The Bait Shed was doing a good business the Sunday evening we arrived.
There isn't much narrative to present - it was the usual Pine Point vacation: walking on sand bars in the morning, supervising the tide in the afternoon, and convening the family and friends for a communal dinner in the evening. Even the pictures are repetitious! Everyone free to do their own thing. It was wonderful!
Rather than fly and rent a car (which was going to be prohibatively expensive), we opted to drive. It was a two day drive, stopping in Erie PA on the way out, and Toledo OH on the way back. I got an EZPass via the Maine Turnpike Authority which is good in all the states (IL, IN, OH, NY, MA, NH) where we were driving on toll roads. It also saved money - the EZPass rate was typically half the cash toll.
The Bait Shed was doing a good business the Sunday evening we arrived.
About one hour later - the fog had rolled in.
Diane and Maddy on the deck of the cottage.
A convivial dinner in the cottage - Jonathan, Cindy (facing away), Dad, and Mom.
Mike and Jonathan.
Maddy and Diane.
Peach cobbler - made by the Greene Gals.
The street light on the town pier through the fog.
Maddy on the paddle board.
M'lyn in the sea kayak.
M'lyn has a funny story about getting fished out of the water by a pair of lobstermen after capsizing the kayak.
Thunderhead in the distance.
The firepit in use in the evening.
XXXX
Maddy, M'lyn, Cindy and Mike on the porch of the cottage.
The setting sun painting the clouds as it departs.
Sunrise at low tide - an excellent time to walk the sandbars at the mouth of the Scarborough river.
Looking across the river to Prout's Neck.
Looking back at the Point.
This low slung single storey beach house is Cindy's and my ideal of beach architecture.
Out on the sandbars again - looking at the moorages between the sandbars and Old Orchard Beach.
A surf clam about to bury itself in the sand.
A yellow slider now graces the front of the little house.
Maddy and Cindy took a dip in the creek.
The shallows next to the Kerr cottage is littered with old clam shells and fragments.(a)
A glossy ibis. (b)
More colorful clouds at sunset.
A freight train crossing the Scarborough river.
More sunset.
Thunderstorm - this was my one successful attempt to capture the lighting with a still shot. (c)
(a) The shallows at the landing at the end of Avenue 5 next to the Kerr cottage is littered with old clam shells and fragments. There used to be a clam shack where you could purchase clams there. Now you get them at the lobster pound.
(b) A glossy ibis (Plegadis falcinellus). This is the first time I've ever seen one in Pine Point in the 50 years I've been coming. Maddy caught some snaps of the critter the day before. According to Sibley's Guide to Birds, they are known in the area but rare. They do not frequent tidal marshes.
(c) Later that evening, a strong thunderstorm passed just north of the Point. Cindy, Mike, Jonathan and I sat on the deck of the cottage watching an amazing show of lighting across the tidal marsh until we were chased inside by the gust front moving through. We didn't get any rain to speak of. I took a number of short videos with the camera that I'm going to try to consolidate into a single clip if I can figure out how to use iMovie.
A snowy egret wades in the shallows of the rising tide.
Cindy and Celeste had a paddle boarding date.
Jonathan takes a swim in the creek.
I moved Cindy's and Celeste's shoes and belongings up the beach after I took this shot of the rising tide.
A (wild?) rose in flower between the garage and breakwater at the cottage.
Rose hips.
A more subtle light reflects off the mud flats at low tide.
The lowering sun on the boats at the town pier.
A couple of lobster boats beached at the town pier for some repairs.
The glossy ibis was back.
XXXX
The Minute Man monuments in Concord on either side of the North Bridge in Concord MA.
The text on the obelisk.
The text below the statue.
XXXX
Carol and John Tate crossing the North Bridge.
The Odlin family (father, daughter, dog) out for a paddleboard excursion.
More sunset images to add to the collection.
This shot is a zoomed-in (not cropped) shot of the previous one.
Dad amd Mom enjoying the cocktail hour spread - cherries, shrimp, cheese and crackers.
Cindy takes in the view (et vino).
Cousin Rhoda, Cindy, Jonathan (obscured), and Uncle Bill on the deck of the cottage.
The tide was unusually high this week. Note that the marsh grass is almost completely submerged.
A flock of snowy egrets flying over.
Fishermen out in Jones Creek.
Another freight train goes by.
A shot of the fishermen with the freight train in the background. The sunset is starting to turn colorful
Nancy Rose and Jonathan appreciating the rose-tinted evening.
Yet another spectacular sunset in Pine Point.
The blueberry bushes that Cindy planted around the little house are now producing berries!
A couple of anglers on the town pier.
Two water men at work.
The police/fire boat testing its lights.
Home again after an relatively uneventful drive, although the passenger side window mechanism gave up the ghost on the drive from Toledo to Saint Paul, and kept sliding down on Jonathan. Fortunately we did not run into any rain that last day. As we are wont to do Sunday nights, we had dinner at Salut Bar Américain on Grand Avenue.
The background on the webpages for this trip is a shot taken while walking the sandbars on the morning of July 21st. The undulating ridges of sand exposed on the sandbar at low tide. I've altered the color, but not the pattern, to match the color scheme of this site.
The images on the site, unless otherwise noted, were taken using an Olympus Stylus 1 (3968×2976 pixel RAW file, ~13 MB). I occasionally had a telephoto supplemental lens attached to the Stylus 1, especially for the wildlife shots.
I've whittled the image size down to two sizes - a thumbnail I use on the page for the day, and a 960x720 pixel (or 720x960 pixel, assuming I haven't cropped or altered the size) image that I've saved optimized for web usage.
A lot of the images I doctored using Photoshop Elements, a trimmed down version of Adobe Photoshop. My most frequent adjustments were: "Crop", "Adjust Light & Shadows" to cope with the extremes of light and dark, "Auto Contrast" and "Auto Levels". I’ve also occasionally run the image through an app called “Noiseless” which degranulates the images I’ve had to really lean on to bring out.