Sam Smith – Although I covered Washington for over a half century, I never ran into a story like this, My wife and I now live in a small Maine town, three miles down a point of land on the edge of a bay that hosts scores of islands. It’s mostly farmland and small houses along with a state park. Recently I’ve been counting the cars that pass me on the point road in the opposite direction and the most I’ve been able to come up with is 15 or about one every thousand feet.
So I was a little startled to learn that another DC guy named Joe Biden was about to visit our point for a speech at a barn about halfway down the road and that several hundred visitors were expected.
Coming back from town a couple of hours before his visit I explained to a local cop where I was headed and he had waved me on. But my wife had chartered a small boat with a captain to take a visiting son and his family (which included two teenage girls) off for an island picnic. On their way home they were stopped by a high speed Coast Guard craft complete with a gun at its bow. The CG vessel was shortly joined by another occupied by a couple of state police officers.
Lacking any ID, as is typical for a mid day lunch cruise, had raised concerns and it was a good 20 minutes before my family was allowed to head home closely followed by the Maine state police.
I’ve been sailing on these waters for over 70 years and served in the Coast Guard, but never heard of anything like this. Our bay used to be where you went to get away from such problems, but apparently not anymore.
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