[0:00:00]

Charlie Phippen: Yeah, and it’s hard to do. It’s hard to do in the fall to come on a day when there’s no ship because we have sometimes multiple ships per day.

GK: Yeah, we really screwed up on that one. [laughter] Well, Charlie, I’ll have you say your first and last name just for the record.

CP: Charlie Phippen. I’m the harbormaster in Bar Harbor, Maine.

GK: Perfect. How long have you been harbormaster? What’s your history?

CP: My history is I enlisted in the Coast Guard, went into boot camp in 1976, and I retired twenty years later as a chief warrant officer. My specialty was operations. I was what’s known as a bosun, a warrant bosun. So I had command of shore units, and I was certified in command aboard floating units of various sizes and missions. I retired. I had a couple jobs in between the Coast Guard and the Town of Bar Harbor. I worked on a salmon farm for a year. I’ve been a scuba diver since I was about nineteen, and so there was a lot of diving involved in that job. Then I went to work at Hinckley’s as dockmaster for two years and got into the harbormaster business, starting in Northeast Harbor as a deputy for a short time, and then I got hired by Bar Harbor. I’ve been here since 2000.

[0:01:44]

GK: Wow. Somebody told me you’re one of the longer-standing harbormasters. Or the longest standing, maybe?

CP: Not in the state, no.

GK: But in the town of Bar Harbor?

CP: Town of Bar Harbor, yes. I guess, over the years, there were many different harbormasters.

GK: Couldn’t stick.

CP: I’m not sure what the reason was.

GK: Do you like this position? Are you happy to be doing it?

CP: Like any job, it has its ups and downs. I feel like it’s a good fit for me with my experience, background. Plus, over the years, you figure out ways of doing things that are a benefit to the port. As a harbormaster, and I’m the president of the Maine Harbormasters Association – just happen to be – we try to convey to the public that we’re really interested in making sure that all users across the board are treated fairly and have an opportunity to use the facilities that we have at our disposal. There’s a key thing that people, a lot of people don’t think about, is there’s an unlimited demand on a very limited, let’s say, infrastructure or area, including moorings and all the stuff that goes along with boats and the ocean.

[0:03:38]

GK: Yeah.

CP: So, a lot to it.

GK: Here, specifically, it seems like there’s maybe higher demand than in some places in terms of parking and congestion and stuff like that.

CP: Well, being a very busy tourist destination ashore, on the shoreside, combined with the amount of marine traffic that we have, including cruise ships, commercial fishing vessels, whale watch, and excursion type vessels, there’s a lot of activity in a very small area.

GK: Has it changed? What we’re looking at out the window, has that changed since you started working here? The buildings or the –?

CP: Well, the building that we’re in is only about five years old. It was built on a Department of Homeland Security grant because it was recognized that we were becoming such a busy commercial and cruise destination that we were able to apply for a grant that was approved. Things have changed on the town side. [0:05:00] As far as the whale watch business next door, they’ve really grown. Not only do they do excursions, sightseeing, whale watching, and things like that, other nature cruises, they also provide a lot of shoreside tendering for some of the larger cruise ships. On days when a ship might be up in our B anchorage, it’s a long commute for the tenders. So they augment with the whale watch boats.

GK: Okay. So the tenders are actually coming off of the – I guess, can you describe – I’ll get back to the changes you’ve seen because that’s a big question, too. But can you describe your daily routine maybe in the summer or this time of year, when things are busy, about, say a ship is coming in when they come in the boats? These are tenders? [inaudible] orange?

[0:06:01]

CP: Yes. Yeah. Normally, the ships arrive fairly early in the morning at the pilot station, which is just a chartered location down below Frenchman Bay, where the ships are required to remain on a recommended route into Frenchman Bay. The pilots will meet the ship at the designated time, bring the ship into one of our anchorages, which are predetermined before the season even starts, then the ship will anchor, and they’ll start conducting passenger ops as soon as – if they have to clear Customs, they’ll clear Customs and start passenger ops and either use their own tenders or a combination of their tenders that they have aboard, which double as lifeboats. [0:07:02] They may hire some of these whale watch-type boats for part of the day, or all day, whatever; it just depends on how many passengers because we have ships that come in from two hundred passengers to forty-one-hundred passengers. Those complements of passengers are based on what the double occupancy of the ship is. We call the lower berth capacity. It’s like the designed capacity of bunks on deck, not fold-outs or whatever. So, that’s how we figure for how many passengers are arriving. Many times, there’s fewer passengers than the double occupancy, and many times there’s over the double occupancy, but we have to have a firm figure to go by [0:08:03] because we have passenger caps that we implement on a daily basis, and we do not exceed those caps. We have a cap on the shoulder season, which would be May, June, September, and October, of fifty-five- hundred passengers per day. Once we hit that threshold, or three ships, whichever, then that day is booked. During the summer, we drop it down to thirty-five hundred passengers just because we’re trying to limit the extra activity on the waterfront because we’re so busy shoreside, and with excursion vessels going in and out all day, it really adds to the activity level. So the ship anchors, they commence passenger ops, and the passengers come ashore and either go on a shore excursion, or they plan something themselves and say, hire a tour guide to take them around, or they just go off on their own exploring or whatever. [0:09:16] And then, typically, the ship will have a last tender thirty minutes prior to sailing, and they’ll leave anytime from late afternoon to early evening. Just depending on the duration of the call and what their next port of call is. So they plan their day based on their movement. We’re just a tend – we’re known as a tender port. We’re not a port of call. We’re not an origin or destination as far as a ship offloading passengers and getting new passengers aboard or anything like that. So we’re just a port call on itineraries during the Canada-New England cruise season.

[0:10:04]

GK: Would you have to have a different permit or something if they were to stay overnight? They can’t stay overnight?

CP: They can. Few of the ships that come in stay overnight. It’s more the smaller ships that are not, say, traveling such great distances to their next port, so typically the smaller American Cruise Lines ships will have a more extended stay. They might come in at seven AM on Sunday and not leave until about four, 4:30, or five o’clock AM the next day. But if a ship has to stay overnight, they can get permission to do that. It just depends on what we have scheduled for the next day. [0:10:58] If we have severe weather and things like that, either ships are trying to get in here and hide from the weather, or they’re trying to get out of here, so they don’t get stuck in the weather. We have that happen every year.

GK: Yeah, especially with ships coming in, October’s been more and more – feels more stormy. Last year was crazy.

CP: We had a lot of cancellations last fall. We’re on par. We figure for ten percent cancellations, so out of a hundred and seventy-some odd ships, we’ll have a dozen to dozen and a half cancellations, typically. It’s usually weather. Rarely it’s a mechanical issue or some other eventuality. We have had ships diverted to Bar Harbor, say, from a Bermuda run. If there’s hurricanes down in that region, sometimes the ship will divert up here. [0:12:02] We’ve had ships divert from here because of weather.

GK: Yeah.

CP: They just have to figure out, “Okay, are we going out around the storm? Are we going to stay in port? What are we going to do?” They make the decision, and if we get an extra ship and can accommodate them, great. If not, they go somewhere else.

GK: Got it. So you have two – what are they called, where they [inaudible]?

CP: We have two anchorages. Our primary anchorage is here in what we call the inner harbor. It’s our A-anchorage, capable of holding one large ship, or on occasion, we might put two small ships in as long as the weather is cooperative. And our B-anchorage is a larger anchorage with two full swing areas for ships at anchor. We can accommodate three ships at anchor as long as they don’t go over the passenger cap.

[0:12:58]

GK: Right. Can you talk a little bit about when you came on in 2000, how many ships were coming in, and what it’s at now? Just that change. I’m also curious are you responsible for handling what that means for everybody on this side of things, on the waterfront. How are they going to get around? How do you come up with a passenger cap? All that. [laughter]

CP: That’s quite a –

GK: That’s a lot of questions, but …

CP: Quite a loaded question.

GK: Yes.

CP: When I first started in 2000 – and there had been cruise ship visitations since, I think, turn of the century. In the early 1900s, it was more typically naval – Navy ships would come here. But somewhere along the line, cruise ships started coming in, here and there. [0:14:00] So my first year, in 2000, we had thirty-six ships. All came in September and October for what you would call the fall foliage season. Then, through that decade, the numbers kept going up and up. The season expanded to where ships basically were booking in from May through October. That’s our defined season because outside of – even May and October can be iffy as far as heavy weather situations. Anything outside of that, it’s just too variable to know whether it’s going to be a viable weather window or not. We try to keep May to October as our season. [0:15:00] As far as other factors, we think that the Canada-New England cruise itinerary has become very popular within the cruise industry. Bar Harbor’s known as a marquee port. So if a passenger sees that Bar Harbor’s going to be a stop on a certain itinerary – like we have Holland America ships that originate in Montreal and they end up in Boston and then, they’ll swap out passengers and come back a few days later and visit Bar Harbor again on their way back to Montreal. That circuit goes on throughout the whole season. So, we’re popular.

GK: People want to book a cruise that stops in Bar Harbor? They’re looking for that, you’re saying?

[0:16:02]

CP: I’m not saying we are the only draw; I’m just saying we are a draw. The industry, I think, views Bar Harbor as a good place to stop, very popular with the cruising public. We try not to let that go to our heads as far as opening it up to any more ships or anything like that. We feel like our limitations of the number of passengers, what we have available for anchorages – we’re kind of maxed out. It’s based on, over the years, just observation and regulation. We’ve pretty much come up with our caps that we feel comfortable dealing with [0:17:01] because you have police that are required for passenger safety when they’re ashore. You got Public Works that are responsible for the impact of large crowds. You’ve got the Fire Department which provides ambulance service in emergencies. My office, my primary function in the planning stages for cruise ships is just scheduling and making sure that we stay within our caps. So that’s a primary long-range focus. Then, when the ships actually get here, we have regulations within our standard operating procedures that are updated annually and distributed widely to the industry that shows what our requirements are. [0:18:03] If ships comply, we don’t have any reason to not let them come in.

GK: Right. Some of those municipal town things that you have to pay for are those covered by the price per passenger? Does the town charge the cruise ships?

CP: The town has a port fee, and it is assessed to a given ship if they come into port, anchor in our anchorage, and discharge passengers into the town of Bar Harbor. There are many times when ships will come in, but it’s too rough, or the weather is too bad to conduct passenger ops, and they’ll turn around and leave, or they’ll sit out in the anchorage for a period of time. If they’re not discharging passengers, we do not charge them the port fee. [0:19:02] But the port fee is assessed to compensate the town for the services that we provide, and they’re directly related to the ship, which is a requirement and it has to do with the ability of the ship operations to occur. That’s pretty much what we’re accommodating.

GK: Yeah. Has infrastructure [and] things changed here because of that rise in the amount of passengers in the time –? This is a new building that we’re in now. But just thinking about accommodating that many people coming on and off –

CP: Yeah.

GK: My other question is, what are the challenges you face now that could –? What are the changes that could be made to help with that? I don’t know if there’s anything that you’re facing that’s a challenge to having that many people.

[0:20:07]

CP: The town purchased the Bar Harbor Ferry Terminal back at the beginning of this year, 2019. Part of that thought process and plan was to possibly, let’s say, spread the crowding that we’re experiencing down here in the immediate town pier area to the ferry terminal. We haven’t figured out how to do it yet, but we’re working on it. The Harbor Committee is working on long-range planning. We’re right now in the phase of having a site evaluation done to see what of the infrastructure that is there at the Ferry Terminal is usable or should be condemned, or should be demolished, that kind of thing. [0:21:06] That’s where we are. We have longer-term plans or a vision of a possible marina, maybe a boat launch. Some accommodation for tenders up there, and we don’t know if we connect that to anchorage B because it’s a shorter run into the ferry terminal. None of those particulars have been determined, but we’re looking at all possibilities and stuff that makes sense. It’s not sensible to overcrowd an area if there’s a way to alleviate some of that congestion.

GK: Where’s the ferry terminal? It’s in a different –?

CP: You can see it from here. It’s that big pier there. It’s about a mile from here. [0:22:02]

GK: But by water, it’s not –

CP: By water, it’s not far.

GK: That much more. Yeah.

CP: No, no. In fact, it would be closer from anchorage B to go into the ferry terminal. So, it’s just something that we’re looking at. It’s a big facility; it’s a facility that was designed for large passenger capacity, vehicles, and a lot of moving parts. We’re hopeful that we might be able to defer some of this congestion up there.

GK: Yeah, because it seems like the buses would be a challenge. That is what it seems to me would be one of the harder things, just having buses there.

CP: The buses downtown on these narrow streets make for interesting travel. GK: [laughter] Travel in and around the town, you mean?

CP: Right, right.

[0:23:02]

GK: Yeah.

CP: For everybody.

GK: Yeah.

CP: These bus drivers have nerves of steel to drive these narrow streets with pedestrians everywhere and vehicles.

GK: It’s amazing, yeah.

CP: It is.

GK: Even to drive in Acadia. I was talking to an Acadia Park person yesterday, and those roads are narrow too.

CP: Yes, very challenging for larger vehicles, for sure.

GK: Yeah, yeah. So that’s interesting. That could really give – because I’ve heard about that, but I guess I didn’t realize it was a facility that could really alleviate some of that congestion for you.

CP: It would be a benefit, I think.

GK: What are your feelings, I mean, either as a harbormaster or just as a person about keeping –? What does the term “working waterfront” mean to you? Is that something that’s important in Bar Harbor, having a working waterfront?

[0:24:09]

CP: I think it’s very important. We have a fleet of commercial lobster fishermen that work out of here for a good part of the year. We aren’t a friendly port weather-wise during the winter months, so we pretty much take everything out of the water, except for a float for safety purposes. Everybody that home ports here for the vast majority of the year move off to other less turbulent ports, like Northeast Harbor, Southwest Harbor. But we maintain that the working waterfront is part of Bar Harbor. The Town Council has, over the years, emphasized the importance of the working waterfront. [0:25:00] I am just a cog in the wheel that sort of facilitates the ability for commercial activities to take place down here, a place for a guy to tie his skiff up, and he’s got a mooring and possibly a float to work off of. Yeah, it all fits together. Our guys are, for the most part, tolerant of the activity. They just know that it’s part of the port, and most are, you know, willing to just be a good player and play by the rules.

GK: Yeah, it’s funny because I grew up in Stonington. So that made the lobstermen rule, right? They make a ton of money, too. That’s the reality.

CP: They make a lot more than I make. [laughter]

GK: Yeah. So, the infrastructure there is so easy, and here, I think it’s just a matter of years. Bar Harbor has been, traditionally, a place where people – it’s a tourist town. I mean, it has been for a hundred and fifty years, if not more. [0:26:16] What that infrastructure is and just how these guys are getting their bait over here, and coming down here, and selling here. It seems difficult, but what are you going to do?

CP: Yeah, there’s definitely logistical challenges. We try to keep up with the requirements. They’re doing barrels of bait now, instead of just trays. Some guys still use trays, but a lot of guys use barrels. We had to increase the capacity of our hoists to accommodate some heavier loads. We just try to work with the fishermen so they can do their job effectively. [0:27:06] It’s quite an attraction for tourists to be able to come down here and see a working waterfront. In Bar Harbor, it’s not much different than wanting another port; it’s just we have other stuff going on that makes it even more interesting, I guess.

GK: Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s something I’ve always been focusing on. Like in Portland, it’s how much development do you have because there is an attraction to the gritty – I mean, maybe only so much, right?

CP: Right.

GK: You don’t want to smell the bait. But it is an interesting thing because you do have people who want to come and photograph that. Do you think it’s something that will continue to be trying to have both? [laughter]

[0:28:10]

CP: Yeah, I don’t see – there’s a lot of young people that are coming up through the apprentice program. It’s generational. A lot of these guys are from fishing families; they’ve been doing it for their whole lives, and they had relatives before them. So I don’t see the commercial fishing industry going away or anything like that. It will be a part of Bar Harbor.

GK: Yeah. Are these moorings out here passed down? How are they mostly –?

CP: They can be. Mooring law in Maine is very specific. [0:29:01] Most towns in Maine adopt local regulations based on state law, and Title 38 specifies that a commercial fishing – a mooring used for commercial fishing can be passed down to family members. It all has to do with harbors that have a waitlist for moorings. If somebody wants to put a mooring someplace in Bar Harbor waters where there’s not a waitlist or where they own shorefront property, no problem. Down here in the inner harbor, we have a very defined area for mooring, and it’s pretty well saturated right now, so we have a waitlist. If, say, a father retires, he can pass his mooring on to his son as long as his son is a commercial fisherman. [0:30:06] Or daughter, whichever. And it’s perfectly appropriate. If a pleasure boater decides to give a mooring up, it goes to the next person on the waitlist. It’s all pretty well spelled out in state law and town ordinance how the moorings are allotted.

GK: Yeah. I haven’t been to Bar Harbor in the summer in a long time, to tell you the truth, because it got too busy for me. [laughter]

CP: It got too busy for me, too, but I got to work down here.

GK: Yeah, I’m sure. I mean, you bring your car down every day, but you probably have a parking space?

CP: I do.

GK: That’s good. [laughter] I don’t remember, or I haven’t seen it in so long. What’s the harbor like? Are there a lot of pleasure cruises, people’s personal boats, too?

[0:31:10]

CP: We have quite a busy, what I would call, day recreational boat activity. People come over. We try to accommodate as many [telephone rings] as many people as possible.

GK: Here, I’ll pause this for a sec. [Recording paused.] We’ll un-pause this. If you can’t speak to this, that’s totally fine. Some of the tender stuff, they’re not necessarily experienced boat operators?.

CP: The biggest challenge to the whole cruise ship visitation equation is having, let’s say, less than highly qualified boat operators. [0:32:00] They do okay going from point A to point B, but sometimes there’s issues, and it’s all about what kind of experience do they have.

GK: So you’ve given them a route into the harbor?

CP: They’ve got definite routes that are laid out, and they should be staying within those routes and complying with other operating parameters, such as no wake in the inner harbor, things like that. It’s all that regulatory stuff.

GK: [laughter] It’s also crazy having people operating boats that aren’t necessarily that trained.

CP: Well, I will say they all have to have a permit to operate a tender. But it’s a lifeboat-type permit and not necessarily something that the US government issues. [0:33:04] It can be from other countries. The unfortunate thing is, most ports aren’t tender ports. So ships that get on the circuit of going to a tender port tend to be better at it with tender operations than ships that rarely go to a tendering port. So we sometimes have issues with ships that just aren’t used to it and not really good at it.

GK: And if the weather’s dicey at all, it could be tricky.

CP: Yeah, it’s just one more variable that has to be dealt with.

GK: What’s your winter –? What are you heading into right now? What does the winter look like here in terms of duties?

[0:34:00]

CP: So we’ll go into our fall haul-out season after the last cruise ship because we pull all the floats out that are in the harbor. They go up into the upper parking lot. But we can’t do that until the bus traffic settles down, which will be early November. It takes all of November into December to get that done. You got water shutoff. You got putting stuff away for the year, boats and whatnot. So, by the end of December, we’re pretty well in our winter mode for a couple of months – January, February. Gives me a chance to catch up on paperwork or prepare for the next season, just getting mooring registrations and things like that all laid out. There’s an intense budget season that goes on, where we, the town staff, particularly department heads, have to prepare budgets. [0:35:07] We have to attend meetings and things to go through that budget process, so there’s a lot to it. There’s training. There’s a yearly conference that I have to attend, usually in March. I got a lot of stuff to do.

GK: Is there maintenance stuff that you have to do? Is that on the harbormaster’s duties?

CP: Some maintenance, yes.

GK: Yeah.

CP: Yeah. So, you’re kind of a jack of all trades. You might go from cleaning crab body parts off of a float that a seagull was having [for] dinner to working on a multi-thousand- dollar budget, [0:36:01] and then scheduling a few cruise ships.

GK: Yeah, all over the – [laughter]

CP: It can be interesting.

GK: You live in Ellsworth?

CP: I live in Ellsworth, yes.

GK: And have you lived there for a long time?

CP: When I got transferred, I was the base XO [executive officer] at Southwest Harbor. I got ordered in ’92, and I retired from Southwest Harbor in ’96. So I bought my house in Ellsworth in ’92, and I’ve been there ever since.

GK: Wow.

CP: Longest I’ve ever lived anywhere.

GK: Cool. Is it weird not living in this town, or do you feel immersed in it anyway, working in Bar Harbor but not living in Bar Harbor?

CP: It wouldn’t matter where you lived. The job would still be the same – [0:37:02] – challenging. The only thing that would be better about living in Bar Harbor is the shorter commute.

GK: [laughter] Yeah, yeah.

CP: I moved so much during my childhood and during my twenty years in the Coast Guard; moving, to me, is old business. I’m happy to be where I am and used to what my routine is.

GK: The trafficked commute in the summertime – does it get congested on that commute?

CP: You’ve got to know the best routes to take and the timing because it’s all about when the Jackson Lab shift gets done, and people in Southwest Harbor get done. Because everybody’s heading for the bridge to get off the island, people that don’t live on the island, and can be very challenging to not get stuck in a traffic jam.

[0:38:08]

GK: Yeah, the bottleneck.

CP: Very much so. One little hiccup and traffic’s backed up for miles.

GK: Crazy.

CP: Yeah.

GK: I’m just curious if there’s a – I don’t know – a vision for the future or something that you’re hoping happens here. Or does it feel like things are clipping along at a good pace?

CP: As far as the inner harbor, I would like to see us do a little expansion over in Harborview Park, which is just west of Harbor Place, where the whale watch goes out of. There’s a town- owned stretch of waterfront that we could develop into something that’s scenic but functional to accommodate more small boats/day boat type traffic and skiffs, [0:39:11] so that people that want to just have a rowboat in the harbor could have a rowboat tied off to the dock and pay a fee and have a boat to use. That kind of thing I’d like to see in the inner harbor. I would also, as I was saying about the ferry terminal, [like to] see that developed into a site that really benefits the town and the people of the town and visitors to the town. As far as accommodation for yachts and other types of vessel activity, we have limited dock space that we rent out on a nightly basis to transient vessels. A lot of big yachts come in. [0:40:01] So we could expand that availability a little bit, too, up there at the Ferry Terminal.

GK: Yeah, yeah. Is there an outer harbor? Is it just Frenchman Bay? What do you call the – ? You say the inner harbor. What’s the –?

CP: Well, within the downtown area inside of Bar Island, Sheep Porcupine and Bald Porcupine, where the breakwater is. That’s the inner harbor, where most of the activity takes place. There are a number of different places along the coast of Bar Harbor, where there’s the yacht club, [where] COA [College of the Atlantic] has a mooring field; there’s a few moorings up in Hulls Cove, and then you get around the corner, and there’s Salsbury Cove, Sand Point area, Hadley Point beyond that. There’s areas where there’s boating activity that takes place. [0:41:03] Outside of the downtown harbor, it’s much less congested.

GK: Yeah, yeah. Is there anything happening with challenges or anything happening in town that I’m not hitting on that I should be asking you about?

CP: Not really anything I can think of. I think you’ve gotten –

GK: I’m mostly just curious about how things are developing, and if I talk to more people – I think it’s always good for me too because sometimes when you interview certain groups of people, you can get this perception, and when you interview certain groups people, you get this other perception. It’s good for me to have a grounding in what’s happening from your perspective.

CP: I’ve given you basically what my function is and my perspective. We, as the town of Bar Harbor, have never really gone out of our way to attract cruise visitation per se, where there’s other ports in the region that are clamoring – Canadian ports are spending millions of dollars on infrastructure. They want the cruise visitation. We basically deal with it as it comes. We don’t promote or want to prevent visitation, but we’re pretty maxed out. There is a threshold. So we try to deal with it the best we can.

[0:43:00]

GK: It seemed from those schedules you showed me for the coming years, there’s not like a tourism bureau of Bar Harbor that’s contacting these – they’re just contacting you. Is that right?

CP: That’s correct. I get reservation requests from a few shipping agencies that are going to represent these vessels within the port of Bar Harbor. If we can accommodate ships, I’ll get a request with twenty or thirty dates on it for, say, Norwegian Ships or Holland America ships, or Princess, and I just go to the schedule for that year and look at the dates, and if we can accommodate them, we accommodate them. But we don’t need to promote. [0:44:04] In fact, we’re just going with the requests as they come in. That’s how we’ve always done it.

GK: Yeah. It’s funny because what you’re referencing – I’ve done this work in Lubec and some other towns. Lubec really struggles economically, and Eastport’s trying to do the cruise ship thing maybe, or they were at one time. I don’t know how Lubec would do it. It’s such a tiny, little – have you been up there?

CP: Oh, yeah.

GK: It’s a teeny tiny little town. But there’s this perception – when I’m interviewing people, they always reference Bar Harbor, either as a success story or as like, “We don’t want to be like them.” It’s one or the other. I wonder – I don’t know. [0:45:02] How does that feel? Because it seems from your perspective that it’s just like, this is just what happened, and we’re trying to manage it. That’s what it sounds like.

CP: Oh, yeah. I think there’s other ports in Maine that have decided they are not interested in having cruise visitations. In fact, towns right on the island have basically voted to say, “We do not want cruise ships.” Bar Harbor, we have our anchorages, we have our daily capacities that we adhere to, and until I get told otherwise, that’s how we develop our scheduling and plans for the coming year. Some towns want more cruise ships. I know Portland would be happy with more cruise visitation. [0:46:02] Some towns don’t want it. It should be what the people of the town want. No matter what activity it is, there are going to be people that benefit from it and people that hate it. So that’s your range. We’ve got that in Bar Harbor, and we’ve got a lot of people that support the port, the aspect of having the cruise ship visitation. Because it benefits certain businesses and individuals. That’s not for my –

GK: It’s a complex – yeah.

CP: That’s not under my tutelage. I don’t have to worry about that kind of thing.

GK: You just got to make sure it’s working.

CP: Pretty much.

GK: Yeah. Right now, it feels like it is working.

[0:47:01]

CP: For better or for worse, it is working at this time, yes.

GK: Yeah, good. Well, thank you. Thanks. We did about an hour, so I think we can wrap it up by now.

CP: Holy mackerel. Yeah.

[00:47:14]