Seaduced's Web Diary - Dix Island, Maine

Dix Island, Maine

Seaduced

John & Jane Craven

Sat 7 Jul 2012 20:15

Whilst at Thomaston, we picked up a few tips for the next stage of our journey. We have about 2 weeks until we need to return to Portland for our second trip to New York, where we are meeting up with the Monteiro family for a weekend in the city, and decided that somewhere quiet would be perfect. All of our stops in America have been really busy as it is all new to us and there is so much to see. Even in sleepy Thomaston we managed to fill our time with a mini road-trip! There is a small island, Dix Island, on which Cabot has a small cabin and a mooring so we set off there. The island is part of a small group of islands, and is owned by the people who have summer cabins there. It used to have a large quarry, and a population of about 2,000. Unlike some places, it is almost impossible to imagine this when you visit as none of the original buildings are there, apart from one, which was the maids quarters and the laundry for the Beal mansion. The island is small and you can walk round it all in about half an hour so it seems strange that a whole village full of people used to live here. There used to be more than 150 buildings, including 2 boarding houses, one for the Irish and one for the Scottish as well as an opera house, but these have all disappeared. The granite from the quarry was used to build post offices in Charleston, New York and Philadelphia. Some of the other small islands nearby also had large quarrys as well.

Interestingly enough, during digging on the island, skeletons have been unearthed, which had been buried with their feet pointing towards the centre of a circle. One leg bone measured longer than that of today's tallest people. No other trace of these 'giants' have been found either here or on any of the other islands, a little bit strange!

Other islands also have quarries and are open for you to walk round, so on Sunday we set of for an afternoon stroll. Having found a spot to tie the dinghy up we started out. John decided to mark the place we had left the dinghy with part of an old fishing float, as once we had walked about 20 paces inland, we could no longer see the boat or even the water - this turned out to be a very good idea! High Island is hugely over-grown and a short walk seemed the best option as we didn't want to leave the dinghy too long and it was quite difficult terrain and also quite 'buggy'. We found the quarry by just wandering around and then decide to head back - this turned out to be considerably more difficult that we anticipated. For whatever reason, and again it turned out to be a very good idea, John had taken our hand held compass with him, without it we would never have found the dinghy. Although the island was small, it was very overgrown with pines and dense underbrush, made all the more difficult by huge ravines and we kept getting stuck with no way through or across and having to retrace our steps and try again. It was getting to the stage where we thought we might have to return to the coastline and swim back to the dinghy! it was also getting late in the afternoon and we wanted to get off the island before the 'real' bugs came out to play. Just as we were starting to get a bit concerned about ever finding our way out, we arrived back at the path and found our marker buoy - what a relief!

Once back at the boat, we bathed our cut and scratched legs and ankles in salt water - ouch - and removed all our clothes and checked for ticks. These are a massive problem here this summer due to a warmer than usual winter. There are lots of leaflets and websites giving all kinds of scary information about how they bury into your skin and give you Lyme disease, so we were extra careful and glad to see nothing crawled out of our clothes! i think next time we will stick to islands with marked trails!!