We bought our sloop Aloft some years ago from a celebrated sailor who kept her at the renowned Maine island where thousands, including our son, were guided on a path to self-discovery and inspiration on small islands and sailboats. In addition to haggling over the price and the required repairs revealed by the insurance survey, we had a bit of a tussle over the vessel’s name (but that’s for another story). At any rate, it was late in the season when the papers were finally signed, and after a week of cruising around Penobscot Bay, two friends and I began the sail back up to Portsmouth.
After a glorious September romp from Rockland, we found ourselves ghosting along in the late afternoon just offshore of an island rich in history, having rescued the starving Plymouth colonists in 1621. I had recently learned that it was also the summer home of a family from our town. Although we didn’t know the family well at the time, I vaguely recalled an offer to use their mooring if we ever passed that way. And so we headed in for the night.
The reaching breeze finally died completely, and as we slid down the last of the swells and into the flat water inside the ledges, there was neither breeze abeam nor wake behind. Aloft carried her way as if by magic, and I felt myself falling hopelessly in love with the boat.
With the setting sun ahead and the sides of the narrow cove almost close enough to touch, it was a scene to remember. My friend pulled a full-size bagpipe out of his duffel in the forepeak and further charmed the scene with the strains of “Amazing Grace,” which he played from the bow with one steadying arm wrapped around the headstay. The spectacle was too much for the island family, who shortly rowed out to invite us ashore for supper.
Their cottage was a converted lifesaving station. A wooden ramp in the boathouse ran from low tide up to the kitchen door. We pulled our skiff up the ramp, tied it to the doorknob, and went inside to eat. The house was lit entirely by candles, except when someone used the toilet. The generator was triggered by the float-switch in the water tank, and all of the electric lights in the house came on for a minute or two following each flush while the tank refilled. The effect was delightful.
I’ve always loved going out to the islands for the beauty, the solitude, the sense of detachment. I know I’m also drawn to them because island visits often require crossing great stretches of open water. Part of the attraction has become the change in outlook that can be the result of living without the comforts and safety nets of modern life.
Islanders make things work with the resources immediately available, and the results can range from quirky to ingenious. If they can’t make it work, they find a way to think differently about it and move to the next challenge. There are lessons to learn out there about consumption and waste, about expectations and values – lessons that are worth taking back across the water with us when we leave.
When I was very young, I often visited a small island in Muscongus Bay. Though just a short row from the mainland, all of the usual island challenges of creature comforts, energy, water, waste products and safety were there. Early in each season, we would couple a series of garden hoses together and drag them out behind a skiff to connect them to the outside spigot on a mainland neighbor’s house. I remember towing propane bottles across the harbor before we could have a hot meal. Garbage was thrown to the gulls every night on the ocean side out of sight of the mainland neighbors.
Gaslights illuminated the evening card games. There was a privy, but I don’t remember a bathtub. Once a week we took a boat full of bottles and cans out beyond the bell buoy to be sunk. Upon arrival one May, it was discovered that the house had been burglarized over the winter. It took three days for the sheriff to arrive from Thomaston to investigate.
I can remember a bright, calm dawn early in my first season on Star Island.
I had awakened to the sounds of migrating songbirds in the air and waves landing softly on the ledgy shore. The western cove was only a hundred feet from my window in the garret of one of the original 18th-century fishermen’s cottages.
Sun streamed through the window as a light breeze lifted the curtains. The sloop was in the harbor, ready for a sail when the wind came up after lunch. For a moment, as the fog of a deep sleep slowly lifted, I marveled at my good fortune to have landed a job in this remote and tranquil place.
And then it hit me: The generator was down again. The silence began to ring like an alarm. The fire alarm would be down. Over 400 impatient souls would soon be wandering darkened halls wondering why the toilets wouldn’t flush and the coffee wasn’t made.
That year I slept in my clothes in anticipation of such disasters, and so it was easy to grab a pair of boots and head down the rocky path to the powerhouse to see what had gone wrong this time. It seemed that one of the fuel filters had clogged again, but the crew was already warming up the backup generator in anticipation of a switchover that would quickly get the lights back on.
Diesel powered the whole place back then, with the exception of propane for cooking. There were four ailing generators with up to 125kW of potential power. In addition, nearly a million Btus of boiler capacity made hot water and steam for the kitchen, showers and laundry. Water came from four different sources. Toilets flushed with seawater. Ten thousand gallons of wastewater were treated daily in a miniature municipal treatment plant that had been seeded that spring with barrels of imported mainland effluent to jumpstart the biological process.
That season, the island consumed over 20,000 gallons of diesel fuel, all of it barged over from Portland, over 50 miles of open water. It was dangerous, risky and expensive. Every day was another miracle, and every day the resourceful crew somehow pulled it off.
Maintaining the rudiments of comfort and safety on remote islands requires ingenuity, patience, good humor and luck. The immediacy of island systems, and the scarcities that are commonplace are connected by clear and undeniable lines. People have long traveled to islands to lift their spirits, but life on the islands can also teach us by exposing what we take for granted, and challenging our patterns of consumption, perceived needs, and relationships with the natural world.
Islanders have always been thrifty and resourceful folk, but mostly out of necessity. At Star Island, the unofficial capital of the Isles of Shoals, we are turning the endemic challenges of island living into a platform to educate and inspire. We are doing this as we move from a reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy.
We learn from, and share resources with, other islanders in New England and beyond. We experiment. We have developed a new awareness that waste is not an option. These efforts are yielding great results. Sometimes they are quirky; often they’re ingenious. This year we cut diesel use down to 4,700 gallons – from 20,000 gallons in 2012. In the Midwinter issue, I’ll tell you how we did it.
Jack is a USCG 100-ton master and the island manager at Star Island at the Isles of Shoals, where his boat, Aloft, lives most of the summer.
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