EAST ORLAND — It’s not surprising that a Beatle would figure in a radio show. But on this day at WERU-FM, coastal Maine’s community radio station, the Beatle makes an appearance not in song but in a seafaring yarn.
And it’s quite a yarn, one that reveals a pivotable moment in this Beatle’s life.
It’s 9:45 a.m. on the second Tuesday of the month, and that means Mike Joyce and Alan Sprague are in the talk show studio at the station (89.9 along the coast and 99.9 in Bangor), preparing to host “Boattalk,” their hour-long mug-up that starts at 10 a.m.
As Sprague, the unrepentant punster puts it in the intro, Boattalk is “a call-in show for people contemplating all things naval, with your rusty anchors, Mike Joyce and Alan Sprague, two old downwind sailors who may be tack-less, but we may be jibbing you, too.”
Sprague, 68, of Pretty Marsh, has been a radio host at the station for 20-plus years. His weekly music show, “The Extra Large Soul Show” (Thursdays at 2-4 p.m.) also is pun-laden. Joyce, 57, of Ellsworth has been with the station since it went on the air in 1988. His weekly music show “Barefoot Blues,” airs 9-10 a.m. on Wednesdays.
All hosts are volunteers.
Boattalk began airing in 1999. An earlier version of the show featured the late boatbuilder Joel White and maritime historian Maynard Bray, but it’s been Joyce and Sprague who have taken the concept and run with it.
And the concept is simple and by all available evidence, sound. Joyce remembers being in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia several years ago when someone who listens to the show online told him, “I don’t know anything about boats, but I love the show.”
Boats and boating seem to have a universal appeal, especially for those living on the coast.
Sprague and Joyce know their stuff. Sprague is an independent boat carpenter, specializing in restoring Hinckley boats.
Joyce also works independently, building and maintaining boats and, these days, spending a lot of time delivering boats. Summer residents hire him to captain their vessels from Florida to Maine, or from here to their winter homes. Joyce completes about a dozen such transports a year.
Both worked for Hinckley in the 1980s. The independent nature of their work today may be just what’s needed for a talk show; they’re not shy about sharing their opinions on the issues, nautical and otherwise.
Just before the show starts, Sprague and Joyce spread out newspaper and magazine stories on the table between them. The stories cover topics like the acidification of ocean waters, tuna that is not harvested “dolphin safe” as advertised, the closing of the shrimp season, the end of government-produced charts.
As the show begins, the topics generate chat between them.
“Every mariner should carry a paper chart,” Joyce asserts.
There’s also a personal story about a 10,000-year-old adze—a woodworking tool—that was hauled up by a scallop fisherman off Mount Desert Island. A marine archaeologist who was a guest on the radio show some months ago brought it to the studio.
“Alan and I held this stone adze,” Joyce related, “and we’re both woodworkers, and we both got chills.”
BEATLE ON BOARD
Today, though, the star is the phone guest, Hank Halsted, whom both Sprague and Joyce knew during their Hinckley days, but who now runs Northrop and Johnson, a yacht brokerage in Newport, R.I. And this is where the Beatle comes in.
Joyce asks Halsted, who has won the single-handed Newport to Bermuda race, what “the big blue,” or open ocean, means to him.
“There’s nothing nicer than consecutive days spent offshore with the elements,” he says. “The sun comes up in the morning, the sun goes down at night. The stars come up. You get into this marvelous rhythm of living with the elements.” In an age when many are electronically linked to the world, even at sea, Halsted says, “To me, ‘unconnected’ is highly sacred space.”
Joyce prompts Halsted to tell a story from 1980.
“So spring of 1980, you’re at the dock in Newport,” he says, “and the charter agent sends you some people.”
The would-be passenger, through the agent, wanted to know Halsted’s birth date and time, which struck him as odd, but he complied. Eventually, four younger people and one older—about 40—shows up at the dock, Halsted said.
“One of them had a guitar,” he continued. “The older guy, he’s sort of running the show, and he alluded to not being much of a sailor, and he wanted to be the cook.” The man had a small satchel with beans and rice, brought his own chopsticks and said he had a Japanese girlfriend.
“He kept dropping these hints, and I just wasn’t getting it,” Halsted recounted, but finally, he realizesd the man he knew as John was in fact John Lennon.
When bad weather kicked up, Halsted said the other passengers and crew “got real seasick, [but] John didn’t. He had a stomach of steel.”
Without autopilot, Halsted was at the helm in the bad weather for almost two days, and exhausted:
“I finally looked at John and said, ‘Hey, you got to come and drive this thing, big boy.’ And he said, ‘Hank, I can’t do that. I just got these skinny guitar-playing muscles.’ And I said, ‘John that ain’t the strength I’m looking for. Come up and drive this thing.'”
He coached Lennon for about 45 minutes, and “he had the feeling for it real fast.”
Halsted went below and slept for about three hours.
“I came on deck and he was a different man,” he recalled. “He had mastered it. He had gotten a heavy dose of ocean therapy. It centered him up real good.”
In Bermuda, Lennon began writing the songs that would become his last album.
“He took this trip for a reason,” Halsted continued. “He was looking for a piece of himself. The good news is, the ocean did for him what it does for everybody—it put him to the test.”
Most Boattalk guests won’t be able to top that story, but its elements—the sea as a source of sublime joy and life-threatening terror, the transcendent nature of facing it—often make appearances in the show. And that’s probably why its appeal is universal, even if the hosts, as Sprague puns, “flounder around” from time to time.