Tuesday
August 9, 2016
We took our coffee to the porch and enjoyed the cooler than recent (about 60 degrees) temperatures along with sunny skies, no wind, and calm seas. Patty made our usual (her sister Chris says I can skip mentioning it) fruit/yogurt/granola combination. While it was still cool, we went down the hill to get water – while I filled our gallon jugs, Patty hung off the info kiosk a new doggie bag (the cleanup kind, not the take food home in kind) dispenser that she made out of an old gallon water container and milk, stuffed with old bread bags.
Up the hill, Patty penciled in the letters for some new signpost signs she’ll paint later while I worked on the blog. Two guests who kayaked over from Popham came up the hill so we put aside our tasks and went to greet them. They spent a long time taking pictures up in the tower and around the property and then commented that they could see why reviews showed their trip would take four or five hours. They said it only took an hour and a half to paddle over and they figure the same to get back but I guess they hadn’t expected to stay on Seguin for very long. It was a pleasant surprise.
After they headed back down to their kayaks, Patty painted the signs she’d stenciled, I finished the blog post, and we packed up some clothes in a suitcase to take off-island tomorrow. We’ve been accumulating stuff all summer and it is now time to start moving things we don’t need, like clothes we’ve never worn or cold weather gear, back to our truck. It’s hard to believe the summer is going by so fast but we only have a little over a month left on Seguin.
Patty made us a pre-ferry snack of sliced cucumbers, crackers, brie cheese, sliced apples, and peanut butter and I contributed mango-pepper jelly to go on my crackers and cheese. After we ate and before Ethan’s group arrived, three visitors (two women and a man) climbed the hill for a visit. They were on a two week sailing trip and declined the opportunity to go up in the tower. Apparently they spent a large amount of their two week trip on the boat and were having trouble finding their land legs again so this time the tower held no appeal to them.
Ethan’s group arrived next and included a number one large family of seven and another of nine. We also had a smaller family of four that yielded a high number of new pin placements on the “where are you from” map – La Vega, CA, Orlando, FL (seems impossible that we were missing Orlando?), and Mt. Washington, NH (well, adjacent to Mt. Washington anyway). A couple with their dog from New Hampshire told us about a website called skywatch.com that will alert us to any events in the sky like a meteor shower, for example, that will be visible in a given place and time. We definitely plan to check that out.
We went down the hill for water again as our ferry visitors were also going down the hill and chatted with a number of them while they waited for Ethan to come back into the cove to pick them up. One of the large families had nicely brought a large trash bag with them to Seguin to collect their picnic trash and accidentally left it on the front porch so we returned that to them also. They knew Seguin was a pack-in/pack-out place and were happy to have their bag of trash to take with them back to the mainland. We were too!
After our ferry visitors headed back down the hill, Patty made our
lunch of left over fish stew, bread, and cheese. The Ethan-fish stew was even better the second time around. Speaking of Ethan, he texted while we were eating to let us know that the weather tomorrow doesn’t look good and it will likely be a short day off-island for us. My aunt and uncle from Williamsburg, Virginia are arriving tomorrow for a visit and will need to coordinate with them once we have more details and times.
Up the hill again, we gathered up our things for the day off-island and took those things back down to leave in the Engine House and then went berry picking (Patty) on the Cobblestone Trail and driftwood picking (Mitchell) on the Cobblestone Beach. We both had limited success but did walk up the hill with a little treasure. After our up, down, up, down, we took a break and relaxed in the living room with our books for a stretch.
From the morning until late afternoon, the wind had shifted from the north in the morning to our more typical south wind and while not strong, it was definitely blowing more later in the day than early when it was almost totally calm. The skies also went from totally clear early in the day to completely cloud covered. We guess this is the beginning of the front or whatever it is that’s bringing in tomorrow’s weather that caused Ethan to want to get us back to Seguin early (and safely).
Before dinner, I worked a little more on our presentation (and I mean a “little”) while Patty worked on milepost signs and then we worked on the presentation together (you won’t have to hear about that for too many more days).
For dinner, Patty made chili and cornbread.
Visitors – 31
Favorite Moment(s) – sipping coffee on the porch in the cool morning weather
Sunrise – 5:27am
Sunset – 7:43pm
#Seguinisland #seguinislandlight #seguinislandlighthouse #maine #LifeOnTheRock
