Articles

From the Deck Winter Picnic

Our first winter in Maine was the coldest we have seen so far. The thermometer had scarcely crept above zero for a week, and on Saturday with a brisk Northwest breeze, needlelike crystals of ice formed on the surface of the bay. They drifted down with the wind and piled up on the shore making

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Reverse!

Reverse gears have come a long way ahead in the last century. In 1925, a red-painted, single-cylinder Lathrop engine crouched in the cabin of our first sloop. Its cylinder was the size of a nail keg and its ignition system was a primitive make-and-break rig that ran on a battery controlled by a knife switch.

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Foggy morning

(With a nod to E. A. Poe) Once upon a morning early, when the fog lay thick and pearly, I sat wond’ring whether Sam had opened up the store. While I sat there almost napping, suddenly there came a tapping. Who could come so early rapping, rapping at my fish house door? ‘Tis some early

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Terrorism in Portland, 1775

On October 17, 1775, Lieutenant Henry Mowatt of the Royal Navy with four ships burned the town of Portland, then called Falmouth. There seemed to be no immediate military necessity for this act, and although there had been skirmishes at Concord and on Bunker Hill, there had been no declaration of independence and no declaration

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