Day 11 - Acadia - The Last Day

This is was our last day in Acadia, tomorrow morning we are heading South towards Freeport and Portland. We started the day at a lobster hatchery where they are trying to increase the population of lobsters for farming purposes. The vast majority of the hatcherys were goverment run and the recent economic problems have caused most of them to close, but there is one in Bar Harbor that is still open.

It was quite interesting to see the different stages of a lobsters growth, they start off life smaller than the eye can see and are highly canabalistic at this point. They also look a lot like a shrimp and its not for several weeks before they start to develop to actually look like lobsters as we know them.

They showed us a video of how they release them back into the wild when they are sufficiently grown. This is when they are about 25 mm long and they release 70,000 or so back into the sea. Of this only around 30 to 40 % will survive to become fully grown lobsters. Whilst this doesn't sound a lot, if the process was to happen naturally, they only expect around a 10th of 1% to survive and to accomodate the current requirements for lobsters, they need hatcheries to do this.

We rounded the day off with some Pirate themed putt-putt golf and almost got sun burn again due to the heat, but a healthy does of sun-tan lotion stopped that from happening!



The weather finally changed last night, we had a mighty thunderstorm which knocked out the power to then entire area last night and has left a goodly portion of the campsite flooded.. it's a good job we are moving on this morning!