This is from my trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park a few weeks ago. I have lots of photos of the Margret Todd, one of the more picturesque (by intention) boats using Bar Harbor. With its maroon sails, it does the scenic thing several times a day on Frenchman’s Bay, ending with a sunset dinner cruise every fair evening. The Caribbean Princes behind the Maggy Todd, on the other hand, is also typical of the boats that use the harbor…Bar Harbor is a regular stop for the cruise ships that work the eastern seaboard of the Americas from the Caribbean to to Newfoundland. They arrive in the night, ferry passengers ashore in the morning in an endless relay of shore boats, 30 folks at a time, and the passengers spend the day spending money at the throng of gifty and arty shops that line the streets of downtown Bar Harbor, spending money (via bus excursions, or even taxi) seeing the sights of Acadia National Park, or spending money visiting one of the tourist attractions that dot the island (museums, Oceanariums, etc., there is even a Maine Lumberjack show in Trenton across the mainland bridge).

What is of interest to me here, of course, is simply the size difference between the ships. Aboard the Maggy Todd you have the impression of being on a fair sized sloop indeed…but seen under the bows of an ocean going liner you get a different picture…it is not so much that the Maggy Todd is small, but that the liner is  HUGE. How very tall it is! The Princess carries 3000 passengers when full and it not the biggest boat that drops anchor in Bar Harbor.  That is totally amazing.

A closer view adds some human scale.

The Maggy Todd is actually as close as it looks here. It must have passed within 50 yards of the bow of the Caribbean Princess (and its mast tops were closer), giving the passengers of both boats a rare thrill.

Canon SX20IS, my normal processing in Lighroom, with some distortion correction in the top shot to bring the water back to level, and a crop for composition.