Vinalhaven

In the depths of my dissatisfaction and boredom with photography, I didn’t process or even look at much of what I shot in 2025 while on a week-long kayaking trip in Maine. I went with my best friend and we stayed with the rest of the tour group in an old farmhouse. It is supposed to be the oldest house on the island and it really was a great location to have as a base camp. That’s the house in the middle with two barns and a boat/fishing shack –

And looking out to the cove from the grass –

And here’s a look at the other side of what I think used to be a boathouse –

Three sides with doors, and one window wall. The inside is a shambles and it doesn’t seem to get a lot of love these days. Not sure how the whole property is managed since the owners don’t spend much time there. They do mow a nice path to this graveyard though –

I did some fanciful processing with some of the presets in Lighroom just for fun.

Seems to be one little family and there were some older markers outside the fence to the left from this view. Some were still upright, but a few were flat on the ground. It was a baffling situation though. Why some graves were left to the elements without any care or preservation, and others got a fence. Granted that isn’t much in the way of tending, but the stones appeared much newer and I wonder if it was a family unrelated to the original owners and so didn’t feel any obligation. Or maybe there was a feud. So much we’ll never know.

It’s really interesting to see what the whole landscape might look like if it were allowed to go back to nature completely. I have no idea how or even if the more grassy areas are kept that way, but it was different from what is inside the fence. Here’s a look at the path going back to the barn –

My friend and I got into the habit of heading down to the end of the pier to chill after dinner and sometimes I got lucky with the sunsets –

The neighbor’s boats –

And the local Loon family swam into this shot to make it better –

No tripod needed and it was nice to be rather casual about photography during the trip. Many of them were processed in both Lr and Ps as I’m getting back into the groove with the TK9 panel and have upgraded to version 4.

Not much in the way of wildlife opportunities except for a couple. First this rabbit buck would appear most mornings while we had coffee on the back deck. He was wary, but not enough to dive back into the hedges from which he’d come. Never saw the rest of them, only this brave boy.

I didn’t take the camera with me on the kayak since there wasn’t time to spend taking pictures, but I did bring the phone and have put together an album on flickr. Click to bring that up. We had basically perfect weather the whole time. Temps in the 70s and mostly sunny with calm seas and winds. One day we took a cruise in a fishing boat around some of the other islands and I got my one and only Puffin pic –

They are so tiny, fast and skittish that it was impossible to do anything more than spray and pray. The sea was calm, but the boat still moves like crazy so that’s all I got. No seals, no cormorants, nothing else even when I stood and tried to act as a gyroscope to keep the camera steady(ish). But it was fun anyway. I hadn’t been that far out on the ocean in a couple of decades.

One day when we got back relatively early, my friend and I went for a short walk in the woods. There are many trails on Vinalhaven and we just more or less picked one at random and luckily the tiny parking area had room. It was cloudy so the woods were dark and wet from rain. Here and there some sun poked through.

The curve and elevation change caught my attention here and I really like the various shades of green in the trees and mosses. So New England.

She and I are ga-ga over mushrooms so of course I had to stop for this Amanita beauty –

Pretty sure I had the camera on my bag to get a little height and steadiness.

This is part of the driveway and while it was lightly raining I went out to see what I could find.

Ok, and one more sunset. Just because.

That’s it for the moment. Same friend and I are just back from paddling Lake Superior near the Apostle Islands and I’ll see if I can scrape together a post from that. Again, I only took the phone on the kayak, so we’ll see.