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Sea eagle kayak5/16/2023 While we ate breakfast, we all had ideas about Steve. Usually, a kayak hatch worked as animal-proof food storage this was the first raccoon we’d encountered that could get into one. This was a small breach of the Leave No Trace (LNT) approach that we tried hard to follow. From then on, the island’s true owner was a raccoon named Steve who had taken bananas as payment for our stay. Obviously the ghost story wasn’t convincing enough. Then I remembered the pair of bananas that were missing. In the morning, a Tupperware-like hatch cover lay open with some gear strewn on the ground beside it. I peeked outside and shone my flashlight upon a pair of shiny eyes: a raccoon, sitting in the woods, staring back at me. We awoke to the sound of claws scratching at the rubber hatches on a kayak. “Steve” arrived in the middle of the night, long after we’d gone to bed. It was the perfect setup for a ghost story. Over on Vinalhaven, a large inhabited island west of us, the trio of red lights atop the wind generators blinked, while 2 miles away in Stonington, occasional headlights atop Russ Hill flashed toward the ocean like a beacon. Named for an early resident of the archipelago here, Merchant Row comprises 65 small islands between Stonington and Isle au Haut. Not only that, but 30 of these islands have public access, and of those, 11 allow camping, with even more private islands open to MITA members.Īfter dinner, as the moon came up and lit the sea around us, Casey and the kids played a card game by candlelight, while the rest of us reclined in our camp chairs, enjoying a cup of tea and the sparkle of moonlight over a mild chop in Merchant Row. Partially sheltered by Isle au Haut, these islands-submerged granite mountaintops with glacier-smoothed ledges and spiky spruce rooting in thin layers of soil-are spaced closely enough that the crossings are short, and if the fog rolls in, as it is apt to do without warning, navigation between them is straightforward. I’d learned to paddle here, a more forgiving patch of ocean than most. When Nate and I started planning a trip that would work for kids, we couldn’t think of a better place than our own backyard, the Stonington-Isle au Haut archipelago. And there are no televisions blaring from neighboring RVs. It’s the best campsite deal around, with the price of a yearly membership, which includes an annually updated guidebook, comparable to the cost of a night at an oceanfront campground. America’s oldest water trail, now in its 26th year, it is composed of about one-third public lands stewarded by MITA staff and volunteers, while the other two-thirds are owned by private organizations and individuals who have entrusted MITA and its members to care for their property as if it were their own. Steves Island is one of more than 200 sites on the trail, which spans the length of the Maine coast, spilling over into New Brunswick, Canada. One thing that made this trip possible was the Maine Island Trail Association (MITA). Just across a narrow channel to the west, the tiny hub of Georges Head, silhouetted against an amber backdrop, arched skyward like the back of some great bristly-furred animal. Rebecca, my wife, sat down first and we followed, sitting in a circle, dropping our dry bags between us. We walked out onto a hump of pinkish granite ledge, a tiny peninsula with the ocean lapping all around and a few spindly spruce trees sprouting from the top. “Dinner time,” he said, just as their son Winslow came padding down a trail in his red fleece, snowman-print pajamas, followed by his older sister Lilja. She wasn’t the first paddler who’d fallen hard for this islet.Ĭasey’s husband, Nate, dug some dry bags out of his kayak. Casey had been on Steves for less than half an hour, but she somehow knew that this was it: her island. Our home for the night was on Steves Island, about 2 miles off of Stonington, Maine, amid an archipelago of some 60 or more islands. She had the sort of involuntary smile one gets when falling in love. With her kids out exploring the island, Casey finally had a moment to sit on a rock and take in her surroundings. The kayaks rested above the beach, beyond the reach of the tide, and we’d pitched our tents-each of our two families in a campsite of its own-beneath the canopy of spruce boughs. We had the island to ourselves: 2 acres of spruce forest surrounded by a wonderland of curving, polished granite ledge that dropped into the sea. Michael DaughertyThe author and his friends paddled from Stonington, Maine, to Steves Island for a two-day stay.
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