On the evening of September 18, 2025, about sixty people filled a room in Winter Harbor for a special Select Board meeting about a piece of property most of them had walked past a thousand times without much thought: the marina at Henry Cove. Town Manager Sara Liscomb had called the session to talk through what might happen if the site sold to a private buyer. Residents pushed back hard. They worried about the marina being "sequestered off" from public use, about a town that already couldn't meet demand for its own dockage, about a waiting list for moorings that kept growing while the property sat listed for $4.95 million.
Eight and a half months later, the sale happened. It happened quietly, in a single sentence buried in the minutes of a routine Selectmen's meeting on June 1, 2026: "The Marina has been purchased by a private entity." No name. No terms. No mention of what changes, if anything, for the ferry dock, the boat ramp, or the mooring field that sixty residents had shown up to defend.
What Actually Sits at Henry Cove
The property people were arguing over is 3.4 acres at the base of the Schoodic Peninsula, with more than 300 feet of water frontage, a large granite wharf, a boat ramp and float, and 13 registered moorings. Town records list the land and buildings, two storage facilities and a small three-bedroom house, at an assessed value of $840,500. It was on the market for nearly six times that.
The gap between those two numbers is the whole story of why the meeting drew a crowd. An assessed value reflects what the buildings and dirt are worth on paper. A $4.95 million asking price reflects what the location is worth to whoever wants to control the only all-tide boat launch near the center of town, plus the town's ferry connection to Bar Harbor. Those are two very different kinds of value, and only one of them shows up on a tax bill.
The site had been owned by Pettegrow Properties LLC since 2015, and by Anthony and Josette Pettegrow directly before that, going back to 2000. For a stretch in between, the Schoodic Institute held a 20-year lease on the property, with an option to renew for another 20. That lease ended around the time of the pandemic, and the site went back to functioning as a working boatyard and marina.
Every Function Packed Into 3.4 Acres
Part of what made the sale unsettling wasn't just the price. It was how much of the town's daily infrastructure ran through one small parcel:
- The base for the Bar Harbor-Winter Harbor ferry, operated by Downeast Windjammer Cruise Lines, which runs five daily round trips across Frenchman Bay from spring through fall
- An hourly stop for the Island Explorer bus, seven days a week in season
- The only all-tide launching ramp near the center of town, used by the Winter Harbor Volunteer Fire Department
- A small boat maintained on site by the Maine Marine Patrol
- Landing space local fishermen have used for scallops and urchins, and for a time, a bait company operating out of the same lot
None of that is written into a deed. It's the accumulated result of one property owner tolerating a lot of overlapping public use on private land, for a long time.
Steven Pagels, who owns the ferry company, put it plainly when asked about the Pettegrows as landlords. "They've been really good working with us," he said. "They very much believe in working waterfront. They obviously went out and did it. They put their money where their mouth is." He described himself as cautiously optimistic that whatever came next would preserve that arrangement, adding, "We've got to be creative about how to make it work. We've got to be collaborative to make these things fly."
A sale changes the owner, and a new owner may or may not continue the seller's long-standing practices, so the future of those arrangements was an open question.
The Year the Marina Sat For Sale
After the September meeting, the town explored its options: municipal acquisition, a public-private partnership, a nonprofit ownership model. Maine's Working Waterfront Access Protection Program, funded through the Land for Maine's Future Program, offered one possible source of matching funds, though where the rest of the money would come from was never resolved. By February 2026, reporters checking back in got the same answer from Liscomb each time: no updates, still awaiting a buyer.
That's five months of a town knowing a sale was likely and having no leverage over who bought it or what they'd do with it.
The Twist in May, and the One Line in June
On May 4, 2026, something shifted. Liscomb told selectmen there was a possible buyer who might transfer the marina to the town itself. No terms, no timeline, just an informational note in the minutes. For a moment, the outcome residents had asked for the previous September looked live again.
Four weeks later, on June 1, that possibility closed. The minutes record only that the marina had been purchased by a private entity. Whatever conversation happened between May and June, whoever the buyer turned out to be, none of it made it into the public record. The minutes for the two meetings, four weeks apart, record the possible town transfer and then the private purchase, and they do not describe the terms of either.
What a Mooring Permit Doesn't Cover
Here's the part that matters for anyone who keeps a boat in Winter Harbor and hasn't thought much about who owns which patch of water. The town runs its own mooring permit system through the Harbor Master, a $30 annual fee tied to the Winter Harbor Harbor Ordinance, with the 2025-2026 cycle already open for applications. That system governs harbor moorings generally.
The 13 registered moorings at the Marine Center are a different thing. They sit on privately owned water frontage, not town-managed harbor space, and they're the only moorings close to the town center available to visiting and recreational boaters, according to the reporting that came out of the original sale listing. A town permit doesn't extend to them. Access to those specific moorings has always depended on whoever owns the dock, which is exactly why the ownership question mattered enough to fill a room in September.
Nobody in the public record has said whether the new owner plans to keep offering those moorings, keep hosting the ferry, or keep letting the fire department use the ramp. The silence isn't necessarily a bad sign. It might just mean business as usual continues by default until someone decides to change it. But it does mean the answer to "what happens to the marina next season" currently lives with a private buyer nobody's named, not with any public commitment.
What hasn't changed, at least not yet, is the rest of the walk into town. The ferry ran its usual spring-through-fall schedule this year. The Island Explorer kept making its stops. The short walk from the dock still passes the same handful of restaurants and the Winter Harbor 5&10 that's been photographed for magazines since the 1990s. As the ferry season winds down for the year and the marina heads into its first off-season under new ownership, the town's mooring cycle and the site's private lease terms are two separate clocks running on two separate schedules, and only one of them is public.
Working waterfront doesn't stay working by accident. It takes an owner who wants it that way, and a town willing to ask hard questions when that's uncertain. If you're watching what happens next at Henry Cove, or thinking about property anywhere along this stretch of the Schoodic Peninsula, Laura Farr has spent years paying attention to exactly this kind of local detail. Let's Connect.