They use this skiff to shuttle you to and from the Barbara Frost Machias Seal Island is only about 15 acres and is nothing more than a low-lying pile of rocks. Fortunately, the ocean was smooth as glass, which allowed us to cover the 9 miles to Machias in slightly over an hour with the bonus that no one got seasick. He also knew his birds and was able to educate us about Puffins and the other wildlife we would see. Andy has been doing this tour for a couple decades and his jokes and stories kept us all entertained. The 16 folks on the tour were quickly ferried to the Barbara Frost, a 40′ coast-guard inspected cruiser where we met Capt. The Barbara FrostĪ couple of hours and a few cups of coffee later I arrived at Cutler: a small, quaint working harbor.
This was great news because there is always a chance that if the seas are rough, you won’t be able to actually land on Machias Seal Island once you get there. I checked the off-shore weather report and saw that it was going to be clear and calm. The drive to Cutler was a bit over 2 hours, so I needed to be on the road before 5am to be at the dock by 7am. Their reviews on Trip Advisor were excellent.īefore I knew it, a couple months had passed and the alarm was ringing at 4am in my small hotel room in Bar Harbor.Cutler is closer to Machias, so the boat ride would be half as long (especially nice if the weather is rough).They were a lot closer to Bar Harbor (where I would be staying).That option sounded a lot better than the other tours where you just take a boat out and try to photograph them from the rocking deck! Two tour companies have permits for Machias Seal Island…one ( Bold Coast Tours) leaves from a small port (Cutler) in northern Maine and another ( Sea Watch) is over the border in Canada. I booked with Bold Coast for three reasons:
A total of 30 people per day are allowed to photograph Puffins from plywood blinds on the island, often with the Puffins only a few feet away.
Only one of those islands (Machias Seal Island) allows photographers and tourists to actually come ashore.
They only come ashore for a few months each year to have their young… and there are only 5 breeding islands in the US. I learned that although Puffins are common in the North Atlantic, they stay at sea most of the year. Now, I’m not a ‘birder’…I mean, I do like photographing birds, but it’s not like I plan my vacations around them (not that there is anything wrong with that)! However, since I thought Puffins were just plan cute (and maybe because of fond memories of my stamp collection), I decided to find out a bit more about the tour. More recently, I was planning a photo trip to Acadia National Park when I ran across an article about photo tours to a Puffin breeding island off the northern coast of Maine. I was one of those nerds who collected stamps, and as it happens, there is a small island off the coast of England named Lundy, which prints their own stamps featuring, you got it, Puffins. Football shaped, Penguin-esque, with their colorful, mini-toucan beaks…no wonder they are called ‘clowns of the sea.’ Puffins… heck, even the name sounds funny! I first learned about Puffins when I was a kid. One of the “Puffins” from my old stamp collection.
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