Isle Au Haut, Maine

Oh beautiful Isle au Haut! This island’s remote, at least from the usual passage through Maine. Remote, not in the sense of being way down east, like Roque, but rather, more out in the Atlantic and away from the mainland population. It has a full-year population of about 60. They run a small ferry service. Getting cars out there is expensive, so they tend to live on: we came across this 1929 Ford dropping of some mail at the Isle Au Haut post office. It’s owner (cheerfully , and I suspect, of similar vintage) laughed: she told me it’s been on the island since the 40’s, giggled, and catapulted into a crisp, but very creaky, three-point turn before rattling off down the road (at which point I managed to snap this photo).

Max and I wandered around. We came across the town store, stocked with the most amazing produce (we’d had a heads-up on this from our mate Hunt, a cool sailor from Portland with a beautiful yawl whom we met in Northeast Harbor, and with whom we had a few Britney’s: he was right; clearly the owner had no profit motive, as the food was sophisticated and spendy and perhaps a bit too fancy for the lobstering locals). We bought some simple, but hermetically sealed, organic, grain fed, covered in seals of approval and all that, meat to make a Mexican feast. Only later did we read ‘use or freeze by 14 November 2006’; still, tasted fine). Outside we met two older ladies who greeted us with a croon across the carpark ‘Hello Boys!’.

There’s a little poem in our cruising guide that helps with the island’s name pronunciation. I like it:

“Says the summer man, when the fog hangs low, ‘There’s a bridal wreath on Isle au Haut’”.

(“But the fisherman says as he loads his boat, ‘it’s thick-a-fog on Isle au Haut’”).