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January 18, 2017

PEMAQUID SUNRISE

[NOTE: REMEMBER, IF YOU CLICK ON AN IMAGE YOU'LL GET THEM ALL IN A SLIDE SHOW]

... with john driving, a good idea since at 5:30am i wasn't fully conscious, we wandered our way down to pemaquid point ... we arrived literally just as the sun was appearing above monhegan island ...

... interpreted in b&w the sky was most dramatic ...

... with the moon at this point in its orbit i knew the tide would be especially low, which was quite exciting since i learned long ago that the best vantage point from which to photograph the lighthouse only appears above the surface once or twice a month ...

... i witnessed the sunrise through the windows of the little red building ...
    

... one of my favorite spots, a place where i often feel a bit guilty for wishing i had an even wider-angle lens ...

... along this rocky promontory the clear evidence of a most tortuously convoluted hundred-million year-old geologic history provides that creationists and believers in "intelligent design" are seriously lacking imagination ...

... the world famous "reflecting puddle" ... i've been here in the summer when a busload of "camera workshop tourists" are lined up at this spot ... a guide with watch in hand carefully meters the minutes so that each photographer gets an equal amount of time ...

... with john the only other person wandering the majestic headland, at times it seemed as if i had the place all to myself ...

... in the past forty-some years it's been only three or four times i've seen the tide this low ... i could see the low reef-like ridge which is only very rarely fully exposed since most often crashing waves make the spot inaccessible ... on this day the sea was calm enough that i decided to take a risk ...

... from the same vantage using a narrower field-of-view lens ...

... although this three-panel pan contains too many technical flaws to consider a serious photograph, still i thought you might enjoy it ...

... we wandered over to fort william henry ... while this structure was reconstructed in 1909, there has been a fort of some sort on this site since 1630 ...

... next to the fort i found an unusually angled fence, most likely evidence of a centuries-old property line ...

... it's quite possible that in 1569, over fifty years before the plymouth colony, david ingram was the first european to explore this estuary of the pemaquid river ... archeologists are still in debate, but many of them believe that twenty years before the pilgrims landed on cape cod there was already a tiny trading and fishing community on this spot ...

... wandering down along the boothbay peninsula, we suddenly came upon a lighthouse neither of us had ever seen ... hendricks head lighthouse is now a private residence, one of those "double-digit millions" pieces of real estate ... 

... if it was mine i'd live in it year-round ...

... i used photoshop to create a photograph of it from when it was constructed in 1875 ...

... the tiny public beach has many ridges of quartz-intruded granite ... the veins must continue off-shore, thus the beach is composed of jagged ground-up rock ...

... hunting island, from cape newagen ... another of those double-digit millions properties ...

... the cuckholds light ... it's now a bed & breakfast ... i checked, there's still a full week available in mid-july of this year ... "how much," you ask ... $4,700, tax not included ... really nice meals are about $150/day extra, and the boat service is $100/hour ... sounds like great fun ...

... another wonderful wanderabout ...