Mostly Maine
Aerial views of Midcoast Maine
Our favorite lobster pound in the Midcoast Maine area is Five Islands. After flying by it a couple of days ago I decided to make a short video of it from the air. I then added an earlier video of my grandson jumping off their wharf into the cold Atlantic. Brr, but fun!
I also updated my video of the same flight this time from Waldoboro to Friendship and my sister’s cabin. This one clearly identifies her cabin.
Now that I have my medical back, I’m back to shooting video. I have lots t process, but since family and friends are visiting this summer, I thought I’d put this together for them.
Today was a great day for mountain flying! The winds were calm and the visibility was decent enough. I ended up with 180 images plus a couple of hours of video. That will keep me busy for a few days.
SOP, for me is to fly with another pilot when I’m taking pictures. Thanks Mark Bowker for flying with me today.
Thanks to may trusty Copilots, Eric and Jakob, who fly the plane when I am taking pictures, we now have images of most of Maine’s lighthouses in the vicinity of Mount Desert and Vinalhaven Islands. That’s not to say the editing/processing and posting of those pictures are done, just that the raw images have been captured. Along the way, we have GoPro cameras taking some videos of the flight. These also need to be processed. Much work remains, but I enjoy doing it.
Here are some previews of the lighthouses around Vinalhaven.
We flew up over Penobscot Bay, Maine to the Penobscot River and the Penobscot Narrows Bridge on May 15. I’ll put together a short video of the flight, but in the meantime, here is a clip of us flying over Ilseboro. Several more lighthouses on the Bay were photographed using a high rez camera and long lens.
On Monday, Jakob and I flew 93R Downeast all the way to Eastport, Maine. The weather was great, the photography so-so, the video was okay until the GoPro failed and the worst part was that the nose gear would not extend. We flew back to Brunswick and manually extended the gear. It took many more than 20 pumps to get the nose gear down. Grr!!!
So, I created a short video with the footage on hand. We’ll be making another trip, once KEPM reopens after their runways are repaired in late summer, early fall. Until then, enjoy this video:
I’ll work on a Downeast section for the lighthouse pages and then return to work on the Penbscot Bay and Mount Desert Island sections.
This video project is now complete. Hope you enjoy.
Chilly and a tiny bit bumpy, but on February 26, we finished photographing the remaining lighthouses along the Midcoast and started to shoot the Penobscot Bay lights. More good news, the FAA has restored my 2nd class medical, but I find shooting while a qualified pilot flies is much better for both flying and picture taking. So, once again, thanks Jakob for going along with me.
Looking at some of these lighthouses in the Winter, you really begin to understand why lighthouse keepers had to be tough, both physically and mentally. Often cold and remote, they were really on their own for much of the winter. Now that all the lighthouses have been automated, the keepers’ job is gone, but their legacy remains. And while the lighthouses themselves are still standing for now, when will they tumble into the sea? As you’ve seen from shots of some of the the Casco Bay lighthouses their foundations are already underwater. Perhaps these 19th Century sentinels are giving us one last warning!