Sebago Lake on camera, and the Maine lakes still in colour this week
The camera at the south end of Sebago Lake looks out across Jordan Bay, which the Portland Water District puts at two miles wide, and this is the week to have it open. Maine's forest service publishes a foliage report every Wednesday, and the one for the week of 2026-10-14 has Zone 1, which is Portland and the Sebago shore, at peak with moderate leaf drop. Two hundred kilometres north it is already over. The same report has Zone 5, which is Greenville and Rangeley, past peak with high leaf drop, so the lake cameras up there are looking at bare branches whilst the southern ones are still in colour.
If you searched for a Sebago Lake webcam you want to know what the picture actually shows and whether it will be there when you look. Here is what each one was doing last night.
The one camera on the lake
Limington: Maine - Sebago Lake - Jordan Bay sits at 43.8540, -70.5712 and is the only camera we carry on Sebago itself. It is a modest 704 by 480, and it burns SebagoCam LIVE and the full date into a black bar along the top, which is the useful habit. I pulled a frame at 01:20 UTC this morning and got 6,332 bytes of dark water, the far shore unlit, one faint light low on the right.
Two things are worth knowing before you rely on it. It runs a ten minute cycle, not a continuous one: consecutive frames were stamped 10:22:39 PM and 10:32:39 PM, exactly 600 seconds apart, and polling it every 45 seconds across five minutes caught exactly one change. And the clock is fast. That 10:32:39 PM frame reached me at 01:20 UTC, which is 21:20 Eastern, so the stamp was running about 72 minutes ahead of the lake it is pointing at. Use it for the picture, not for the time.
What it will not give you is a long evening. Sunrise at those coordinates today is 06:56 and sunset is 17:58 Eastern, eleven hours and two minutes of daylight, and tomorrow is 173 seconds shorter again.
The lakes that are good after dark
The best night frame in Maine last night was not on Sebago at all. Kezar Lake at Lovell, about 47 km northwest, runs at 1920 by 1080 and is sensitive enough to hold stars. The 09:18:03 PM frame has the White Mountain foothills as a flat black ridge with a faint glow behind them, a scatter of stars above, a lit boat out on the water with its reflection running down toward the camera, and a birch in the top right corner lit white by whatever light the camera has. It is stamped kezarwatershed.org in the bottom left. It runs the same ten minute cycle as Sebago and its clock is honest: the 09:18:03 frame arrived two minutes after it was taken.
Schoodic Lake at Lake View Landing does something I wish more cameras did and prints the weather into the frame. At 09:11 last night it read 39.0 degrees Fahrenheit, wind variable at 0.0 mph, with the date in the top left and the readout along the bottom. Ten minutes later it had not moved a tenth of a degree. Forty degrees and no wind in mid-October is frost weather, and on that camera you can watch it arrive. Its cycle is the loosest of the three: those two frames were 573 seconds apart, not 600, so it is near ten minutes rather than on it.
The ones that stop at dusk
Beaver Cove Marina on Moosehead Lake is the prettiest frame of the set and it is also the one that was hours old when I looked. Its last picture of the day is stamped 06:08:30 PM, 44.1 degrees and wind northwest at 10.0 mph: boats still in their slips, grey docks running out into the water, spruce along the far shore and the last of the sun behind it. Sunset at Beaver Cove was 17:54:25 Eastern, so the camera gave up fourteen minutes after the sun did. I polled it twelve times across eight and a half minutes and got a byte-identical file every time.
That is not a fault, it is just what a daylight camera is, and it tells you when to look: the hour before sunset is when that one earns its place.
Live video on the northern lakes
Three of the Maine lake cameras are not stills at all but continuous YouTube streams, and all three come from the same operator, Boston and Maine Live. Moosehead Lake at Greenville sits at the southern end of the lake, 195 km north of the Sebago camera. Moosehead at Rockwood is the Birches Resort camera on the far side of the lake. Sebec Lake is at Granny's Wine Cellar at Merrill's Marina, which is the name the stream carries. All three were live when I checked this morning. You watch them rather than reload them, which makes them the ones to open if you want to see weather move rather than a frame of it.
There is nothing public we carry on the Naples or Windham shore of Sebago, which is the busy end, so the Jordan Bay camera is doing all the work for a lake twelve miles long.
What I will do next
The ten minute cycle is the number I want to nail down properly. Two cameras landing on exactly 600 seconds and a third coming in at 573 is suggestive, not settled, and the honest way to close it is a full day of samples rather than eight minutes of them. I will take one camera, poll it every thirty seconds for twenty four hours, and report the distribution of the gaps.
The thing I cannot work out from here is the clock. Sebago's stamp was 72 minutes ahead and Kezar's was right, and both cameras reach us through the same mirror, so the drift belongs to the camera and not to the path. Whether a stamp that far out is worth flagging to a viewer, or whether people reading a lake camera simply do not care what minute it is, I genuinely do not know. If you run a camera with a burnt-in clock, I would like to know how often you check it against anything.