Yes, New Hampshire Has Islands With Water This Blue — And You Can Sail Right Out to Them
Here’s a fact that surprises almost everyone who’s just moved here: New Hampshire has islands. Real ones, five to seven miles off the Seacoast, with water that turns a startling turquoise on a clear summer day. They’re called the Isles of Shoals, and once you live here, they stop being a “someday” trip and start being a “let’s go this weekend” trip.
The Isles of Shoals are a cluster of nine small islands straddling the NH/Maine border, with Star Island as the main draw on our side. It’s the second-largest of the group, home to the century-old Oceanic Hotel, the Gosport Village ruins, and a two-hundred-year-old stone chapel that’s still standing after everything the Atlantic has thrown at it. In the 1800s, painters and poets colonized the place before conferences did — Celia Thaxter hosted Childe Hassam and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow here, and you can still feel why artists picked this rock in the ocean over anywhere else.
Getting out there is the easy part now that you’re local. Ferries run from Portsmouth (Isles of Shoals Steamship Co.) and from Rye Harbor (the Uncle Oscar), and most day trips give you a few hours to walk the island, tour the chapel, and just sit with that improbably clear water. Pack a lunch, bring good shoes for the granite ledges, and go before the season turns — this is one you’ll want to make an annual thing.
