Jan Van Heek stands over his boat doing something he couldn’t do two years ago here in Buck’s Harbor: He’s topping off the tank of his 42-foot sailboat with fuel.
Van Heek and his wife cruise the Maine coast for four weeks each summer, stopping here and there and filling his 90-gallon fuel tank as needed. The Van Heeks, who have a summer home on Rackliff Island in Spruce Head, have a fondness for Buck’s Harbor, the picturesque deep-water harbor in Brooksville at the head of Eggemoggin Reach.
But for two years—2023 and 2024—fuel was nowhere to be found here after Buck’s Harbor Marina shut down following a simmering dispute between the marina owner and the town.
Sailors such as the Van Heeks aboard their J/42, Sweet Bean, couldn’t fuel up there as they cruised the Maine coast. But now, the second boating season that the marina has been open following its two-year closure, it has fuel, new moorings, new floats, and more amenities for the boating public. It also has fuel year-round for the local fishermen who have accounts.
It was sad when the marina closed, Van Heek said while fueling his boat. “No fuel, no moorings, nothing,” he said. Now it’s among the best marinas for him to stop at.
“I’m glad they figured it out,” he said. “These docks are fantastic; they’re among the best. Everything here is very nice.”
The resurrection of the Buck’s Harbor Marina is just one part of the continuing efforts in Brooksville to maintain and improve basic services, such as fuel, and public access to the water that are needed for a thriving working harbor.
Work is scheduled to get underway in late November or early December to dredge Betsy’s Cove, where the public landing and floats are now located. The dredging should take only a few weeks and a new pier should be built by next April, if all goes according to plan.
When the dredging and new pier are completed, it will provide all-tide public access to the harbor, something that’s vital for fishermen such as Frank Peasley, who harvests lobsters and urchins.
When unloading his catches of urchins, he has to wait for the tide to come in so he can bring his boat into the town landing float. As for lobstering, fishermen place their traps on the floats at low tide, but then have to wait for the tide to come in before they can bring their boat in to load the traps so they can set them for the season.
“We can now do one load of traps a day, if everything works out well,” Peasley said. “Once the dredging is complete, we’ll be able to do two or three a day.”
Mark Shaughnessy, chairman of the town’s Harbor Committee, said the value of a top-notch public landing that’s always accessible and a business such as Buck’s Harbor Marina are vital to the overall health of the community.
“We need to preserve places for people to work. We can’t just be a retirement community and a summer community, we have to have a real community,” he said. “Keeping the working waterfront working is part of that.”
The sudden closure of the Buck’s Harbor Marina at the start of the 2023 boating season jolted local and visiting boaters and fishermen. The marina was the only source of fuel between Castine and Stonington, had moorings, and was a good landing point for cruising boats.
Andrew MacArthur, a seasonal resident and president of a New York-based real estate investment and development company, bought the marina the following year. MacArthur’s family has had a home in Buck’s Harbor for three generations, and both his daughters worked at the marina in years past.
It took a year to get the marina into shape before it could open. There’s a lot of work involved in installing a new 8,000-gallon fuel tank, putting in new floats, and expanding the marina’s fleet of rental power boats. They replaced all the moorings with new granite blocks and new chains; it now has about three dozen moorings, 10 of which are seasonal for transient boats.
A pump-out vessel offers pump-out services to boats not only in Buck’s Harbor, but in the Benjamin River in Sedgwick and Center Harbor in Brooklin, farther up Eggemoggin Reach.
The marina also has a small store with snacks, gifts, and beverages, along with marina facilities that include showers, restrooms, and a laundry. MacArthur also purchased the iconic Condon’s Garage building near the village center, which was made famous in Robert McCloskey’s 1953 children’s book One Morning in Maine.
The garage is now being used for marine storage and as a place to restore dinghies and dories.
Buck’s Harbor has a lot to offer boaters and the marina fills a major role. With the Buck’s Harbor Market, Buck’s Restaurant, and a newly opened coffee and ice cream shop a short stroll away, the town has plenty of other things to offer as well, said Tom Hollyday, general manager of the marina.
When the marina reopened last year, many people gave thanks—“Thank God you’re open”—that it had been revived, he said.
“This is a natural place to stop at the top of Reach,” Hollyday said. “It’s almost like providing access to a town.”
When the marina closed for two years, fishermen coordinated with a local oil company to bring an oil truck to the dock at high tide and fill six or seven fishing boats that were lined up, but that could be done only at high tide. Sometimes high tide might be mid-morning, which pretty much messed up the whole day, Peasley said.
When the marina closes for the season, fishermen will be able to continue getting fuel in the winter months by punching in a code on the fuel tanks and filling up their vessels, Hollyday said.
The cove dredging and public landing upgrades have been years in the making, but are now imminent after the town received a $900,000 federal grant this summer. That grant, coupled with state grants and a pledge by the town to spend up to $500,000 on the project, means work will commence in a couple of months, Shaughnessy said.
The project will create a channel and turning basin 6-feet deep at mean low tide and result in the town’s first all-tide public pier. That’s a huge benefit for commercial fishermen, who now can’t work two hours on either side of low tide, he said.
“There’s no place in Brooksville where you can access the shore at all tides, currently,” he said. “For a town with 50 miles of coastline, it seems not like a good thing. When the marina closed, it made everybody realize that there was no public access.”
Boaters like Jan and Christi Van Heek are among those who fully appreciate what’s going on in town, especially the Buck’s Harbor Marina.
“Just having it open again is fabulous,” Christi Van Heek said on the float next to their boat. “It’s one of my favorite places to come.”
