I’m sorry, Maine. I know
your lobster industry is huge – Capt John Nicolai spend three hours this
morning explaining it to me in the greatest detail as I bounced up and down in
his boat Lulu – but the end product is a disappointment. It has no flavour!
Maybe it’s ok done Thermidor, or with more gutsy sauces than just melted
butter, but simply boiled and served? No way, no how is it as tasty as a
Kaikoura crayfish, bought from a caravan beside the sea, and eaten au naturel.
Otherwise, though, I have
no complaints about Bar Harbor. We anchored in the bay and went ashore in a
tender, scuttling beneath the immense and ugly bulk of the Regal Princess,
whose 4,000 passengers were already cluttering the streets of this eminently touristy
but still very pretty little town. I went straight out with Capt John, to see a
lighthouse on Egg Rock and then to investigate lobster-fishing.
Several of his jokes were
to do with lifeboats and the Costa Concordia, so when he kept referring, in asides
to his crew-mate, to “that boat that’s sinking” I naturally assumed it was more
frivolity. After the disappointment of the lobster lunch, though, I hopped
aboard the (free!) Island Explorer bus out to Thunder Hole, where I got off for
a bit of a walk and discovered, right there on the rocks, a super-fresh shipwreck.
The Tiger Shark, a charter
fishing boat of dubious reputation according to the bus driver (“I’m not
surprised at all that it was taking on water”) got into trouble, off-loaded its
passengers and then was washed onto the rocks, comprehensively holed in the
bow. Already taped off by the police, it’s clearly going to be a popular topic
of conversation amongst the local folks for some time.
For me though it was an
unnecessary dramatic interjection into a coastline that is already striking: a
backdrop of rocky hills covered in trees well into their autumn foliage, the
sea breaking on beaches of huge round pebbles, and in the sky above skeins of
geese flying, presumably, south. Lovely!
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