When the first mate led me down the ladder and showed me my cabin, I had to refrain from asking: “Is that a small bed or a large drawer?” Another question bobbing in my mind on that cool Sunday evening in June was, “Should I pop the seasickness pill now or wait until we sail in the morning?”
Those and any other doubts I might have had about life on the schooner Nathaniel Bowditch vanished within a day of setting sail from Rockland on a four-day voyage among the far-flung islands of Penobscot Bay. By that time I was throwing around terms like jib and gaff and stay sail, my hands were calloused from hauling in lines (never say rope) and hoisting the anchor, and I had stopped worrying about where my next shower would come from or what port or island Capt. Gib Philbrick would have us to by nightfall.
When you sign on with one of the nine schooners of the Maine Windjammer Association, you throw convention — and sometimes comfort — to the wind in exchange for something all too rare in this era: genuine, unvarnished travel the way it was before anyone dreamed of putting vanity items in the bathroom, when a shore excursion was a pint of grog in a seafront tavern.
These tall ships, some more doughty than dashing but all an impressive sight under full sail, carry 20 to 44 passengers with a crew of 4 to 10. When they’re beating into the wind under a high summer sun, they bring back the period, a century ago, when schooners flocked on the horizon like clouds of butterflies, carrying lumber and fish and locally quarried granite for the monumental bridges and museums of Boston and New York that are landmark pieces today.
The Maine windjammers started doing rustic cruises in 1936, and today the nine members of the association and four or five independent craft — most of them historic, a few built in recent years just for windjamming — range the midcoast between Boothbay and Bar Harbor from late May to early October on runs of three to six days, charging $100 to $150 a day.
No two are alike, and you are quick to develop an allegiance to your own, though I wasn’t sure how well I’d bond with the Nathaniel Bowditch after a night in the No. 1 hole (forward cabin). All the windjammers go out on Monday morning so you spend Sunday night in the home port, either Rockland, Rockport or Camden. On a stroll of Rockland, I picked some just-budding lilacs and installed them in my cabin in a paper cup. Then I maneuvered myself limb by limb into the lower berth. From nearby came a voice: “Will the light bother you if I read for a while?” A pine wall separated my cabin from the next, narrowly open on top.
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m going to read myself. I’m told I snore sometimes. I hope it doesn’t happen tonight.”
“That’s OK, I know I snore.”
Did he ever. When I awoke the first time, the timbers shook with a low, mournful snuffle. I will say the sound was different each time, and so was my response: I cursed, I prayed, I knocked on the wall, and somehow I patched together enough sleep, so that when I climbed down the ladder to the galley at 7:30 a.m. for breakfast, I could joke about the night with my new mates.
It helped that the food was good, better than good: fresh blueberry muffins, scrambled eggs with Gruyere cheese, thick, crisp bacon, wheat toast, slices of cantaloupe, juice, dry cereal.
Stacie Kohler, a bona fide baker and chef, turned out a succession of meals that had us all purring and coming back for seconds: chowders and fish stews, roasts and lasagna, spinach salads, fruit salads, oven-baked breads.
The galley, my favorite hideaway, was a warm, skylighted lair with three wooden tables and benches. Kohler, from Colorado, and her aide, Jessie Johnson, from Idaho, welcomed your company at any time of day to talk books and life and travel.
“Just don’t come down here before 7 in the morning,” said Kohler. “I’m up at 5 o’clock stoking the oven and I’m bad company then.”
I’m convinced that no matter what the winds and weather and ports of call, a windjammer is only as good as its cook and skipper. Capt. Philbrick, a bearish man of 6-foot-4 with a laugh that could be heard the length of his 82-foot deck, was a captain out of some storybook I must have read. He talked with the “hahd” vowels of northern Maine, and could he talk. He stood all day at the helm spinning the wheel and nattering with his fascinated company, seldom fewer than three, on whatever subject the winds tossed him, not just seafaring stuff but how the Maine Militia had recently been seen taking target practice on the Penobscot River, how the Italians came up from New York to teach the locals of Stonington the art of stonecutting, the best way to attack a one-three-one zone defense (he’d been a basketball coach at the University of Maine).
Philbrick, 60, treated the Bowditch like a beloved vintage car, and he bristled slightly if you questioned her speed or ability to run without its engine.
“Oh, this is a blue water boat, she was built for speed and deep seas,” he said of the 24-passenger schooner that was launched in 1922 as a racer bred to win the Newport-Bermuda race. She went through several incarnations and name changes, and during World War II served in something called Hooligan’s Navy, stealing up and down the coast and out to the Azores on surveillance for Nazi subs.
By the time Philbrick — a hoops coach, fishing guide and Maine lake sailor — got her in 1975 she was the Nathaniel Bowditch, named for the early Salem, Mass., navigational pioneer, and she needed a lot of work.
Over the years he has had to replace almost every plank and beam, but even as he has made improvements he has refused to tart her up. The pine deck, no shiny sweep of polished wood, shows splotches of resin. Other schooners, especially those built in recent times for cruising, have hot showers below decks; the Bowditch has a makeshift shower on deck, but in the cool days of early June no one asked that it be rigged up. You took a sponge bath in one of the two bathroom stalls below.
These tall ships with their flocks of sails were built for sailing, and sailing is what you do from 10 a.m. or so until late afternoon when the captain, following the wind and his whim, puts in to a harbor or cove for the night.
There is no daily calendar of events; you can read or snooze or chat with new friends, and you are encouraged to help with the sailing chores. The deck crew numbered three — first mate Sean Wadsworth, a young salt out of New Hampshire, second mate Rachel Hamilton of New Hampshire and only 18, but well schooled at sea, and Denny Davis, a quiet Kentuckian. They listened for Philbrick’s throaty commands from the helm and we jumped in to help, hoisting sails, setting jibs, hauling up the anchor, “sweating out” the lines.
My favorite command, a new one on me, came the first afternoon as we nosed into Bucks Harbor. “Scandalize the fore sail!” Philbrick yelled. He was telling Wadsworth to lower the gaff so we could begin to furl the main sail, a total team effort that reminded me of trying to fold laundry sheets with my wife.
“Very, very good,” shouted Philbrick, ever the confidence-instilling coach. “It’s usually the 4th of July before we accomplish a maneuver like that.”
There were only 11 passengers (20 is the usual), but they were an interesting mix. Among them were Ned Rogers, a retired credit manager from Mundelein, Ill., whose wife had granted him a furlough to fill out his dream of sailing on a windjammer; Pat and Ed Meehan of New Providence, R.I., veteran windjammers; Alan Corindia, a Keene, N.H., schools official who contributed his handmade maple syrup to Kohler’s galley, and Turner Bratton, a divorced dad from Texarkana, Texas, with his sons Forrest, 11, and Austin, 13.
Windjamming isn’t actively promoted as a family vacation (not enough to do for older kids, too dangerous for wee ones), but the Bratton brothers proved it should or could be. They were the most active hands aboard, peeling carrots in the galley, fetching Kohler produce from the ice chests on deck, sketching, reading, playing games, and never, ever whining or looking bored.
From our anchorage in Buck’s Harbor, you could see an ample yellow house on a grassy hill. It belongs, said Philbrick, to Archibald Cox, of Watergate fame.
Two other Maine schooners were tied up for the night in the quiet harbor. After dinner (lasagna, mixed salad, garlic bread) some of us took the dingy ashore. The port of Buck’s Harbor is a key target for the windjammers every other Tuesday night, when the main street is roped off and people dance to a steel band, Flash in the Pans. We arrived as the general store and town were closing up, but it was good to stretch and to sniff the lilacs and apple blossoms. Beside a worn house I saw a circa 1947 Oldsmobile Hydro-matic, tired and worn itself but almost as pretty as an old schooner.
By the next morning, my worries about sleep and seasickness were over. When I’d asked if I or the snoring passenger could be moved, Philbrick’s answer was to hand me two waxy earplugs. Well, they worked, though it helped that the racket subsided. On my shelf of a bed, lulled by the schooner’s gentle sway, I slept a deep eight hours. As for mal de mer, it’s a remote threat. In the sheltering confines of Penobscot Bay with its thousands of islands, the seas are generally calm, though Philbrick improved our chances by staying in the inner bay in search of warmer air (and thus calmer water).
Two or three bald eagles were soaring over Cox’s house when we puttered out of Bucks Harbor. Later we saw seals playing on rocks, (though no whales or porpoises this trip), and other gorgeous schooners came and went. The weather grew cold in the afternoon, but the sailing was vigorous and spray-tossed, and when I needed a break I went down to the galley and read and chatted with Kohler, who was making gingerbread and reading us snippets of Spalding Gray’s “Impossible Vacation.”
By 4 p.m. we were nosing into Stonington, a picturesque lobstering and stone-cutting port. “Isn’t that a Grandma Moses fishing village?” gushed Philbrick.
Davis took a few of us in by dingy. I strolled the main street and stopped for a cappuccino at a pretty little hotel, Inn on the Harbor, whose 13 rooms are named for Maine windjammers. It wasn’t the injection of caffeine or contemporaneity I needed. It was the warmth. From the inn I could see the sail-shorn Nathaniel Bowditch. Tomorrow we’d have a lobster dinner on a remote island, and the next day we’d be beating it back to Rockland, back to the 1990s. It was too soon. How hooked was I on windjamming? I was having warm cozy feelings for my drawer of a bed.
BOOKING A MAINE WINDJAMMER
There are nine members of the Maine Windjammer Association–Nathaniel Bowditch, Angelique, Grace Bailey, J.& E. Riggin, Lewis R. French, Mary Day, Mercantile, Timberwind, Victory Chimes.
Timberwind takes the fewest number of passengers, 20; Victory Chimes the most, 44. Most of the windjammers have several showers below deck (though none private), and most cabins have a tap and basin.
The season runs from end of May to early October, with three- to six-day cruises at an average of $335 to $725, meals included.
This summer, Timberwind and its captain, Rick Miles, will experiment with a few family and singles cruises out of Rockport. July will be an active month for the windjammers. On the 7th, the association will celebrate its 20th anniversary in Buck’s Harbor with a street dance; July 11-13, Rockland Schooner Days Festival; July 14, Schooner Gam, an evening of fun and festivities at a site to be selected based on weather and whim; July 25-26, Governor’s Cup Windjammer Regatta, a race pitting a dozen windjammers.
To get to windjammer country you can fly to Boston and on to Rockland with Colgan Air Service. Augusta and Portland are an easy drive to Camden, Rockland and Rockport, the three main bases.
Call or write Maine Windjammer Association, Box 1144P, Blue Hill, Maine 04614; 800-807-WIND. For the Nathaniel Bowditch, it’s 800-288-4098.
Another source for windjammer vacations is North End Shipyard Schooners. The company’s schooners are the Heritage (carries 33 passengers); Isaac H. Evans (25 passengers); and American Eagle (28 passengers). There are three-, four-, six- and 10-day cruises. Prices range from $390-$1,175 per person.
For more information, contact North End Shipyard Schooners, P.O. Box 482, Rockland, Maine 04841; 800-648-4544.
