Aug. 26 - Swan's Island, ME

Opechee Island - Anchorage

“Life’s a beach and I’m just playing in the sand.” —Unknown

We could probably stay on Mount Desert all summer and find plenty to do, but that nomadic urge to keep moving pulls us away to the next new adventure. Our stop today was just 15 miles west in a little archipelago of islands north of Swan Island.

We spent the day beach combing the shores of Opechee, Black and Sheep Islands. Here in Maine we're not looking for the normal beach items like sea glass, sponges and shells...although we have found some nice pieces of sea glass and a few large shells. Our prize is a little more unique to Maine...lobster buoys. We're a little limited on space so we can only keep the best ones and we found a lot of great buoys today. In fact we found so many wonderful buoys today we had to take some of the ones we found earlier back to the beach...it'll make someone's day to see the pile we left on Sheep Island.

Maine has over 5,900 licensed lobstermen, they work about 3 million lobster traps and more than 30,000 are lost every year and their distinctly colored buoys wash up on shore. Each boat has their own unique color for their buoys and the colors have to be displayed on their boat. These colorful buoys help the lobstermen locate their traps.