Boating and Water Access in Southwest Harbor, Maine

Town Docks and Public Access

The Town of Southwest Harbor operates three public waterfront facilities: the upper and lower town docks in the village center, and the Manset dock across the harbor. All three took real, documented storm damage in the January 2024 storm sequence and have undergone (or are undergoing) FEMA- and state-funded repair -- see the Dock & Pier Guide page for repair-specific detail. This research did not find a published, current mooring-fee schedule or a specific mooring-waitlist length for Southwest Harbor's public mooring field, and a boat owner should confirm current availability and cost directly with the town's harbormaster.

Dock space in this harbor is not purely recreational by design. The Upper Town Dock on Clark Point Road hosted the Cranberry Cove Ferry's passenger-boarding operation for roughly 20 years before the town's Select Board, in January 2022, decided the ferry could no longer use that dock after July 1 of that year -- a real, documented example of how public-dock space here gets actively contested between commercial fishing, ferry, and recreational uses rather than being an unlimited shared resource. Anyone planning to rely on town-dock access for a private boat should treat current availability as something to verify locally, not assume from an old listing or a prior season's experience.

Hinckley and Morris Yachts: A Nationally Significant Service Address -- With a Correction

The Hinckley Company was founded in Southwest Harbor in 1928, originally as the Manset Boatyard servicing local lobster boats and summer residents' yachts, and it became a pioneer of fiberglass boat construction with its first fiberglass model in 1959. It is worth being precise here, because this is exactly the kind of fact easy to get wrong: Hinckley's corporate headquarters today is in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, not Southwest Harbor. What Southwest Harbor retains is the company's birthplace and a genuine, currently operating Hinckley Yacht Services facility at 130 Shore Road in Manset -- real service and repair capacity, just not the current corporate address. Morris Yachts, a semi-custom sailboat builder founded in 1972 by Tom Morris and now part of The Hinckley Company, also builds and services boats in the Southwest Harbor/Mount Desert Island area.

For a boat owner, the practical upshot is unaffected by the headquarters distinction: genuine, high-caliber marine service and repair capacity is available locally at the Shore Road yard, a real differentiator from many small coastal Maine towns that rely on a much smaller-scale boatyard or none at all. But a buyer or writer describing this market should say Hinckley was founded here and still services boats here, not that the company is headquartered here -- the two are different claims, and only the first is currently accurate.

A Real, Active Working Harbor -- What That Means for Recreational Boaters

Roughly 50 active lobster-permit holders fish out of Southwest Harbor's port, which landed $11.2 million in total catch in a recent reported year -- the seventh-highest total of any Maine port that year. A recreational boater here should expect genuine commercial-fishing traffic, particularly in early morning hours and during peak lobster season, and should expect the harbor's public docks and channels to prioritize working-waterfront access alongside recreational use, not exclusively cater to pleasure boating. The town's 2017 cruise-ship moratorium (see the hub page and What Nobody Tells You) means this harbor does not see cruise-ship traffic, but it does see real, active commercial fishing traffic year-round.

A Real, Current Ferry: The Cranberry Cove Ferry

Contrary to an easy assumption that all Cranberry Isles ferry service runs out of Northeast Harbor, Southwest Harbor has its own genuine, currently operating passenger ferry to the Cranberry Isles: the Cranberry Cove Ferry. Its dock has moved twice in recent years -- for roughly 20 years it boarded from the Upper Town Dock on Clark Point Road, then relocated to Beal's Lobster Pier (also on Clark Point Road) in 2022, and most recently moved again to 126 Clark Point Road (the former MDI Lobster pier) starting with the 2026 season, a change made to ease dockside congestion and parking. It runs seasonally, from Memorial Day weekend through roughly October 1, with several trips a day (fewer in the spring and fall shoulder weeks) -- a real, bookable way to reach Great Cranberry Island and Islesford directly from Southwest Harbor, not just from Northeast Harbor's separate Beal & Bunker mailboat service.

Southwest Harbor also sits near the mouth of Somes Sound, the glacially carved "fjard" (a smaller, shallower feature than a true fjord, despite the popular "only fjord on the East Coast" label) that nearly splits Mount Desert Island in two -- genuinely scenic boating water, though this page does not claim the Sound itself as exclusively Southwest Harbor's, since its head, at Somesville, belongs to the Town of Mount Desert. Confirm current Cranberry Cove Ferry fares, schedule, and parking directly before planning a specific trip, since seasonal ferry schedules shift year to year.