Tides
Reading a Tide Rip on Penobscot Bay
Standing waves, eddy lines, and the difference between a fair tide and a foul one. A morning aboard a 32-foot sloop out of Camden.
Tag
maine
Lighthouses
The Fresnel Conservator of Portland Head
In a small room above the gift shop at Portland Head Light, Esme Carriere unpacks a wooden crate from Birmingham, England, containing fourteen replacement prismatic elements.
Tides
Tidepooling at Acadia in Shoulder Season
A May morning at Ship Harbor, with a thermos and a tide table. The pools are cold, the crowds are gone, and the periwinkles do not care either way.
Fisheries
The Maine Herring Co-operative's Year: Quotas, Bait, and the Question of What Comes Next
The Maine herring fleet is smaller than it has been in a century. The co-op that organises most of it has spent the past four years writing letters to the New England Fishery Management Council, and the past two years preparing for a fishery that may not exist in 2030.
Charts
The Last Commercial Chart Cartographer in Maine
In a second-floor office above a hardware store in Camden, Hollis Burnham has been drawing inshore charts by hand and by Illustrator since 1991. He is, he believes, the last person in the state still doing it as a trade.
Charts
NOAA Paper Charts and C-MAP, Compared in the Same Cockpit
A four-month inshore test off Boothbay, with a paper folio on the chart table and a Raymarine plotter at the helm, found neither obsolete and neither sufficient on its own.
Coastal Towns
Lubec, Maine: The Year After the Last Sardine Plant Closed
Eighteen months after the closing of the Stinson cannery in Prospect Harbor and three decades after Lubec lost its own, the easternmost town in the United States is still learning what comes after fish.
Fisheries
Stonington in November: A Week with the Lobstermen of Deer Isle
The boats leave the harbour before five, in a cold that the gauges call thirty-one. The talk on the radio is short. The traps are coming up heavy with kelp and not much else.