Sunday, July 30, 2017
This morning started out cool but beautiful, blue skies and not a cloud in them. This is going to be a busy day. We spent an hour this morning cutting the plateau, I took the riding lawn mower, of course, and Brian went after me with the weed wacker. The grass is finally getting to the point where it only needs to be cut about every 7-10 days, trails are about the same. We tend to cut back the branches more now than worry about the grass height.
By 10am, the people were arriving. Our first couple to climb the trail were friends of one of the Wednesday Warriors and they had the added bonus of a whale show off the east coast of the island. She didn’t want to go on a hike because of the amount of blow spouts on display. As the morning progressed, the traffic from the small boats heading to our cove was really impressive, and yes, reports were coming up of hovering boats outside the cove until another boat left.
Visitors today had whales to watch, Monhegan Island and Mount Washington to view and near perfect wind and temperatures. The visitors were all pretty darn happy and reluctant to leave.
Ethan’s ferry arrived around 11:30 with a full boat of 25 people and they all came up the trail at once, this can be really intimidating when we both know all these people want to do is go up the lighthouse tower and we must do it 6 at a time and have this entire group done by 1:15pm mixed in with all of our other visitors. I tried something new today to see how the flow worked, of course I happily greeted everyone and explained how long the tours were and the 6-person limit. I hoped everyone could enjoy their lunch, visit the museum or take a short hike instead of standing at the base of the tower for an hour waiting to climb up. Brian was going to stay up in the lens area of the tower and discuss the Fresnel lens and supervise guests on the platform and I was going to give the history talk as people waited around and oversee the gift shop. It seemed to work well with a few exceptions, people still hovered but at least everyone was chatting and feeling pretty good about their visit. Brian and I were non-stop until about 3:30 today but neither one of us were suffering from leg muscle fatigue from walking up and down the tower.
A few fun guests today that stood out to us and gave us a few minutes of discussion tonight were: a lovely young lady with the most beautiful arm art of a lighthouse from her imagination. She was fascinated by all things lighthouses and was very receptive to all the info about Seguin. Another was a dog named “Seguin”, she was named after the island but this was her first visit to her homeland! Also, had a spirited conversation with a father and son pair about the ghost stories surrounding the island and whether it was a fact or fiction. We also had many return visitors from earlier in the season and a few FOSILS members who introduced themselves.
I realized I didn’t write about Sam the Seagull yesterday and his heroics. We have this seagull that for whatever reason has bonded with us. He is always around the yard when we are or watching us from the chimney of the guest quarters when we are up in the tower. He likes to try to take things from Brian when he is out in the evening, including one time trying to take Brian’s fleece. Well, Saturday night after dinner, I have the dogs out in the yard walking around and Sam is on the chimney chirping at me. As we headed towards the oil house, Sam was getting agitated and hopped to the edge of the cottage roof. Then I heard the high pitch chirp of an osprey on the oil house. I grabbed the dogs and brought them in and grabbed the camera to get pictures of the osprey. As I walked closer to the osprey, Sam was getting upset and now squawking at me. Suddenly, Sam decided to start attacking the osprey to get him away from me and the osprey did finally fly away. After all of this, Sam settled down again like all is good! Now, fast forward to tonight, Brian is sitting on the bench just relaxing and here comes Sam walking over to him just to hang and have some guy time I guess. I do want to make a point that we do not feed Sam because once we leave he is on his own, so this is all done without the aid of bribery! Too bad we can’t travel on our boat with a seagull, he certainly has shown his loyalty.
Another quick garden update, we have been eating peapods daily for the past 5 days, and tonight we picked 2 zucchinis to break up the peapod monotony. We grilled them along with the chicken, yum.
Guests today – 67
Guests total – 974
USCG – 6
