An exciting way to explore Maine

By Christina Tree, Globe Correspondent

ACHIAS, Maine - Sea kayaks seem designed for exploring islands, especially the thousands of small uninhabited Maine islands scattered between Casco and Cobscook bays. Maneuverable in as little as 6 inches of water, these stable, easy-to-steer-and-paddle craft are ideal for ''gunkholing'' - poking in and out of coves, around rocky island edges.

Admittedly, it's not quite that easy. Many Maine islands lie miles from shore and all are subject to wind, currents, and fog. They are, moreover, all but invisible to most landlubbers.

Sure visitors can see rocks and trees. Maybe they can even identify fireweed and tell a gull from a cormorant and a fir from a pine. But chances are that without a guide they won't notice the limpets in tidal pools, sandpipers camouflaged in seaweed, eaglets high in the pines, semi-precious stones among the pebbles, and, on one island at least, ancient Indian petroglyphs.

''This is a visionary - maybe a shaman wearing moose antlers,'' Captain Martha Jordan observed after clearing away strands of dried seaweed to reveal an unmistakable blue figure in the red stone. The artist had skillfully used the layered colors of sedimentary rock, chipping through the thin layer of red to create the images,

According to Maine State archeologist Mark Heddon, such figures, which are scattered around Machias Bay, were carved at times ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 years ago. The artists, Heddon says, were Etchimins, seafaring Indians who lived east of the Penobscot River and for whom Machias Bay seems to have been a central congregating point.

The more I searched along its east/west axis (the natural grain of the stone ran north/south) of this particular island point, the more petroglyphs I found: a spirit messenger here, a youth with a fish there, another with one arm longer than the other, perhaps just setting out in life. By a rich tidal pool - breeding ground for a variety of marine life - Jordan showed us another small figure suggesting fecundity. These were shamanic symbols, I surmised, memorializing such rituals as fishing, coming of age, birth, and death.

The guide also pointed to sandpipers I would have missed and to the way the piping plovers rose low into the air, showing their fringe of white tail feathers in unison to resemble a wave, a camouflage trick, she noted. The island is state-owned, she said, closed annually until mid-July to protect the nesting eider ducks and off-bounds until Aug. 15 beyond the rocks and beach, because of nesting eagles. The beach, incidentally, is studded with the kind of semi-precious stones for which Jasper Beach, across the bay, is known.

Machias Bay is in Washington County in eastern Maine. Its 921-mile, ruggedly beautiful, lonely coastline begins well east of Acadia National Park.

''Birds are thicker, fog is denser, tides are higher, currents are quicker, and weather happens faster, more furiously there,'' says Tom Berg, owner of Maine Island Kayaking Co., offering tours the length of the Maine coast. ''It's entirely different from the more peopled and idyllic landscape around Mount Desert and Penobscot Bay, he adds.

Likewise, Rob Scribner, owner of Eastern Outdoor Adventures in Machias, says, ''This is the most extreme section of the Maine coast.'' An experienced paddler, raised in Machais, Scribner is a recent graduate of the University of Maine, a third generation Maine Registered Guide, who offers guided half, full-day, and multiday kayaking tours almost the length of Washington County's varied coastline - from Jonesport, west of Machias, to Cobscook Bay.

Machias and Cobscook bays are separated by an amazing piece of shoreline. First comes the long stretch of high, dramatic cliffs known as ''The Bold Coast,'' running almost without interruption to Quoddy Head - where a candy-striped lighthouse marks the easternmost point in the United States. Then the Maine coast turns north to form the western shore of Passamaquoddy Bay, a shore that is itself deeply indented, forming Cobscook Bay.

''Really Cobscook is a network of bays,'' Tim Sheehan said as we met at his Tidal Trails Eco-tours base in Pembroke. Driving to a boat launch at nearby Cobscook Bay State Park, Sheehan talked about the way, thanks to the extreme tides and currents in this area, marine life tends to be larger than other places. Periwinkles, for instance, are huge, the size of large grapes. Nutrients that would settle to the bottom elsewhere, he added, shoot to the surface. A biology teacher, Sheehan enthused about ''finding new things here all the time.''

The day was clear but windy, so we chose to paddle up a protected, lake-like reach of Cobscook Bay, from the Two Sisters (twin islands) to Hallowell Island, which is thickly fir- and pine-forested and is owned by The Nature Conservancy. Here two eaglets perched high in pines. Fully grown, they were squawking and stretching but not flying. ''Just learning,'' Sheehan said, noting that they were still dependent on their parents, and that reminded this parent of her own fully grown offspring.

Paddling back along the shore, we watched a double-crested cormorant and a seagull hammering over a fish and spotted a loon here and a seal there, but few signs of habitation. Cobscook is, as Sheehan describes it, ''a coastal frontier.''

The village of Pembroke itself resembles a frontier ghost town. Homes and (empty) commercial buildings include a trapezoidal movie hall, and an old hardware and general stores. All date from the village's 1870s prime, when its ironworks and shipyards prospered. Today Pembroke is best known for its Reversing Falls Park, site of the coast's most extreme tides, boiling through the narrows at up to 25 knots.

This is one sight you don't want to see from a kayak. Sheehan offers tours of the ''falls'' in his inflatable zodiac, and also uses a lobster boat to view ''Old Sow,'' a whirlpool in Passamaquoddy Bay that's billed as the world's second largest.

Captain Jordan also offers tours in her larger, six-passenger, 34-foot lobster boat, the best way to see the seals that cluster on Machias Bay ledges. Accustomed to the drone of lobster boats, seals will permit motorboats to come a lot closer than they will kayakers. (Do memories of Etchimen hunters linger?)

In the past few years the immense natural beauty of this far shore has become far more acessible - thanks to many miles of new coastal hiking trails as to the advent of all three kayak outfitters, but eco-tours in Washington County actually date to the 1940s, when Barna Norton began taking visitors to see puffins on Machias Seal Island.

Norton notes that this island was never mentioned in the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty that gave Campobello and Grand Manan to the British, and that it was claimed by his grandfather in 1865. Norton's son John now captains The Chief, the Nortons' specially designed boat. Puffin-watching trips usually leave at 7 a.m. sharp from Jonesport.

''But it's not like going to the drugstore,'' Barna Norton says. ''Trips are subject to weather and only continue until the puffins decide to leave.'' The puffins are usually gone by the first week in September.

Machias Seal is a 15-acre island, a bird sanctuary that lies in open ocean 9 miles off the village of Cutler, the base from which Captain Andrew Patterson also offers puffin tours, including walks on the island itself, as well as sightseeing along the Bold Coast and, through October, trips to Cross Island, a large nature preserve just east of Machias Bay. September is prime time for seeing a wide variety of migrating shore and sea birds, and another favorite spot to observe them is Mistake Island.

The newest sight, both from kayaks and larger boats throughout this area, is aquaculture. While salmon farming is concentrated in Passamaquoddy, Cobscook and Machias bays, where high, strong tides constantly flush through them, the net pens are also found farther south. I inspected them in Blue Hill Bay, off Barret's Island.

That was the first day of my Down East adventure and it began at Coastal Kayaking Tours on busy Cottage Street in downtown Bar Harbor. One of the oldest and largest kayak outfitters in Maine, Coastal Kayaking offers a wide variety of tours, from 2 1/2-hour harbor tours to multiday camping and inn-to-inn expeditions. Mine was a full-day tour, and the weather was perfect: hot and still. We put in at Seal Cove on the quiet, western side of Mount Desert.

Here again let me make my pitch for a guide. For starters there's the safety factor. Anyone who simply rents a kayak without already having done extensive paddling (and not in a canoe) is asking for trouble. Stable as they are, kayaks can tip, and sunny as the weather can be when you set out, clouds and fog have a way of materializing out of Maine air.

Even without her navigational aids and a cell phone, our guide, Natalie Springuel, would have quickly inspired confidence, teaching the basic paddle strokes and safety procedures (a couple in our group had never kayaked before) and putting us at ease, in the mood to learn about tidal zones and currents, about edible seaweeds (I still can't deal with eating anything called ''bladder wrack'') and about the history of passing islands. I spotted several seals, a school of dolphins, and an osprey nest, with the young birds still in the nest and parents hovering around. Rather than setting paddling records, our group opted to ''gunkhole,'' paddling lazily and enjoying the water, bird, and marine life. At Pretty Marsh, we found shelter from a thunderstorm just in time.

Known for the immense variety of its terrain (two-fifths of it maintained as Acadia National Park), Mount Desert Island makes an ideal base for kayaking. Its paddling possibilities are immense, according to Natalie Springue: everywhere from Blue Hill to Frenchman bays and from the Cranberry Islands to protected Somes Sound, depending on wind and weather.

Bar Harbor, the largest of Mount Desert's resort towns, alone accommodates 3,000 visitors in the space of a few square miles while all of Washington County (as large as the states of Deleware and Rhode Island combined) offers some 70 widely scattered motels, inns and B&Bs with no central reservations service.

East of Mount Desert and west of Washington County, on the Schoodic Peninsula, Danny Mitchell's MooseLook Guide Service offers kayaking tours in Frenchman Bay and many points east, also canoe trips on several Down East rivers that are also served by Sunrise Canoe Expeditions, the grandaddy of outfitters in this part of Maine, one that first offered sea kayaking in Cobscook Bay more than a dozen years ago (it didn't catch on then).

''Eco-tourism'' is hot in Maine this summer and the weather has cooperated. Kayaks are back-ordered the length of the coast and outfitters are maxed out. Even in Washington County there's almost enough business to go around, but then it's high tourist tide, which crests Aug. 20-21 with the colorful celebration of the Wild Blueberry Festival in Machias, then quickly recedes.

Christina Tree of Cambridge is a frequent contributor to the Travel section and coauthor of ''Maine: An Explorer's Guide.''

Published 08/08/99 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section.