When I cross over the causeway onto Mount Desert Island at 7 a.m., the water on both sides of the road is piled up with snow-covered ice floes. My car thermometer says it’s 3 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I brace myself for a very cold boat ride, but when I get to the dock in Northeast Harbor the temperature is already up to 8 degrees and there is little wind. The walk across the marina’s icy parking lot to the M/V Sunbeam is treacherous, but the dock and the boat’s aft deck have been cleared of ice.
Douglas Cornman, Maine Seacoast Mission’s director of island services, pops out of the salon to welcome me aboard for the 8-mile ride to Frenchboro, one of the smallest Maine islands that still has a year-round population.
The Maine Seacoast Mission was founded in 1905 by Alexander MacDonald and his brother Angus. In the late 1800s, while in college, Alexander had served as a minister and one-room schoolhouse teacher on Frenchboro, where he realized the islanders had medical and educational needs that weren’t being met. By the early 1900s, the two brothers were Congregational ministers with parishes in Bar Harbor and Seal Harbor. They asked their wealthy summer parishioners to finance a mission to aid the needy on the islands. At the time, there were about 300 inhabited islands along Maine’s coast, some with just a lighthouse keeper’s family with few resources.
The Mission’s first vessel was a sloop named Hope that sailed from Kittery Point at the New Hampshire border to Quoddy Head on the Canadian border, covering 1,535 miles and visiting 64 settlements in its first year. In 1906, a more seaworthy sloop called Morning Star was donated. In 1912, a powerboat named Sunbeam was put into service. The powerboat allowed the Mission to supply services in winter, and since then, five boats, all named Sunbeam, have served Maine’s shrinking island communities.
Today’s Sunbeam serves the 15 remaining year-round island communities with an emphasis on the seven most remote islands. Sunbeam V was built out of steel in 1995 at Washburn & Doughty in East Boothbay, Maine. With three deck levels, the 74-footer is tall for her length. With her dark green hull and white cross on her bow and black funnel, she looms over the lobsterboats in the marina.
Cornman shows me around the salon, which looks big enough to seat 40 or more people. There are three large tables with outboard settees, lots of stools and a couch to port. Cornman says the salon allows island residents to make themselves at home, like a floating community center. “They sit down, they tell us what’s going on, we listen and try to connect them to a service,” he says.
Those services range from social and medical to educational, mental and spiritual needs, and the mission is not just about the boat. In addition to the Northeast Harbor headquarters, which is Sunbeam’s homeport, the Mission also has a campus farther Downeast in Cherryfield. That facility addresses food insecurity, makes housing improvements, gives out scholarships and runs the largest after-school program in the state of Maine. Most of the Mission’s funding comes from private donations.
Food plays a big role in the group’s mission. That’s clear aboard Sunbeam, where there’s a large, U-shaped galley. Opposite is a coffee station and refrigerator stocked with drinks. Cornman introduces me to Siobhan Harrity, the boat’s steward, who tells me to help myself to a cup of hot coffee and homemade cookies, which, I learn, the boat is famous for.
Sunbeam’s history of providing good meals to the islanders is legendary. When the boat visits the islands, Harrity will whip up lunches to give residents a reason to come aboard. On this day, Harrity will serve a homemade pasta e fagiole and fresh focaccia, which she will bake in the boat’s oven as we motor to the island.
“We work with anyone on an island, including summer residents,” Cornman says, “but the most profound work happens in winter, when the goal is to get the islanders out of their houses and allow them to be with their neighbors.”
Forward of the galley is the health office, where telehealth conferences are conducted with doctors on the mainland. Islanders can also get an in-person physical from the crew’s nurse practitioner, Simone Babineaux. She checks vitals, takes medical specimens, provides medical supplies and gives vaccinations, a job that kept the crew busy during the pandemic. Sometimes the crew also provides iPads to islanders, so they can make telehealth calls to the mainland from their homes.
Across from the health office, a cabinet holds a wooden pirate ship, a castle and other toys and games. “The island kids know where we keep the pirate ship, and they will grab it when they come aboard,” Cornman says.
In the bow is the pantry, which has food, pots, pans, small appliances and heaters, all of which are available to islanders free of charge. “We keep it stocked so we can do an impromptu birthday party or deal with a crisis. We are prepared for almost any emergency you can imagine,” Cornman says.
In the pilothouse I meet Sunbeam’s captain, Mike Johnson, and Storey King, the ship’s engineer. Johnson oversaw Sunbeam’s 2020 refit at Front Street Shipyard in Belfast. “We gutted her,” he says. “It would have been $5 million for a new boat or $2 million for a refit.” To deal with interior rust, they sandblasted it, which also gave them an opportunity to rethink the boat’s layout. Among other tweaks, they eliminated the shower on the galley level to make room for more refrigeration and brought the pantry up to galley level so the steward wouldn’t have to navigate the stairs anymore. They also updated the boat’s systems. “In essence, she’s a new boat,” he says.
Johnson fires up the boat’s 454-hp C18 Caterpillar diesel. The view from the bridge is impressive. “You’ve got 18 feet height of eye from up here,” he says. The pilothouse is huge and has almost 360 degrees of visibility. The only thing that blocks Johnson’s view from the helm is the funnel aft, but a stern camera and large console monitor eliminates that blind spot.
Cornman and I step out of the pilothouse onto the upper deck, where two liferafts and an inflatable dinghy are stowed. He warns me to look out for ice and points out the six red metal eyes welded onto the deck. They’re there to secure a casket. Sunbeam has transported human remains to the mainland for burial and returned deceased islanders back to the islands for their final voyages. The deck has also been the scene of weddings (Cornman is a certified notary), hosted band performances, and carried hundreds of pounds of garbage back to the mainland after island beach cleanups.
On the lower deck are five crew cabins, and the one full head is shared by all. In the bow, a multipurpose room stores spare engine parts and extra linens, and serves as the laundry room. A queen bunk is forward. “We call it the honeymoon suite,” Cornman says with a hint of a smile. “It’s the most unromantic room imaginable.”
Cornman’s cabin is farthest aft, just ahead of the engine room. It’s cozy and flooded with light from a good-sized porthole. He tells me how during the refit they removed the bunkbeds to make the cabins more comfortable. The refit also allowed them to add more soundproofing to reduce the noise from the Caterpillar, which was significant.
Cornman and I head back to the bridge as Johnson takes Sunbeam off the dock and hand steers her out of Northeast Harbor. There is high cirrus, but the sun is out, there are 1-foot seas and the wind is moderate. Johnson sets the autopilot for Frenchboro, which appears straight ahead to the southwest. We pass by Gott’s Island, a former year-round island that is now a summer colony, and Black and Placentia islands, which were inhabited at one time, but are now deserted. The islands are covered in snow, but look cheerful. “Today is a nice day,” Johnson says. “Getting into Frenchboro won’t be bad.”
Sunbeam has the flexibility to reschedule its trips around the weather. Today’s trip was changed due to gale warnings in the Western Atlantic that occurred earlier in the week. “If the weather is bad, we just reschedule,” says Johnson.
I am pleasantly surprised at the lovely conditions we have for a winter boat ride and ask Johnson about the worst conditions he’s encountered. “We were coming back from North Haven,” he says. “It was just stormy. We were 10 minutes from the Bass Harbor Bar [a reef just south of the Bass Harbor Head Light Station that must be crossed to get to Northeast Harbor from the west]. The wind was from the Southeast. Big seas. It had been blowing for days. And it was coming over the bow. Green water came over the pilothouse. It took the tender behind us right off its cradle. It was low tide. There was barely enough water to get over the bar. It’s just 14 feet of water, but there were 5-foot troughs, and the boat has a 7-foot draft. It lasted only about 10 minutes and I was grateful that it was a short-lived experience. Had we had kids aboard…”
“We would have needed a mop and a bucket,” deadpans King.
Snow can be an issue too. “The visibility gets bad,” Johnson says, “and the radar doesn’t like wet coastal snow, which has big flakes.” But the boat can handle the heavy weather. “On crossings, the boat is fine,” he says. “But she is short and high, and she catches a lot of wind. The limitation of the boat is in the harbors. You can destroy a dock with a lot of wind.”
“When it’s blowing 35 going to Matinicus, it’s not so fun,” King says. The engineer had operated his own tour boats before joining Sunbeam’s crew 17 years ago. “I’m an island boy,” he says. “I grew up at The Moorings next to the Hinckley yard in Southwest Harbor.” I ask him if he’s been around boats his entire life. “Not yet,” he quips with typical Maine wit.
As we cross over to Frenchboro, King steps outside the pilothouse to clear the forward deck of snow and ice. He shovels the snow over the side, but to get rid of the ice he fires up the hot water hose. He melts the ice just enough so he can smash it into shards. He spends a good half hour clearing the deck from the pilothouse to the port bow, where Sunbeam will sidle up to the ferry dock. We pass large buoys covered in ice. “Sometimes they submerge almost completely with a dome on top,” Johnson says.
We enter Frenchboro’s harbor, a long, narrow cove with modest homes perched on the steep hillsides. Once tied up, it doesn’t take long for someone to walk down to the boat. Jan Piper, the island’s former schoolteacher who also served time as the town clerk, uses the dock’s wooden ladder to climb down to the boat. Inside, Piper is greeted like an old friend. Harrity has the soup and the focaccia ready. Cornman offers Piper some new books for the island’s library. Her husband has been off island, and she jokes that she hasn’t missed him, but she’s clearly eager to have some human interaction. “It’s been miserable,” she says to Cornman about the weather. “I haven’t been out [of my house] for three days.”
Piper moved to the island in 2014 to teach three girls in the schoolhouse. Back then, the year-round population was around 40, a sharp drop from the 200 people who lived there in 1914 and the 70 full-timers in 2008. Now it’s down to about 10 people, with maybe only six on island during our visit. “When I was a teacher, I would bring the kids to Sunbeam for socialization with the crew and their neighbors,” Piper says. Now there are no kids and school operations are suspended.
With the exception of Isle au Haut, where the population grew from 65 to 88 during the pandemic, all the island populations are shrinking. Longtime island residents are dying and with few young people moving offshore, eldercare is an important component of the Mission’s raison d’etre.
Cornman asks if there is a car he can borrow to deliver a hot meal and supplies to a widow who won’t be able to make it down to the boat. Piper offers her old Jeep Wrangler. It’s a stick-shift, so I offer to drive. Babineaux hops in next to me while Cornman wedges himself into the back. The few roads have been plowed by one of the residents, but the island is slick with ice. When I back the Jeep out of Piper’s driveway, even though I’m jamming on the brake, we slide down into the road. We make it up a steep icy hill to the widow’s home, where Babineaux gets out for a visit. Cornman shows me around the island. There is just one mile of paved road. It runs around the harbor from the ferry pier, which passes the town office and post office, the historical society, museum and library, the elementary school, and the church. There is no store on the island. All supplies come from the mainland.
We get out of the Jeep at the Outer Long Island Congregation Church. It was the Mission’s founder, Alexander MacDonald, who served as that church’s pastor in the late 1800s while also serving as the island’s teacher. Frenchboro’s real name is Outer Long Island. The village on the island was named Frenchboro in the 1890s, after a Tremont lawyer who helped establish the island’s post office. Because Maine had so many Long Islands, the village’s name eventually became synonymous with the island.
When MacDonald lived on Frenchboro, the Baptist Church was pulling ministers back from the islands and he saw that spiritual guidance was not the only thing the islanders needed. He and his brother brought doctors and nurses, delivered supplies—including Christmas presents—and checked in on the lighthouse keepers and their families.
Cornman emphasizes that islanders are not a bunch of helpless souls and that the Mission is not there to tell them what to do. He explains that the Mission has spent the past 100-plus years acting as a trusted bridge between mainland resources and the islands. As times change, “we simply help the islands evolve,” he says.
Cornman came to the Mission after decades as a mental health practitioner in Philadelphia. When the Mission’s previous chaplain was stepping down, he was asked to do a one-year study to find the replacement. The chaplain said that the Mission could hire another ecumenical minister but that it would have to be someone who could also deal with mental health issues. Or, the chaplain said, the Mission could hire a mental health expert who was not an ordained minister but was comfortable with religion and spirituality.
“We did focus groups and surveys,” Cornman says. In the end, the islanders made it clear what they wanted. “The islanders told us that ‘having a belief outside ourselves was important,’ but they didn’t want the Bible shoved down their throats.” Cornman was hired and has been the director of island services for the past 14 years.
“[Today] the Mission is more about a spiritual side, but we’re not throwing religion out,” Cornman says. “Most churches close for the winter. The Mission is interfaith. I became a notary so I can officiate at church and do services aboard Sunbeam. I let people know I’m not ordained. I’m about love, kindness and compassion.” A big part of the Mission’s mission, Cornman says, is addressing isolation. “We connect the dots. We can bring them all together because we have this big boat.”
We hop back in the Jeep, pick up Babineaux and make our way back to the boat. Three more islanders—Tim Wiggins, his partner Sarah Young, and Myron Lenfestey—show up on the boat. Wiggins is the islander who plows the roads. He asks us how we made out going up Dump Hill Road, which was covered in a sheet of ice. “You know why they call it Dump Hill Road,” he quips, “because if you slip on the ice and fall down, you’ll slide right into the dump.”
Wiggins moved to the island from Florida 31 years ago when he was still married to John Lunt’s granddaughter, who hailed from Frenchboro and wanted to return to the island.
The Lunts loom large in island lore. They were the first to settle the island in 1822, which is why it was originally known as Lunt’s Long Island to distinguish it from another Long Island in Blue Hill Bay. For 200 years, the Lunts have been the ruling family on Frenchboro.
Wiggins loves living on the island, but he admits it’s not easy. “You can’t be squeamish,” he says. “I’m glad I have my health. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
For the next couple of hours, the islanders and Sunbeam’s crew chat aboard the boat. Much of the talk centers on the challenges of living on a sparsely populated island that continues to lose its population. Frenchboro is now the smallest town in Maine by population. The lack of kids is a major topic of concern, and not just because it puts the school’s future in doubt. It could also impact ferry service, which is already scarce. Between Thanksgiving and early April, the state ferry only comes to Frenchboro a handful of times per month, and there is fear that it may be discontinued altogether. Piper has been told that the ferry will continue to run even if the school is permanently closed. “It really stinks without kids here,” Wiggins says. “You listen for them, and you miss them.”
Lenfestey is quiet and listens to the conversation. Later, Babineaux and Harrity will say how surprised they were that they had never met him before because the crew tends to know every islander on every island by name. When I ask Lenfestey what he does on the island, he tells me he lobsters for a living, but that he’s spending the winter replacing the old plywood cabin on his boat. I ask which boat is his. “It’s the white one,” he says, and points to a pretty Beal Island-style hull in the mooring field. It’s a Stanley Beal, built in 1986 out of fiberglass, which he got when he turned 19. “It was one of the first out of the mold,” he tells me, “so it still looks like a wooden hull.” He grew up lobstering, banding lobsters at age 6, tending traps at 12 and fishing from his own little red skiff when he turned 13.
Lunch having been consumed, Cornman asks if anyone would like a health check. Piper declines because she’s recently been to a doctor on the mainland and says she needs to go. She’s been aboard for about four hours, but she seems reluctant to say goodbye and there are lots of long, warm hugs with the crew before she leaves the boat.
Lenfestey, Young and Wiggins take turns in the health office to have their vitals checked. All look like they are in good health, and that turns out to be the case, with Wiggins coming out of the office jokingly bragging about his excellent numbers. It’s been a while since he got a health check. He’s only been to a doctor once in the past 18 years when he had to go to the mainland for antibiotics after he got a fishhook in his hand.
Cornman wants to check on one more islander, so Wiggins offers us a ride in the bed of his pick-up truck. We drop Lenfestey off at his house and supply his neighbor with some warm soup and focaccia. She invites us in and after a short chat Babineaux, Cornman and I gingerly walk the icy island road back to the harbor.
It’s time to go. The tide has changed, so we no longer need the wooden ladder to get onto the bow. We step straight from the dock onto the upper deck and into the pilothouse. King unties the boat, and Johnson points Sunbeam back toward Mount Desert Island’s snow-covered mountains. Cornman, Babineaux and Harrity finally get to relax. Sunbeam heads home, slowly rolling back and forth in a light beam sea.
May 2025
