For millenia, members of the East Algonquin tribes paddled their canoes out to Monhegan. They used it as an offshore base to hunt for swordfish and named it Monchiggon, which means “out-to-sea island.”
Monhegan is definitively out to sea. It sits in the Atlantic Ocean 10 miles from Maine’s Pemaquid Peninsula. But even though I’ve lived across from the island for five years, I’d never taken my boat there. I had my reasons. My RIB was too small; the harbor was too exposed; the holding ground was poor; there were too few moorings; and there was no dinghy dock. So, I always took the ferry.
I love Monhegan. It’s beautiful and quiet. There is no airport, the roads aren’t paved, there are only a handful of cars, and there are very few people. For decades, the year-round human population has hovered between 60 and 70, although in the summer ferries from Boothbay, New Harbor and Port Clyde unload a couple of hundred tourists a day. Fortunately, the island is big enough to absorb them.
But the ferries have drawbacks. In the summer, you need to make an advance reservation, which means you may have bad weather on the scheduled day. The ferries also don’t take you to the towering headlands on the Atlantic side. And when you see wildlife, the ferry won’t stop.
Taking my own boat would allow me to go when the weather was good and see the cliffs from the water, and get me closer to the island’s whales, seals and porpoises.
More than anything, though, it bugged me that I had never gone to Monhegan on my own boat. Going by ferry always felt like a massive “boating failure.” So, when a summer day with little wind and small seas presented itself, I launched my 16-foot RIB and set out for the island.
Fifteen minutes into the crossing I spotted three harbor porpoises, when a disturbance caught my eye. An enormous whale slowly rose out of the water. It took it’s time to slip back below the surface, came up twice more, and then disappeared for good.
Twenty minutes later, I was at Duck Rocks, just off Monhegan, where a couple of dozen seals were swimming around. I brought the RIB as close to the rocks as I dared and waited for the hide-and-seek game to begin. At first, they spy-hopped from a distance, but then they snuck up behind me and ducked below the water when I spotted them. After 30 minutes of playing with my pinniped pals, I headed for the harbor.
Monhegan’s harbor sits between Monhegan Island and the much smaller Manana Island. There are two entrances. The southwest entrance is broad and easy to enter. But it faces the ocean, which can make it a tough place to overnight. The northern entrance is very narrow, but it was much closer to me. I waited for one of the ferries to exit, then entered through Herring Gut.
At the harbor’s only dock, the Capt. Ray O’Neal from Rockland was pumping heating oil into a truck while people were jumping off the pier. I was asked if I’d seen any gannets. Monhegan is a popular stop for migrating birds. More than 336 bird species have been spotted there since Samuel de Champlain mapped the island in 1604. I hadn’t seen any gannets but mentioned the whale and how long it took to take one breath. “You saw a fin whale,” someone told me. “They spend a long time at the surface.”
I was told that “Shermie,” the harbormaster, was probably out tuna fishing, and that Fish Beach would be my best bet to get ashore. But my timing stunk. I had arrived at high tide, there was very little beach, and the water was crowded with little kids. The kids made the landing too risky and I also didn’t want to be left high and dry for 11 hours, so I opted for a cruise around the island.
Monhegan is much smaller than it looks. It’s only about 1.7-miles long, 0.7-miles wide and less than a square mile in area. I slipped out of the southwestern end of the harbor and turned to port for a counterclockwise tour.
On the southeast side, I encountered half a dozen anchored boats fishing for tuna. The captain of the Carmyn and Calleigh out of Cushing told me that the giant bluefin had been “jumpin’ out of the water in the morning, but just wouldn’t bite.”
On the eastside, I slowly followed the contours of Burnthead, Whitehead and Black Head, the island’s tallest headlands. A hundred and sixty feet above me, hikers took in the views. A couple of fishermen had scrambled down the steep rocks. One of them stood precariously close to the water’s edge.
In the shallower areas, gray seals popped their horseheads out of the water. On the guano-covered cliffs, Double-crested cormorants chattered nervously as they nurtured their offspring. Coming around the northern end, a large pod of seals approached to within 15 feet.
On the northwestern end of the island, I spotted the first house I’d seen since leaving the harbor on the southwestern side. In the 1950s, the island was protected from overdevelopment by Theodore Edison, Thomas Edison’s son, and a decades-long summer visitor. When he learned of a plan to sell buildable lots, he quietly purchased 300 acres and formed a land trust. Today, called Monhegan Associates, it owns about two-thirds of the island and maintains 12 miles of public trails.
After two hours, I returned to Fish Beach to find it loaded with summer visitors. Not wanting to shoehorn my way in, I returned to the mainland.
Three days later, with a more favorable tide, I launched before sunrise and motored back to Monhegan. Thirty minutes later I entered the harbor from the southwest to find the island as quiet as a mouse. I exited the harbor on the northside and made another cruise around the island. When I returned an hour later, I spotted a couple walking down Manana Island’s hillside. They launched their small wooden skiff and rowed across to Monhegan’s Swim Beach. When I approached them, they confirmed that Fish Beach would be a better place for my RIB.
There were no little kids in the water and there was plenty of exposed beach. On a falling tide, I threw a stern anchor in the water, nudged the boat onto the beach and tossed a bow anchor among the rocks.
A lone plein air artist was painting a harbor scene on the beach. Artists first came to Monhegan in the mid-1800s and painters like Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, James Fitzgerald and all three Wyeths spent time on the island. Like the birds, artists return to the island year after year.
I put on my hiking shoes and for the next five hours roamed the island. In the village, a father watched his young son kick a stone down the road, and while hiking up to the lighthouse and the museums, I ran into the woman who’d been rowing across the harbor with her husband. With her grandchild on her arm, she told me how she and her husband had built the house on Manana Island 35 years ago, lived there in the summer and for years had lived on Monhegan in winter. Later, I learned that she was Daphne Pulsifer, an artist and sculptor who owned the Edison Studio that had once belonged to Theodore Edison and his wife, Ann.
At the top of the hill, I planted myself on a bench and took in the view of the village, the harbor and Manana Island. I could clearly see Pulsifer’s house and the tall Coast Guard walkway that led up the island’s steep slope. The long-abandoned Coast Guard station on the far side of the island was obscured from view.
Neither the Monhegan Museum, which depicts the island’s rich history, nor the Monhegan Art Museum would open for another three hours, so I headed for the woods. Walking by the large bronze fog bell made famous by the Jamie Wyeth painting, Bronze Age, I again ran into Pulsifer and her grandchild.
At the rear of the museum grounds, a trail took me to Whitehead, one of the headlands on the Atlantic side of the island. The view was spectacular, but my enjoyment was short-lived. With no wind, hundreds of black flies rose out of nowhere to dine on me. In an effort to escape them I dashed back through the woods to the village, a handful of flies still in tow.
The Lupine Gallery hadn’t opened yet, so I walked to the ferry dock where I popped into the Barnacle cafe for a cup of coffee and a fresh slice of blueberry cake. Sitting outside, I struck up a conversation with a Boston couple who’d spent the night on one of the moorings aboard their catamaran. They’d arrived from Matinicus, where, in the aftermath of the January storms, they’d found the harbor in shambles. Even though some of Monhegan’s waterfront buildings were also missing rows of cedar shakes, they found its harbor far more charming.
From the dock, I could see my boat high and dry on the beach, but I suspected that the Danforth wouldn’t hold well in the pebble beach and made a mental note to swap it with the plow anchor I’d thrown among the rocks.
At 10 a.m., the Hardy Boat Cruises ferry arrived from New Harbor. Four hotel pick-up trucks backed onto the pier to transport luggage for their customers. When the ferry’s 100-plus passengers disembarked, it felt like a horde had been released, not unlike the flies on the other side of the island.
Above the ferry dock, I ducked into the Island Inn to check out the featured artwork and took in the view from the veranda high above the harbor. Guests were whiling away the time in rocking chairs. I would have joined them, but for the signs that said the chairs were for hotel guests only.
Back at Fish Beach I made another attempt to find Shermie. I stuck my nose in the Fish House’s kitchen below the harbor master’s office where the friendly owner let me check out the interior of the 1824 building with its original rough-hewn beams. When I spied a bowl of fresh shrimp, I knew where I would be eating lunch.
My suspicions about the Danforth anchor turned out to be correct. A light pull on the rode brought the anchor back to the boat without digging in. I threw it among the rocks to hold the bow and switched the plow to the stern position. Pulling hard on its rode, it dug in within a few feet.
At Lobster Cove, I checked out the rusting hulk of the D.T. Sheridan. The tugboat wrecked on Monhegan’s rocky southern coast in 1948 and has been an attraction ever since.
Inside the Monhegan Community Church, a lone woman was playing her flute. The sound was appropriately divine.
By now, the tide had turned, and the water was making its way back up the beach. At the Lupine Gallery, I chatted with owners Bill Boynton and his wife, Jackie Boegel. When I asked how long they’d been running the gallery, Boynton told me it had been 40 years. “Maybe it’s time for a retirement sale,” he said, but his wife thought differently. “I was thinking we should have a celebration,” she said. Seeing I might have sparked a potential marital rift, I made myself scarce. As I headed back through the village, I ran into Daphne Pulsifer for the fifth time. Monhegan is indeed a very small island.
By 11:30 a.m. the Monhegan Brewery had opened, but I found myself too hot and impatient to stand in line. Behind The Novelty, a local pizza joint, I used one of the island’s few public bathrooms to change into my bathing suit. I paid the 50-cent donation and returned to the beach.
After a quick dip, I found Shermie in his upstairs office. He was fine with where I’d put my boat and told me there was no charge for beaching it. I asked why there was no dinghy dock. “There’s no room,” he said. “Where would we put it? The harbor is too small.” When I asked if the three guest moorings required reservations or if they were first come, first serve, he shook his head. “I can’t do reservations,” he said. “I’d spend my entire day chasing people off,” and then explained that visiting boaters should just pick up an empty guest mooring and call him about payment options. When I asked about the holding ground, he again shook his head. “It’s not safe,” Shermie said. “You can’t anchor.”
From Shermie’s second-floor deck I could see the water crawling up to my boat, but I figured there was still time for shrimp tacos. I thanked the harbor master, went downstairs to the Fish House and ordered my lunch.
The tacos were delicious. As I finished them, the boat began to lift off the beach. I pulled the bow anchor from the rocks, retrieved the stern anchor from the water and motored back to the mainland.
The next morning, I motored back to Monhegan with my wife. The spell was broken.
This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue.
