On a warm summer afternoon, Mr. Alfred West, among several other sightseers from away, stood on the co-op wharf watching the two “quaint” lobster boats lying alongside the lobster car below. A faint smell of salt bait pervaded the scene.
The boats were each about 30 feet long with high, sharp bows, a little coop to shelter the skipper, a davit and a power winch for hauling traps, a big cockpit and a short, wide stern deck. They were rather battered looking, for they were workboats and were used hard. Pete, skipper of the boat lying ahead, had unloaded his catch of snapping green lobsters into a galvanized tub standing on the scale. He held the nozzle of the fuel hose in the fill pipe of his boat and watched the meter whirl away his profit.
“Norm, how’re we goin’ to make a living lobstering with the price of diesel creeping up to five dollars a gallon?”
“Price of lobsters has to go up, doesn’t it Pop” said Norm, with a glance at the buyer by the scale.
“Have to,” agreed Pop. “If people want to eat lobsters, they will have to pay what it costs to catch lobsters.”
“But what if they can’t or won’t pay the price?’
“Then we all get squeezed,” said Pop glumly.
“Or find a cheaper way to catch lobsters,” put in Pete.
A watcher wearing new dungarees and a white shirt called down from the wharf above, “The wind is free. Why can’t you catch lobsters from a sailboat? The old timers did and they made money.” No one answered. Pop was writing something down in his cash book. Pete was carefully screwing down the deck plate over his fill pipe. Norman was busy casting off his lines to move his boat ahead.
Undaunted by the chilly silence, the visitor continued. “They built boats designed for fishing – Friendship sloops – and they went all winter too. And those boats cost under a thousand dollars to build. You ought to see the model of one they have in the museum in Bath. With no fuel costs, you could compete with other fishermen.”
Norman looked up at the smiling visitor and turned to Pop. “Give me a turn at that poverty pipe,” will you Pop..” He jammed the nozzle down the fill pipe in his boat. The visitor aimed his camera at the stern of Pete’s departing boat, Old Squaw.
“Named her after his wife,” muttered Pop.
After dinner before a warm fire, Alfred West, on vacation from the bank, and his high school graduate son, Ed, contemplated the day’s discoveries.
“See you changed your pants, Dad. You don’t like those dungarees?”
“Too stiff, even if they help to make me look like a resident.”
“You sure got a brush off from those two fishermen. What was that all about?”
“I suggested they pick up their pots in a sailboat. Now I know those two old guys couldn’t catch enough lobsters in a week from a sailboat to make a day’s pay. Still, the wind is free and we ought to be able to use it somehow to move a boat.” They watched the fire a while in silence.
Ed’s glance fell on an old photograph of a coasting schooner framed above the mantel. “How about a schooner?”
“It would cost a lot to build one.”
“Yes, but with no fuel costs, you could move a lot of freight for little money.”
“What would you move?”
“What the old vessels used to move: lumber, lime and cement, granite, kerosene in cans to the south and coal, lumber, cloth, molasses, even rum, north. We could build a small schooner to start with and get rich guys and historical societies to pitch in.”
“Maybe we’ve got something there, Ed. Maybe old TJ at the bank would give us a loan. What about crew?”
“Lots of guys would like to go for sea experience. And there are the people who sail these dude schooners in the summer who might be glad of a year-round job. You could likely get the captain of one to be captain on our boat.”
“Maybe a few passengers in the summer or in southern waters.” The project gained momentum. “Maybe the State or even the Federal government would give us a grant.”
Addie, who was helping Mrs. West in the kitchen, broke in. “There was a fellow tried that a while ago. Had a schooner built up to Thomaston. Name of Ackerman or something like that. He lost her on her first voyage.”
“How was that?”
“Talk to the lady at the Historical Society. She is great on Maine history.”
Next night: Our schooner project is a loser, Ed. Same thing I got the cold shoulder for from the fishermen yesterday. We didn’t know what we wee talking about. The lady at the Historical Society found in the archives a 1980 WoodenBoat magazine written by Peter Spectre, who had done a thorough research job on the John F. Leavitt.
“What happened? Did she get shipwrecked?”
“No. Abandoned at sea.”
“Why?”
“Ignorance and lack of experience. It seems her skipper, Ned Ackerman, had much the same idea as we did, but he went ahead and had a good little schooner built and had her loaded with lumber and chemicals for Haiti. To dodge government regulations, they made her too small to be really profitable. They should have known better than to have started out in the winter and they ran into a bad storm. They had a gybe, whatever that is. They got the foresail all tangled up somehow. A spare mast which they had tied on the deck, got loose and banged into the boat and probably made it leak, and they couldn’t make her heave to.”
“What’s ‘heave to’?”
“Make her sail so she pointed into the waves. She wallowed in the trough of the sea. To avoid government regulations, they had no engine. A barrel of oil they had for the winch spilled all over the deck and made it too slippery to walk on. Ackerman had no captain’s license and the crew were summer sailors. People with the skills and experience of old-time sailors would have known better than to sail in the winter, could have avoided most of their troubles and dealt with the rest. It was all too much. They radioed for help and the Coast Guard took them off in a helicopter.
“And just let the schooner float away?”
“I guess so.”
The next day Mr. West went down to the co-op wharf dressed like a banker on vacation, not trying to be anything else, with his ears open and his mouth shut.
A regular contributor to Working Waterfront, Roger F. Duncan is author of Maine: A Maritime History and other books.