Veendam. GX1, Leitz Telyt-V 200mm

Today's Blip took some deciding. We were visited today by the Holland America Line liner Veendam. I had decided earlier in the day that she would be today's Blip so I took a few frames as she was anchored offshore in Frenchman Bay. I took one very close-up of her just getting under way and one can really see every detail of the ship and the crew doing their thing to make it all happen. But that image didn't give a sense of the place and the scale of things. The ship could have been anywhere. So I chose this frame. Veendam is already doing about 8 to 10 knots heading through the narrow channel between the Schoodic Peninsula and Bald Porcupine Island (with its quills of evergreen), which will take her out to the open sea in the Gulf of Maine. At this point the Bar Harbor pilot is dropped off to his waiting launch. The little white objects bobbing in the water are the floats attached to lobster traps. The lobsterman each have a color code on their floats, registered with the Maine Department of Wildlife and which distinguishes one fisherman's territory from another. They do the rounds of their trap territory sometimes several times a day in their sturdy, seaworthy boats, lifting the traps one at a time to check for the critters. It is such hard and hazardous work that if another fisherman or stranger were to try to pilfer from the traps, shotguns would be reached for in a heartbeat.