2026-07-10 Shelter Cove with Jennifer & Hayden

My oldest daughter Jennifer and my grandson Hayden are visiting, and they wanted to go to Shelter Cove in Carroll Inlet, and so of course we went there!

Here is a map snippet from my Garmin InReach that shows our track out there and back.

It is about 26 nm one-way to get out there from town and it takes my slow boat about 3 hours.

It's a USFS dock and they are "first come first served," meaning that you cannot reserve the dock. You just have to take your chances and hope that there is room at the dock when you get there.

We pulled out from my slip in Bar Harbor at about 8:15 AM and we arrived at the destination at 11:20 AM, so it took almost exactly 3 hours.

Because the dock is in a little nook you can't see it until you are right in front of it. When I made the final turn into Shelter Cove and could finally see the dock, we got quite a surprise. There was a large bunk house/barge tied to one side of the dock. It took up all of one side and most of the front of the dock leaving only 1 side open for other boats. Fortunately, we were able to tie up there. It makes the trip so much more enjoyable if we can get tied up rather than having to anchor in front and come in by raft.

I eventually found out that the USFS is conducting a timber sale in the area and they are using this floating bunk house to house the people managing that sale. It will be there at the dock all summer and will be pulled away in the early fall.

Some of the docks have a side float on one side, but this dock does not, it is just a small square dock.

After a quick lunch Hayden and I took the trail through the woods over to the humpy creek to see if there were any fish there yet. There were not, as I expected.

After that the next priority was to launch the raft, which I did so as expeditiously as I could as Hayden was impatient.

When I was here in mid-June I dropped 2 crab pots out in front of the cove. But when we went to pull them one of them was seemingly anchored to the bottom and we were unable to pull it. I did not see the buoys when we entered the cove because it was high tide. The pot has apparently moved into deeper water, and the buoys are only visible at low tide.

Hayden is the official desginated driver of the raft now! We went out to try to pull the crab pot, but no go on that.

Hayden really enjoys bombing around in the raft. He had bought a little sailboat that attaches to 2 empty water bottles, and he was trying to tow it behind the raft.

We have many diversions for Hayden when we come out on these trips. One of them is the crab snares. The ingenious little devices have a little wire basket for some herring chunks for bait. Then they have several loops of heavy monofilament line around the bait basket. The theory is that the crabs will get tangled up in the loops and you can catch them that way. You just attach a weight to it and drop it down to the bottom on a regular fishing rod and check it from time to time.

He actually got a small crab on one of the snares!

It was a male, but it was too small to keep so back into the sea he went.

Another diversion was shooting the BB gun. He started out with a rifle that you have to pump 7 or 8 times for every shot, but now he has a BB pistol that uses a CO2 cartridge and you don't have to pump it. We save our empty Gatorade bottles and Pepsi cans for him to use as targets.

In the evening we had a nice fire in the fire pit on the dock. While we were hanging out at the fire Hayden was still dock fishing. He must have stumbled on a school of Rock Cod because he started catching them one after the other. Some of them were quite large.

It was a pleasant evening on the dock.

We went inside at about 9 PM and sacked out soon afterward.

Before going inside, I took one of my trail cameras and set it up in the clearing that is just up at the top of the ramp. I set it to capture the area where the trail over to the creek begins.

When we checked it in the morning, we were surprised to see that a doe and fawn had passed in front of the camera just a few minutes before I went up to retrieve it.

In the morning after making a batch of pancakes we started to make preparations for departure. That sounds easy but we had a lot of stuff on the dock. We had multiple fishing rods, crab snares, the fire pit, the axe, some folding camp chairs, a few pocket packs of fishing lures, etc. etc.

I also had to stow and secure the motor from the raft and then winch the raft up into its travel position.

Lots to do before we could pull out.

We pulled away from the dock at about 10 AM in sunny and calm conditions.

Hayden wanted to try some bottom fishing on the way home, so I stopped in behind Hume Island in a likely looking spot and dropped the anchor. It was dead calm in there and quite beautiful but there didn't seem to be any bottom fish around, so we didn't stay very long.

In the Spit Point area, we came across an area of what is locally known as "Red Tide."

I did my best to avoid it but, in the end, I had to run through some of it. I was concerned that it might clog up the seawater intakes for cooling the engines, but it appears that that did not happen.

Here's what Google had to say about "Red Tide:"

A red tide is a common term for a Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB). It occurs when microscopic marine algae—usually dinoflagellates—reproduce explosively. This rapid growth creates dense concentrations that can turn the ocean water a distinct red, brown, or green color.

The phenomenon is driven by a combination of ideal environmental conditions: warm surface temperatures, high sunlight, calm seas, and an abundance of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.

Many of the algae species that cause red tides (such as Karenia brevis in the Gulf of Mexico) produce powerful, naturally occurring toxins. These toxins can build up in filter-feeding shellfish, making them dangerous—and potentially fatal—for humans and animals to consume.

When we got out to the Cutter Rock area near Mountain Point, I dropped the anchor again, but it didn't grab so we had to pull it immediately. After that I had no more energy for anchor dropping or pulling so we just headed in.

We got into the slip without any issues at about 3:30 PM after logging about 52 nm for this trip.