Midcoast ports see opportunity as Bar Harbor limits cruise ships

This story first appeared in the Midcoast Update, a newsletter published every Tuesday morning. Sign up here to receive stories about the midcoast delivered to your inbox each week, along with our other newsletters.

The Queen Mary 2, a cruise ship that’s the length of three football fields, loomed outside the breakwater in Rockland’s harbor early last week, as many of its 2,600 passengers came ashore and flooded downtown.

It’s an exclusive experience riding the Queen Mary 2, the only liner that still regularly crosses the Atlantic. It has a planetarium, a theater, a champagne bar, luxury shops and an art gallery with an original Salvador Dalí piece for sale. On the East Coast, its destinations include New York City, Boston and Halifax.

And on two occasions — first in 2018 and then again last week — it has come to Rockland.

That most recent visit was part of a subtle shift for midcoast Maine. At least two of its communities have recently been showing more openness to welcoming cruise ships, just as a tourism mecca farther up the coast — Bar Harbor — has begun enforcing new restrictions on them. Besides Rockland allowing more ships to visit this year, the town of Searsport is also considering becoming a cruise stop.

It’s too soon to say if this shift will continue. Those communities still haven’t made any big decisions regarding cruise ships. It’s also possible Bar Harbor’s controversial new restrictions could be loosened, and another community even farther up the coast, Eastport, is making its own bids for more cruise traffic.

But a modest uptick in cruise visits to the midcoast this summer could inform future increases. Rockland is on pace to see seven cruise ships this summer, up from the six that came last year, according to harbormaster Molly Eddy.

Eddy said Rockland has seen more interest from cruise ships this season after Bar Harbor implemented its restrictions, but she’s not sure if the city will continue to allow the same number.

The city will use feedback from this year to determine whether to modify the new rules, which increased from two to three the number of small ships allowed to berth in the harbor at any one time, and allowed one large ship of up to 3,000 passengers to berth per week during September and October.

“The number says ‘up to,’ so we can always go less, right?” Eddy said. “So we have the option of saying, ‘Hey, OK, so seven ships worked great this year. Maybe we try eight or nine next year.’ Or, ‘Actually, no, we’re gonna go down to four.’”

Officials in Searsport have discussed becoming a cruise ship stop for almost 20 years, but it has long taken a back seat to other, more pressing issues, according to Town Manager James Gillway.

The town has been making more headway on that concept in recent years, starting talks with two different cruise lines in 2022 and almost welcoming one large ship last year, though some residents had expressed concern about doing so.

“We were looking at smaller vessels and through the years, we’ve just kind of plugged away at it little by little,” Gillway said, noting the new restrictions in Bar Harbor. “We’re looking if there’s a desire to move forward and see if we can bring something in.”

The next steps for the town include building an ordinance to regulate the industry, securing necessary licenses and ensuring its port infrastructure is up to the task. Gillway said the town could commence most of those steps within the next year, though infrastructure upgrades could take longer. The town also expects to survey residents soon about their opinions on the project.

“There are also considerations like traffic, bus traffic, people who want to walk uptown. There’s a lot of aspects that the city is looking into,” Gillway said.

Back in Rockland, officials say that there are incentives to bring in cruise ships, including boosting sales at local businesses and collecting fees that help pay for harbor infrastructure improvements.

But they also note the burden a rush of cruise ship passengers can put on the community, and they have launched a new program called PortShare Promise Midcoast this season to help.

Modeled after similar programs in Portland and Juno, Alaska, it provides information and shuttles to cruise passengers to help them get around Rockland, and a feedback form and schedule for residents, according to Shannon Landwehr, president and CEO of the Pen Bay Chamber of Commerce.

“When you’ve got 3,000 people coming in for a four- or five-hour window, how do you move them through a very small area and not feel negative impact?” Landwehr said. “We were really trying to mitigate all of that.”

On the Queen Mary 2, Capt. Andrew Hall said in an interview that he’s hoping the cruise ship will return to Rockland more often, given that his passengers love the city’s scenery, history and art museums.

“We obviously look at all the reviews, what our guests say about places, and they do rate Maine very, very highly,” Hall said. “The scenery, of course, is immense here, isn’t it?”

Jules Walkup is a Report for America corps member. Additional support for this reporting is provided by BDN readers.