Maine!   They’re known for their beauty, but boy do they get their share of trash.    Lobster buoys, lobster traps, plastic water bottles, oil bottles, you name it.    

Actually the mechanisms by which trash gets deposited is fascinating.    It only took me half a day to figure out the pattern.   Trash doesn’t stick to the steep granite ledges, but it marches along with the tide and the waves until it hits a more level beach, and then gets washed up, sticks, and lines the high-high tide flats. 

We had a two-boat system and volunteers and MITA folks were out on the dock for our mother-ship, called The Beagle, and run by a guy named Darwin.   Go figure.   He took us out to McGlathery Island, where we met a guy who ran the skiff named Ben Fuller, who is the curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum and Maine kayak guide.    The plan is that the skiff deposits the trash pickers (that would be me), and then gets the trash, and then brings it to the mother-ship and then the mother-ship runs it to the dock, where it gets hauled away.  

There’s an additional issue with cleaning up trash from the islands:  fishing gear.   The common-law on fishing gear is that you are not allowed to touch it, as it belongs to the fishermen.   In principle, the idea is that the fishermen will eventually come along and retrieve their gear, so it’s illegal to pick up lobster buoys, smashed up traps etc.   This is a holdover from the bad-old days of trap wars, where other fishermen would wreck intrusive gear.    The problem is that fishermen rarely retrieve their gear that smashes up on the beaches, and can’t really seem to be bothered.   So, what to do?  

The concept that MITA has worked out, and seems sensible enough, is that any salvagable gear gets hauled to the local harbormaster, who then alerts fishermen in the area to the stuff, and they can swing by and retrieve it if they wish.   It seems like a win-win concept, but hasn’t really caught on yet on a large scale.   I hope it does, because there are a whole bunch of islands out there that have gazillions of neon-bright broken up lobster buoys littering the shores, along with polypropelene rope and barnacle encrusted broken lobster traps.    The idea that you can’t touch this stuff doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, so the idea that someone wanting to clean their beach can deposit the reusable gear in a sensible location seems like everyone comes out ahead.  

Ben dropped us off from his skiff on McGlathery Island and the lot of us set about scooping up trash.   I’d say that maybe 50% of it was old broken up lobster buoys, and the other fraction some combination of platic bottles and even plastic party balloons that seem all too common.  

The whole operation is a bit like flossing your teeth, but applied to a beach in this case.   You approach a beach with tons of bright colored junk on it, and when you’re done, it’s in pristine shape – as if returned to its original wild state.   It’s a very satisfying feeling, to be honest.

By 2 PM we’d picked McGlathery clean and headed back to Old Quarry.   I have to say, the pile of trash that came off McGlathery and another couple of islands was impressive.

Part of the trash haul from McGlathery Island. 

Shifting into kayak mode, Dan and I loaded up our camping gear and paddled south to Wheat Island, which is a MITA site on the northeast side of Isle au Haut.   It’s a beautiful place with big granite ledges.   Since it was a full moon, we saw the spring tide.   As luck would have it, the timing of the high tide around Isle au Haut is coincident with the lunar transit.   The means that when we pulled up around 6 PM, we had to carry our gear over a long trudge over slippery kelp and seaweed.   No matter. 

Looking west from Wheat Island

 

The next morning, we put out for a clockwise paddle around Isle au Haut.    The tidal currents around the island are interesting.   Isle au Haut acts like a kind of cork that stoppers the waters round Deer Isle, so the tidal currents run strong on the eastern and western shores.    We put in a bit early to avoid the peak current around the east side of the island.   Even still there was a definite current running.   We tried to do a bit of shore hugging to reduce the exposure to current.   This turned into a surpise for me.   There was a decent southeaster swell running from the storm on Friday.   We paddled inside an area called Seal Ledge.   As we crossed over part of the submerged ledge, a rogue high swell broke right behind me.   I hadn’t done much in the way of rolling or tuning up for the season, so I wasn’t so sure about my ability to react, but somehow I managed to instinctly do the proper leaning and bracing and the wave passed with no problem.   Still, I was a bit startled. 

The forecast was for the wind to pick up to 15 knots out of the north.   Now, the southern part of Isle au Haut has something of a reputation as being exposed, and my imagination was getting the better of me.   Ben Fuller remarked about some conditions under which “no-way, no-how would I go round the south end…”   Dan and I pulled up on a sloping rocky north-facing beach on an island called Eastern Ear.   With the wind picking up and the reputation of the south end of island floating around in my head, I got apprehensive. 

We launched again.   As we were about to round the southeast tip of Isle au Haut, we passed six other paddlers who were northbound.   I managed to extract that they were from the Boston and Cape Cod area, but they seemed pretty determined to keep moving.  It turns out that one of them was Josko, a NSPN’er (North Shore Paddler Network), but I didn’t know it at the time. 

Despite my apprehensions, the southern stretch of coast on Isle au Haut was glorious.   The sun came out, and swells were swinging in, and breaking on shoals inland.   The north wind cleaned up the wave faces on the breakers, and it was a magnificent view – big granite cliffs now awash in sunlight. 

Dan, off Eastern Head, Isle au Haut

Western Ear, Isle au Haut

Duck Harbor campground, Isle au Haut.   This is part of Acadia National Park. 

 

We snuck between Western Ear and Western Head, which has a small channel open up at high tide, and proceeded north to Duck Harbor.   At Duck Harbor, the National Park Service runs a small campground, and we had a reservation for a lean-to.   The original plan was for two others to come – Bill Wertz, and a woman named Helen, but they both had to drop out at the last minute.   As it was Dan and I set up our tents inside the lean-to, which was very comfortable.   We hiked up to Duck Harbor Mountain and got a great view of Vinylhaven to the west and Matinicus Island way out to the south.

The next day, Monday, was a hiking day.   Since Dan, his wife Pam, my son James, daughter Phoebe, and James’ girlfriend Hallie, are all planning on the Glorious Return Hike, we’re all thinking about getting in shape for this, so Dan and I set out on a hiking day on the island.    We hiked up the main north-south ridge of the island and then into the town of Isle au Haut proper and then back to the campground.   After tallying up the mileage, I figure we walked about 14 miles that day.   Not bad, and we really didn’t get too much in the way of blisters. 

Hiking path around Isle au Haut

Finally, Tuesday was the day to head back into Stonington, so we loaded up again and paddled along the western side of the island, slipping through the “Thoroughfare” that separates the town of Isle au Haut from Kimball island.  

We swung north toward Stongington, but stopped off at Crotch Island, which is a working granite quarry.   Crotch is really amazing, and gets its name from a small inlet on the eastern side that divides two small hillocks.   The place is littered with the detritus of the quarrying operation with lots of cast-off blocks of granite.   Impressive. 

After Crotch, we swung east and back to Old Quarry.   We got a nice hot shower at the campground and had an early dinner at a fancy inn in the town of Deer Isle. 

Wednesday was a drive home and the typical rude reentry into the world of spread-sheets, reports and the like.   Oh well.   Before this, I couldn’t imagine that I would develop a fondness for picking up trash, but there you have it – I’m ready to go back and clean out old lobster buoys in a heartbeat.