Maine Sound

I was walking around Portland, I noticed the slightly fake tourist town, with a fishing/ industrial section that doesn’t merge at all well with the tourists. I thought about it for a moment and with a shudder I realized this is all eerily recognizable. It is older and less plastic but this really feels like a Picton of the North East (I say ‘a’ because I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is more than one). Once I got over the shock of this I though what is the best thing to do in Picton, and of course there is only one answer, get out on the sounds, and so that is what I did. So I went on a trip on a really nice 90-odd year old schooner. The Maine sound is quite spectacular, the hills aren’t as high as Marlborough but it is quite impressive.

Yesterday I went out on a canoe trip around the sound and again it is very pretty, and in plenty of places where you get that amazing felling where the sound of your paddle in the water is the loudest noise around. These island of the sounds have a whole lot of holiday homes, which again makes it fell a whole lot like the sounds back home (It even has that familiar black line at high tide that I always associate with Marlborough). I was talking to the guide about the what it is like to live out here and he was explaining about the winters, he told me that it is quite cold in Winter, averaging about 0 degrees in the middle of winter, I thought yip that cold but hay I have played Hockey in that weather so its not all that bad. Then he said ‘sorry I don’t know what that is in Celsius’ so I realized he was talking about 0 Fahrenheit (I have just checked that on line and that is negative 18 Celsius) and this is the average for several months, that is not weather that is a natural disaster and they have this every year.