Here you see a spring tide lowering in Brooklin’s Great Cove earlier this week. There was little wind bothering her, so the Cove had time to work on her reflections. As the water receded, she revealed blooms of her swaying rockweed, which soon became tangled mats hiding crabs and snails that waited patiently for the tide to come back. It always has.
The Cove’s changing personality is perhaps her most remarkable feature. Every day, her two tides rise and fall about 9 to 12 feet, covering her completely and then exposing her mysterious tidal pools and pungent mud. Then, there’s the disappearance act that she can do in fog.
In the winter and early spring, there’s a beautiful vastness to the Cove, when her cold waters seem vacant, except perhaps for a few dabbling ducks and swooping gulls. In the summer and fall, Great Cove is a carnival for those of us who are addicted to the pleasures of “being on the water.”
Summer in the Cove, when she’s at her most frenetic, is worth a few word pictures: colorful small and large sailboats seeking the same winds; singing passengers on tall-masted windjammers helping to lower and raise big anchors and huge sails; luxurious or just strange power boats that contribute the husky background sounds of their engines; lobster boats churning up big bow waves as they take shortcuts through the islands; water-bugging skiffs, kayaks and paddleboards and, on occasion, a seaplane landing so its passengers can watch the finish of a regatta.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 14, 2026, and August 6, 2023.)