Allen Daggett has been buying and selling lobster off the Cape Porpoise Pier for 51 years. He's also a Kennebunkport selectman, which means he's spent the better part of two years watching his own town tear up the dock he's worked his whole career, then rebuild it from the pilings up. When it was finally done this June, his verdict was simple: it's a state-of-the-art pier.
That's the headline most people already caught, somewhere between the town's low-key ribbon cutting and the local news roundup. What's easy to miss is that the reopening didn't just restore the pier you remembered. It handed you a slightly different Cape Porpoise, one where two of the three restaurants on Bickford Island answer to new names, and the dock itself sits built for a coastline that keeps flooding higher than it used to.
Two Years, $8.6 Million, and a Dock Built to Outlast the Next Storm
The Cape Porpoise Pier renovation broke ground in the fall of 2024, designed by GEI Consultants and built by Prock Marine, with a scope that went well past patching cracks. Crews replaced the aging bait shed, built a new harbormaster office, and expanded and rehabilitated the commercial pier that supports roughly 50 commercial fishing vessels working out of this harbor. The town covered part of the cost itself, with the rest coming through the Maine Department of Transportation's Small Harbor Improvement Program and the Working Waterfront Resiliency Grant Program.
Nearly two years of in-water and on-land construction meant parking and access to Bickford Island were unreliable for anyone who fishes, eats, or just likes to walk out to the point. The town marked the project's completion with a brief ceremony in late June, deliberately low-fanfare given how long the disruption had dragged on. Even now, the pier isn't fully buttoned up. Crews are still finishing the north pilings, which have to be embedded in rock, along with the fuel stations and a solar panel installation still to come.
The detail that matters most for anyone who lives near the water: the new dock was built two feet higher than the one it replaced, specifically to avoid the kind of high-water flooding Cape Porpoise saw in the winter of 2024. Town Manager Laurie Smith put the intent behind the whole project plainly.
"This project wasn't about building a bigger pier, it was about preserving one of Maine's iconic working waterfronts."
Two feet doesn't sound like much until you consider what it protects. It's the difference between a fishing fleet that keeps unloading through a storm surge and one that has to wait it out, and between a bait shed that survives a hard winter and one the town has to consider demolishing, which is roughly where the old shed had landed before this project started.
The Same Buildings, Three Different Names
Bickford Island has held three restaurants for as long as most people can remember, and that's still true. What's changed is which two of them still go by the names you'd expect.
- Pier 77 is now Ultramar, a seafood grill and raw bar under the direction of chef German Luccareli.
- The Ramp is now Casa Seventy Seven Osteria, also run by Luccareli, leaning Italian where its predecessor leaned toward pub fare and antique sports memorabilia.
- Cape Pier Chowder House hasn't changed a thing. It's still Daggett's operation, still supplied daily by Cape Porpoise Lobster Company, still the place with red picnic tables and a view of the working boats.
That's a lot of turnover for a stretch of dock you can walk end to end in under two minutes. Pier 77 built its reputation over more than a decade as the elegant, white-tablecloth half of a two-restaurant pairing with The Ramp next door. If your mental map still has that pairing intact, the reopened pier is going to look right and taste different.
Luccareli's name shows up a third time just up the road at The Lost Fire, his wood-fired, Patagonia-style barbecue spot in the village proper. Between three kitchens, one chef now sets a good part of the culinary tone for this whole corner of Kennebunkport, which is a different kind of consolidation than the harbor itself just went through, but it's happening on the same timeline. If you're wandering past the pier into the village center, Musette is worth knowing too, a small cafe run by chef Jonathan Cartright, formerly of the White Barn Inn's kitchen.
Back on the Water in Time for the Rest of August
The timing works out well for anyone who's been avoiding the area during construction. There's still plenty on the calendar worth walking out for. Outdoor Movie Night returns to Prospect Reserve at Goose Rocks Beach on August 18, followed the next day by the Maine Makers Mini Market at the Nonantum and Ice Cream Night at the Seashore Trolley Museum. Superhero and Princess Weekend takes over the Trolley Museum on August 22, and Pokey LaFarge plays Vinegar Hill Music Theatre on August 26.
If the pier's last few finishing touches have you looking for somewhere else to walk in the meantime, the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust stewards 12 harbor islands and maintains roughly 30 miles of trail across town, land protected around the same idea driving the pier project: protect the working waterfront and the land around it for the people who actually use it day to day.
Cape Porpoise doesn't usually change this much on purpose. Most years it just weathers, the way the shingles do. This year it got rebuilt higher, renamed twice on the same short stretch of dock, and handed back to the people who never stopped fishing off it in the first place. Whether you end up back at the Chowder House out of habit or trying the raw bar at Ultramar for the first time, the walk out to Bickford Island is worth taking again now that the fencing's finally down.
If you want more of what's actually changing in the neighborhoods you already call home, before it shows up secondhand somewhere else, Adam Parent and the LUX Group keep a closer eye on this stretch of the Maine coast than most.
