Month: August 2024

Today, as I was giving a tour of the lighthouse, I asked the last of the group to close the door on their way in. It’s something I ask of every group (otherwise the swallows will join us) when it occurred to me… the swallows are gone.

There is a fair amount of avian wildlife on Seguin. Gulls, cormorants, osprey, catbirds, finches all call the island home. We even watched a bald eagle from our front porch today. But of all of these, the swallows are my favorite. I learned this summer that the swallows nesting under the boat house are barn swallows, while the ones nesting in the keepers quarters are cliff swallows. They’ve been dive bombing the lawn all summer and their constant presence and thrilling acrobatics will be a treasured memory of mine. It’s another sign that the seasons are beginning to shift. Fair winds, friends.

DAILY WEATHER REPORT
Temp: 71.1°F / 55.2°F
Sunny and breezy
Wind: SSW 4.2 mph / Gust: 10.3 mph
High Tide: 9:57am / 10:07pm
Low Tide: 3:49am / 3:55pm

We have our official move out day set. We’ll be leaving Seguin on Wednesday, September 11th and heading back to the mainland. The visitors have slowed and we’re feeling the end of the season fast approaching. With only about two weeks left on the island, we’re making our list of last projects and things we’d like to do before we leave this magical place.

The views of the lighthouse from the trails and yard that are so familiar that we almost take them for granted will become memories and only something we can revisit through pictures. So for tonight’s post, I’m going to post a gallery of some of my favorite shots of the lighthouse taken from my numerous hikes around the island at all times of the day and night.

Daily Weather Report
Temperature: 81.1F / 64.6F 
Windy, cold, and rainy in the morning, becoming sunny and warm by afternoon
Wind: 5.4mph N / 20.6mph N
High Tide: 6:56am / 7:13pm
Low Tide: 12:42am / 12:53pm

Today we experienced a rare set of circumstances on Seguin; the weather was beautiful and we had no visitors. Perhaps its a lull before the big Labor Day weekend, or maybe school is back in session, but we cannot remember a nicer day when we were not graced with the company of at least a few new guests. Of course, we could not let the opportunity to catch up on long delayed projects go to waste.

Repairing the missing step on the cove stairs was a project we triaged early in the season. Since it was lost in a winter storm, any repair is likely to meet the same fate. Strike one. Since there is a nice flat rock to the side of the staircase, the step is not really needed. Strike two. We were never able to finally cross it off our to do list, however, and the thought that it was the first thing our guests see when coming to the island always bothered us, so today we cut new steps, braced the risers, and repaired a few loose steps further up the staircase.

Next, mowed all the lawns before we began painting the Keeper’s Quarters. We were able to get a coat of white on the Keeper’s side porch and begin painting the dormers. It has been the most weather dependent project on our list, and it felt good to put a dent in it. Eventually the wind picked up and we put the brushes down for fear of dripping paint everywhere as our drop cloths turned into spinnakers.

Our final project took us to the loop of the north side of the island. We are vigilant about warning visitors to stay on the trail as they pass through the marsh because of poison ivy, so it was important that we maintain the boardwalk. The ground is soft in the marsh and the boards tend to sink and become unstable. We replaced the worst offender and shored up the rest so that walking the boards is a lot easier.

DAILY WEATHER REPORT
Temp: 71.2ºF /60.3ºF
Clear, sunny, warm
Wind: N 2.6mph / Gust:10.3mph
High Tides: 5:48am / 6:06pm
Low Tide: 11:46am

This was one of our busiest weekends of the year! Pretty much from noon on Friday through about 5pm this evening moorings were always full and sometimes boats rafted up to fit into the cove. Saturday and Sunday both saw over 50 visitors and we’re now over 1100 for the season.

We’ve heard a lot of our visitors say that this was their last weekend to get out on the water for a while because school is starting, they’re heading south for the winter, or they’re going to be pulling their boat out of the water for the season.

We can see the signs of summer ending. Friday evening had a true chill to the air, some leaves have started to yellow on the South Trail, and the southerly migrating Monarch butterflies have joined the Swallowtails on the island. It’s a bittersweet time here as we’re also starting to think about how we’ll be moving on soon as well.

Over the last week or so, Matt and I have been really thinking about how our time on Seguin is coming to an end. The weather has started to turn a bit cooler, and we can feel fall in the air. We have less than one month left here on the island, so we’ve started to plan how we’ll start to move our gear back to shore on our last few resupply days. There will be so many things we’ll miss about island life once our time as keepers has passed.

With the end of summer in mind, it was fitting that today our first visitors today were former keepers Cyndy Carney (2007), Mary Killery (2013), and Greg Guckenburg (2013). They had a chance to hike the trail, gather some blackberries, and then we sat around the porch talking a bit about how things on the island have changed, and a lot about how they haven’t. I think Greg had it right when he said that just when you get in your rhythm and understand the island, it’s time to go.

I hope that some day in the future Matt and I will be back on Seguin and chatting with the keepers about our days pumping water from the well to keep the cisterns full, the never-ending battle with trail maintenance, our rituals around the hot water heater, and all the places our dog Tulah got stuck in brambles.

Daily Weather Report
Temperature: 67.5F/59.0F
Sunny with increasing winds
Wind: 4.5mph SW Gust 13.5mph
High Tide: 12:58am / 1:28pm
Low Tide: 7:16am / 7:38pm

We finally have clear enough skies to see the super moon that brought unusually high tides this week. Because they coincided with the rough seas and storms created by Hurricane Ernesto, we had a little bit of a surprise when we brought the dogs down to the cove for our morning walk. The dinghy had been moved sideways and lifted off its wooden track that it is tied to overnight. There was no real damage, but between the waves and the tide, the water had come up the beach at least another 5 or 6 feet.

We went down to Cobblestone Beach next and saw that logs that had been in place all summer had been rearranged along the rocks and there were a lot of branches and buoys washed up high along the shore. At this point in the summer we know the island so well that small changes like a log shifting or rocks being out of place are very noticeable.

We had no visitors to the island today, but we saw that the lobster boats were back out this morning, so we assume visitors will be soon to follow.

Daily Weather Report
Temperature: 68.7F/60.6F
Light fog in the morning, occasional showers, clearing by afternoon
Wind: 3.4mph NW
High Tide:  11:54am
Low Tide:  5:43am/5:54pm

It was a very busy weekend on Seguin. On Saturday we welcomed over 50 visitors to the island. It also happened to be Matt’s 50th birthday. We had some friends visit and we got a chance to go “cliff jumping” (i.e., hopping from rock to rock between the Cove Trail and Cobblestone Beach) with our friends’ kids, hike the trails, play card games, and share some great meals to celebrate. We were joking around with Matt that he has to retired from lighthouse keeping because the US Lighthouse Service had a cutoff age of 50 when they were in charge of Seguin Island Light, though we all agreed Matt’s doing a great job and can stay on through the end of the summer.

Summer really felt in full swing on Saturday as the moorings were full nearly all day. We had a group of 21 visitors spend the afternoon picnicking and taking turns going on lighthouse tours. Their group put us over 900 visitors for the summer! We saw visitors swimming in the cove and nearly every group took some time to hike around the North Trail to pick the blackberries that have overtaken nearly every inch of the island. August is a special time in New England when everyone is enjoying summer to the last drop, but everyone also knows that the first days that feel like fall are right around the corner.

By Sunday morning, the fog settled in and there were pretty strong winds and relatively low visibility as Hurricane Ernesto started to churn up the waters. We didn’t have any visitors to the lighthouse, but we did see a couple of sailboats out on moorings when we ventured down to the cove later that evening. It looked like it was a pretty rocky night for anyone who was moored out there.

This morning the fog was the thickest we’ve seen it and it didn’t let up all day. The batteries didn’t charge up in the morning because we got no sun for nearly two days straight, so we had to turn on the generator for a couple hours in the morning to get the system up and running again. Even though we can’t see the water today, we can hear it roaring. The tide is high from the full moon and the combination of the wind, tide, and storm off shore brought large waves and some huge logs (more like trees) into the cove. We’ll have to figure out a good time to try to move the largest log to somewhere more safe once the waves settle and we time the tides right. We just had one couple come up from the sailboat around noon to get some shore time after spending the night on the mooring. They were planning to stay again tonight to wait out the rough seas and fog.

The juxtaposition between the perfect summer day of Saturday and today’s moody fog was very Seguin. We’re looking forward to seeing what the remainder of our time here will bring as the summer winds down.

Because we’re often asked what animals we’ve seen on Seguin, we figured we’d come up with our running list of species we’ve seen (with varying degrees of scientific exactness).

1. Bats
2. Smooth Green Snakes
3. Garter Snakes
4. Brown-lipped snails
5. Canada Geese
6. Gulls
7. Osprey
8. Bald Eagle
9. Terns
10. Cormorants
11. Barn Swallows
12. Cliff Swallows
13. Goldfinches
14. Hummingbirds
15. Eider ducks
16. Crickets
17. Katydids
18. Grasshoppers
19. Ants
20. Deer flies
21. Green head flies
22. Mosquitos
23. Monarch Butterflies
24. Swallowtail Butterflies
25. Hickory Tussock Moth Caterpillars
26. Minke whale
27. Rock Crab
28. Periwinkle snails
29. Porpoises
30. Gray seals
31. Mink

Because the only mammals are bats and the occasional mink, we’re in a rare situation in Maine where there aren’t ticks! We saw this little mink friend scurrying down the tram path this morning on our way to cove.

Today we woke up to some fog and a threat of rain. By noon, the skies had opened up and there were thunderstorms in the area that lasted until about 1:30pm. We had a few visitors beat the rain and some that got stuck in it, but everyone handled it with good humor!

When the weather cleared, Matt decided he was going to row the dinghy around the entire island. He set off from the cove around 2pm with the initial plans to go clockwise around the island, but quickly changed plans and went counterclockwise when he assessed the incoming tides and waves.

He said it was a pretty smooth ride until he rounded the southern tip of the island where there were some 4ft waves, but they helped push him back toward the cove. As he passed the east side of the island, there were about 20 gray seals that were curious about what he was doing and followed the boat.

I met him around 3:30pm back at the cove and we towed the dinghy back to the high point of the beach. Matt said it was a great afternoon adventure, and he’s looking forward to doing it again when the weather is right!

Daily Weather Report:
Temperature: 68.4/61.2
Foggy in the morning, rain midday, cloudy by afternoon
Wind: 2.2mph NE   Gust 15.9mph
High Tide: 7:33am / 7:43pm
Low Tide:   1:21am   /1:23pm

I don’t know what a blog with out words would be called, but sometimes you just have to see things for yourself.

The Aurora Borealis was visible from Seguin Island Station last night.

Daily Weather Report
Temp: 77.4º / 60.4º
Sunny and clear
Wind: NNW 4.1mph / Gust: 17.2mph
High Tide: 11:31 am
Low Tide: 5:35 am / 5:49 pm