Hands-On, Feet Up on a Schooner Sail

The first mate and I waded into the sea with a basket, scooping up salt-fragrant green handfuls of clean, knobby seaweed for the lobster bake.

When the wood fire in the beach pit was white-hot and crumbling, we placed the seaweed on top and fanned out ears of sweet corn still in their silky husks, heaps of slick black mussels bristling with limpets and a mass of dappled, dark green lobsters. A quart of melted butter bubbled in a pot; a cooler held soft drinks and beer. The ship’s dozen passengers spread out on the sand, savored the waves and fire, sipped and waited.

While the food steamed, I walked over a sandy rise and away from the cove where our schooner, the Kathryn B., rocked at anchor. Slipping off my shorts and sweatshirt, I stepped into another cove in my tank suit and reef-walking shoes. When the water was thigh-deep, I bent over and floated, watching the vast mosaic of the sea bed--a pale lemon-colored crab, wide ruffled ribbons of kelp, snails striped like cinnamon Christmas candies, iridescent flashes of small fish.

I had sailed Penobscot Bay on the Kathryn B. previously, in the warmth of a Down East summer. This time I wanted to see what it was like in autumn, timing my visit for a full moon and the color change in the forests sloping down to the bay.

So for a long weekend in October, my friends Linda Strande and Judy Olausen and I joined others on this replica of a 19th century Yankee coasting schooner.

Maine claims more islands--4,617 by some counts--than other states on the Atlantic coast; 1,800 of them lie in Penobscot Bay, between Port Clyde in the west and Brooklin in the east; only 400 are larger than an acre.

The cove where I floated was a speck in the bay’s 1,000 miles of corrugated coastline, which hold a forest of seaweed and underwater canyons providing a haven for colonies of fish, sea urchins, clams, crabs and lobsters.

I stood up and heard the keening whistles and peeping of unseen sea birds, the flap of the ship’s enormous red and white pennant. Back over the sandy rise, my fellow passengers were happily swapping recipes for lobster, now heated to a bright red.

“We could split ‘em like the French do in the West Indies and put ‘em on the barbie,” said our captain, Gordon Baxter.

Gordon and his wife, Kathryn, built their schooner in 1995 with an eye to history, safety and the cruising comfort of 10 to 12 passengers. The ship’s hull is steel instead of wood; three 63-foot masts carry 3,000 square feet of sail, including a main sail, mizzen sail, foresail and several staysails.

The comforts below the 80-foot deck--large berths, airy private cabins with private heads (toilets) and showers--are uncommon in the schooner cruising world, where older, more traditional ships carry as many as 30 passengers, cook with a wood stove and may have showers and a head on deck.

The fleet that sails Penobscot includes a few replicas like the Kathryn B. as well as more original schooners than any place else in the country. Only about 18 authentic vessels survive, a remnant of the thousands of originals.

The freight trucks of their day, Yankee coasting schooners hauled coal, lime, cod, granite, timber, potatoes and passengers along the coast until they were supplanted by steamships and railroads in the early 1900s. The ships we pass or glimpse--including the Stephen Taber and the Lewis R. French, both launched in 1871, and the Grace Bailey, which dates to 1882--are floating National Historic Landmarks.

Back at the lobster bake, I stabbed my cold beer into the cornmeal sand. Butter ran down a fistful of lobster. My plate wobbled under a load of hot corn, steamed clams and tender new potatoes.

“Gordon, I’ve been eating lobster for 21 years in Maine and this is the best I’ve ever had,” said passenger Jean Des Jardins.

It was. I had two, knowing it might be a long time before I could return.

The food fueled our work on the ship. Hauling lines, I felt my back, legs and arms strengthen and my palms toughen as we followed the captain’s commands: “Slow down peak.” “Take up throat.” “Sweat yours up.” (Lower the outside edge of a sail, raise the inside edge where it attaches to the mast, and pull the halyard to raise the sail higher.)

On the largest schooners, some passengers are essential to raise the sails. Pitching in is optional on the Kathryn B. On this trip many of us--my friends and I, plus couples from Maine, Delaware, Virginia and New York--helped.

It takes no sailing experience to grab a line and heave as directed, and the crew teaches interested guests how to tie knots and coil ropes. You don’t have to be physically fit or a keen sailor; anyone who would rather loll and read or nap is welcome to do that too.

To complement our at-sea experience, Linda, Judy and I had arrived in the Kathryn B.’s home port, Rockland, a day early to explore. It’s a town of about 8,000 people, an hour and a half drive northeast of Portland.

Maine’s coastal villages abound with picturesque clapboard homes dating to the Revolutionary and Civil wars, grange halls turned craft centers, antique shops, funky wharves and lighthouses.

Rockland is also home to the internationally acclaimed Farnsworth Art Museum. When I walked into the galleries of the museum, which is devoted to Maine art and to the works of the Wyeth clan in particular, the nautical paintings were no exaggeration.

What we saw in the galleries we saw at sea and on the shores and bay around us. The odd, soul-baring, mystic light and salt air lent majesty to every object and sound: the chime of green can buoys, tubby lobster boats with bright blue crates in the stern, the soft tang-tang of halyards and lines on the masts, the tone of the ship’s clock marking the four-hour watches. At night, a full harvest moon rose over black pines and shone through the portholes.

After breakfast, we pulled up anchor and set sail again, moving over the waves at a stately 6 to 8 knots. On sailing ships, unlike mammoth cruise ships, there is little privacy. Passengers observe cheerful protocol of strangers on a joint adventure. Gordon and his affable crew (first mate Greg Volz, hostess and deckhand Mindy Doreski and cook Linda Thompson) made this easy.

Those who tired of company on deck were welcomed in the galley, where Thompson, a former chef on the U.S. Presidential Yacht Sequoia and student at L’Escoffier cooking school in Paris, chatted while preparing our food. I remembered from my previous trip her lobster Benedict at breakfast, her lunchtime chowders, her warm canapes at sunset and imaginative roasts at dinner.

The sailing season here begins around Memorial Day and runs through mid-October. July and August bring the warmest weather and sunniest sails. In autumn, the islands and shore are more colorful, and winds are bigger.

On this sail, a big low front was moving in from the southeast, possibly bringing rain and wind strong enough to force us to anchor in a protected cove. Penobscot Bay is sheltered from the usual winds and swells of the open ocean, but those unaccustomed to sailing still can get green around the gills. In one windy stretch, one of the women, pale and sweaty, sank to the deck but revived after chewing candied ginger and putting on acupressure bracelets.

Gordon, whose electric blue eyes and blond mustache gave him a Donald Sutherland-like appearance, slipped on red, green and yellow plastic sandals. These, he explained, were his West Indies Rasta shoes, his “happy shoes.” At the first sign of bad weather, he puts them on and dances.

“It usually works,” the captain said, smiling.

He pointed out Hurricane Island, the site of an Outward Bound school where students camp, kayak, row, sail and sleep in large open boats, braving the 60-degree water. (Even in summer, the water temperature seldom tops 64.)

Penobscot Bay also attracts politicians and poets, actors and entrepreneurs. The white turreted Victorian home of the Smith Brothers (of cough drop fame) gleamed from the shore at Samoset; writer E.B. White (“Charlotte’s Web”) grew up in Brooklin and poet Robert Lowell lived in Castine. At Buck’s Harbor, we saw the house of the late, former Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Actress Kirstie Alley has a waterside summer mansion on Islesboro. Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis on North Haven, where his wife’s family had a home.

We entered the Fox Island Thoroughfare, a channel between North Haven and Vinalhaven islands, which became summer colonies in the 1880s. We sailed between them, noting more masts than houses. The captain pointed out small boats off the bow.

“That’s a North Haven dinghy, a design unique to the Penobscot Bay. It is still made here,” he said, adding that it’s the oldest type of boat in its class in North America.

Schooners moved past like cumulus clouds, silent in the cerulean sea.

“Two-thirds of the schooners have no motors,” Gordon said. “Ships like the Mary Day, the J. & E. Riggins, the Lewis R. French and the Victory Chimes use a yawl or push boat to help them into and out of anchorages or docks.”

We passed the time reading, napping, taking a hand at the wheel or watching the pines against chalky birch and pastures rolling to the sea. We eavesdropped on the skippers as they chatted on the radio, coolly understating their concern over the potential storm: “Who knows--’fraid there might be some west in it,” one said.

“Roger that,” another replied.

Throughout the trip, the deck around the wheel and compass was a welter of working and vacation detritus--parallel rulers, foul-weather gear, a conch shell, a boat horn, sunglasses, binoculars, coffee mugs, a GPS instrument and a kazoo. We used “binocs” to see three dolphins off the port side, the shiny dark dome of a harbor seal’s head and a pair of loons diving into a sea pocked with vibrant yellow and orange lobster trap markers.

A steel-drum band punched out a reggae beat from the tape player, and we sailed through the day, lunching on chicken leek potato soup, a Romaine salad with orange slices and pine nuts, and warm chocolate chip-cranberry cookies.

“The only way to get more cholesterol is to inject it,” passenger Norman Engersbach said happily.

On our last day, the threat of a storm forced us to retreat into Rockland Bay. As we anchored between the ships Heritage and Victory Chimes under a coarse, gray sky, a two-story white trawler towing its dinghy eased past us--Jimmy Buffet’s Continental Drifter.

“That boat moved out here to anchor instead of getting beat up on the dock if there’s a storm,” the captain explained.

A light rain fell, but no storm materialized. No one missed our last dinner: We sat on the blue velveteen banquette in the salon lighted by silver candelabra, while the crew served shrimp and lobster grits, thyme-encrusted pork loin, then ginger creme bru^lee and champagne.

We woke the next morning to bagpipes in the thinning mist, a sign that Capt. Ken Barnes on the nearby Stephen Taber was up, and everyone else had better be too.

Ten to a side, the Victory Chimes guests and crew heaved up its three leviathan sails, great shivering curtains that caught the wind, stiffened up and carried it away. Their song--half chant, half melody--floated across the bay: “Way, haul away, we’ll haul away together, way, haul away, we’ll haul away forever.”

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GUIDEBOOK

Coasting on a Yankee Schooner

Getting there: In summer the Kathryn B. sails from Rockland, Maine, about 80 miles northeast of Portland. American, Continental, Delta, United and US Airways offer connecting service (change of planes) from LAX to Portland. Restricted round-trip air fares begin at $458.

When to go: Schooner sailing season runs May to October. The Kathryn B. starts in June.

Kathryn B.: All rates are for double occupancy and include meals and drinks. June rates are $650 per person for a three-night cruise, $1,250 per person for six nights. July through September, the price is $750 for three nights, $1,425 for six.

Contact the Atlantic Coast Schooner Co., 391 Hatchet Mountain Road, Hope, ME 04847; telephone (800) 500-6077, Internet https://www.kathrynb.com.

Other schooners: Other traditional ships offer sailing vacations in Penobscot Bay. Three-night trips are $329-$475, double occupancy; six-night trips are $675-$838, double.

Contact the Maine Windjammer Assn., which has a fleet of 14 schooners. P.O. Box 1144, Blue Hill, ME 04614; tel. (800) 807-WIND (9463) or (207) 374-2993, fax (207) 374-2952, Internet https://www.sailmainecoast.com.

For more information: Maine Office of Tourism, 59 Statehouse Station, Augusta, ME 04333; tel. (888) 624-6345 or (207) 287-5711, fax (207) 287-8070, https://www.visitmaine.com.