Going Down East

Our ship

If you fly to Boston from the UK, your route arcs south of Iceland and Greenland and makes a kind of virtual landfall just north of the St Lawrence in Labrador. The arc continues west of Newfoundland, and tracks between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, then you make a course correction near Bangor Maine as you begin your descent. The impression is that you are tracking south down the coast of North America but you are not; you are actually heading west into Massachusetts.

Mainers heading towards the coastal Canadian border talk about going "Down East". If you head north you enter Quebec, but if you follow the coast, right at the end of Maine lies the town of Eastport. This is as far east as you can go in the USA and as far north as you can go outside of Alaska. And guess what? It's south of London by quite a bit (about the same latitude as Bordeaux), yet it reminds me of Port Stanley in the Falklands, Stornoway on Lewis or Tobermory on the Isle of Mull.

"It's not quite the end of the world, but you can see it from here". they say.

The Old Sow.

The sub-Arctic feel of the place is due to immense glaciation that ground down the landscape in the past and the dominance of the cold Labrador Current today, which brings cold, clear Arctic water south and creates shifting fog banks almost every day. It all contributes to that feeling of mystery and isolation you get when staring out to sea from the edge of a continent.

No-one gets to Eastport by accident because it's so out of the way. You have to want to go there for some reason, and ours was to see whales.

Lee, our guide.

My sister-in-las Susy Kist is the communications officer for ORPC; a company that is generating electricity from the tidal surge where the Gulf of Maine meets the Bay of Fundy. The tidal range is enormous here like the Bristol Channel at home.  The power of the currents is easy to see in the waves, whirlpools and eddies that constitute the "Old Sow" that boils and gurgles in the straits off Deer Island. You can actually see it on Google Earth.

The up-wellings stir up food for marine life such as mackerel that you can catch four at a time off the town breakwater and the channels concentrate the krill where the whales and seabirds can get it. This year the water off Quoddy Head is the warmest on record. It's the same all down the coast, which explains the abundance of tuna, bluefish and mackerel and the absence of cold-water species, including whales.

Our crew.

Usually, by late August you could take a whale-watching trip from anywhere down the Maine Coast, or even from Boston and expect to see several types of whale, including humpbacks. At the beginning of September the first young humpback had been seen in Canadian waters off New Brunswick so we reckoned  that we had a chance. Actually we saw a lot of porpoises and common seals, thousands of birds and two minkie whales so the trip was really worth the effort. We had fabulous weather and had a day on a real schooner with Butch for our skipper and an excellent guide called Lee.

The boat is called the Ada C Lore from Eastport Windjammers. Most of the other boats we saw were out of St. Andrews in New Brunswick.

Dan the cabin boy.

After an early sighting of porpoises we started to pick up sea-birds, almost as soon as we pulled away from the breakwater. You can actually watch whales from the shore here because the water is so deep. Mostly, in the Gulf of Maine you have to go out beyond St Georges Bank which can be well over an hour out from the coast.

From the balcony at Motel East, we had already seen eiders, black guillemots, a loon, cormorants, ospreys and fish crows. My first fresh sighting was a Manx shearwater, then we reached the Old Sow where flocks of small Bonaparte's gulls were were feeding. They are very like Little gulls but with pink legs. Across near the Canadian lighthouse at East Quoddy, off Campobello Island, there was a lot of activity and mixed flocks included gannets, great and sooty shearwaters, Arctic skuas (Parasitic jaegers) and a little flock of Red-necked phalaropes.

East Quoddy Head Lighthouse

The whale we saw most was called Stump because she had lost the top of her fin. She was joined  by a young minkie towards the end of our trip. I'm sure that by now, in mid September, they will have been joined by the bigger whales. All the same, seeing these smaller whales at close quarters was a great privilege and I hope all the other passengers thought the same.

But Eastport isn't just about tourists and whales; it's an interesting place in its own right. The largest buildings are mostly derelict canneries, left over from the boom days when the main crop was sardines. Actually the American canning industry started here with salmon. moved on to lobsters and then to sardines., but they soon ran out of lobsters. Still, there are some rather splendid brick buildings along the shore, many of which are now shops, and the brick library is a bit of a classic. Otherwise, most houses are white, wooden buildings in the colonial style. Its not a pretty place, but it is attractive.

Great shearwater.

The town is brought alive by the extraordinary people who live there. We came across old-timers of Scottish extraction, and a few people who looked like they might have Native American genes. This is the homeland of the Passamaquoddy and they have a reservation just that you pass through on the way into town. Sadly, we didn't get to know much about them on this trip, which was too short. All the same we met enough people to say that this small town has more than its fair share of characters! Almost everyone we met was really outgoing and friendly.

Thar' she blows!

You see a surprising number of white tailed deer around the houses at dusk. They all seem to be does, and a lot of them have fawns with them. Locals told me that there are two reasons for this; coyotes and food. The coyotes hunt in packs and take fawns, but they won't come near the houses that have dogs. On the other hand, people have started feeding the deer because they simply like to have them around.

We visited one house with a bald eagle's nest in the back garden. The householders were buzzed by the adult eagles when they used their hot-tub on the deck but by the time we got there, the eagles were out hunting. All the same, we saw at least a dozen species of small birds flitting through the pine trees there. I guess they have so much wildlife because the house is on a narrow isthmus, but some of them seemed to be attracted to the eagles' nest, or at least to the buzzing swarms of flies that gathered there.

The Giant Fisherman

Finally, I can't leave Eastport without mentioning the Giant Fisherman who overlooks the harbour. He's not a thing that could have got there by accident, but he's not exactly art either. Actually, he's a bit tacky, but he illustrates the whimsy of the place and no one can resist photographing him.  How did he get here then?

The answer is on the plaque at his feet. He was made in 2001 for a TV mini-series that was shot on location in Eastport called "Murder in Town X". The town adopted him in 2005 and dedicated him to one of the firemen who died at the Twin Towers in NY on 9/11. I like him; what do you think?

Fort more photos go to Photobucket.