The Drive to Maine
We left the DC area early Saturday morning on September 8th. There was a lot of pre-trip discussion about what time we should leave and how much pre-packing Shannon would do before the trip. I wanted to leave at five and Shannon wanted to leave at seven. We compromised and tried to leave at six. But I was so excited to get on the road that I mistakenly took the Beltway I-495 instead of I-95. By the time we realized we were headed toward Richmond and not New York we were about 15 miles off course. That put us back on I-95 around seven ... I made up for lost time by driving insanely fast. Shannon lamented her lost hour of sleep then entertained herself by shopping for gifts at the gas stations.
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Our plan was to drive about 9 hours into the state of Maine and stop for the night at Colleen Moore's house. Colleen is a racer I had met the weekend before our trip at an outrigger canoe race on Kent Island. Susan Williams introduced us because I was still trying to get information on where to find the seals and she knew Colleen lived in Maine. Shannon wanted to see seals on the trip. I wanted to see the islands in the Deer Isle Archipelago. So I had planned the trip to kayak first around places I thought would have the most seals and then head to the Deer Isles. What I didn't realize at the time was that most of the seals we would see on our trip were lounging on the ledges in the Deer Isles.
So the weekend before we were to leave I was still talking to everyone I could find who might have good beta on where the seals were. Colleen introduced me to another friend of hers and he mentioned a ledge in Casco Bay close to Colleen's house that was home to "thousands of seals." It was on our way to Acadia so Colleen volunteered to let us stay at her house Saturday night. Our plan was to kayak Casco Bay on Sunday out to this ledge and perhaps camp for the night on Jewell Island. We never made it to Casco Bay.
All day Saturday it had been hot and muggy. When we arrived at Colleen's house we commented on how hot is was in Maine. Colleen and Pete assured us that the warm weather we brought with us from Maryland was a fluke and normal Maine weather would be moving in overnight. They weren't joking. This was the first lesson we learned about kayaking Maine ... the weather changes ... and quickly. Sunday morning we were greeted with a stiff wind, whitecaps on the bay outside Colleen's house and a grey sky that looked like it could dump lose on us any minute. Fortunately Shannon is a very conservative kayaker as am I. We decided to skip Casco Bay and continue on to "The Hub", a small island off the coast of Mt. Desert Island and supposedly a breeding area for seals.