Page 20. MAINE COASTAL NEWS December 2012


Maritime History By Amos Boyd


During the summer, when fl owers bloom and the sky is deep blue and white billowy clouds, and the days are warm and sunny, it is diffi cult to remember just how bitter could and grey our winters can be. Southerners and other out-of-staters think of Maine winters as arctic and wonder how we can put up with such conditions. However, many of us have managed to survive more than a few Maine winters, and sometimes even enjoy such hardships as ice fi shing, snowmobiling, sledding, skiing, skating, etc. When it’s too cold to go out, we do a lot of good reading or watching TV. We do not have the life-threatening storms and conditions that wipe out whole communities and kill hundreds of people as


PROBLEMS OF A DIFFERENT KIND


they do in regions further south and west. Earthquakes do sometimes rattle the dishes on our shelves, but they do not shake our homes to pieces and bury hundreds of peo- ple in debris. Nor do we have tidal waves, hurricanes or typhoons, poisonous snakes or frogs, man-eating alligators or croco- diles or tropical fevers. We do have snow that frequently has to be shoveled or plowed. We sometimes have sleet and freezing rain, and streets and roads have to be sanded, and although these sometimes cause great inconvenience and sometimes accidents, hundreds of people don’t die, roofs don’t get blown away, nor are homes demolished. In general, there are accidents only when people drive too fast for some conditions. Those of us who drive


Coastal Stories from Downeast


Continued from Page 8.


Arthur Woodward. Running in vapor is the same as in warmer weather fog. He ran his courses and times up, found his marks, went on to the next one, etc. I remind you, friends, that there were no electronic navigation aids aboard the smack.


Running those courses back and forth in fog was something he had done for many years. In another narrative I told about him and me going the 80 mile round trips thir- teen consecutive times in thick dungeon fog both ways one summer. On this day with masthead high vapor fl ying he left his mark off Petit Manan Light and ran in for the whistling buoy off Schoodic Point. He ran his time about up and didnʼt


hear the buoy, nor could they fi nd it, as they jogged around and listened out there in the vapor with near zero visibility. As anyone familiar with the Schoodic Peninsular knows, itʼs bold water right up to the granite shore. Not a good place to make a mistake, particularly if your vessel and cargo are self insured.


Since they could not locate the whistle Dad got on the marine radio (the one elec- tronic device aboard the smack) and called the Coast Guard in Soʼwest Harbor. The re- liable Coast Guard came out and using their radar were able to locate the whistling buoy. Why couldnʼt anyone hear the whistle? In the windy freezing weather with the vapor the whistle was frozen up. The Coast Guard helped Dad get his bearings and get on his way to safely deliver his trip of lobsters in the tough weather.


* * * * *


SOLD One pretty Sunday Morning we looked out of our kitchen window and saw the Aerolite going up the Reach. Papa had her mooring off of his home in Jonesport, be- tween the Middle Factory and George Bealʼs wharf. We could see her on the mooring from our home in Beals. Here she was heading up the Reach and none of us knew where he was going or why. It turned out that he was selling her and he was delivering her to Portland to the new owner, who would take her to Provincetown, MA, and convert her into a dragger.


It probably would take him some 17 or 18 hours from home to Portland and we found out that he was all alone. He was diabetic and on insulin and he had heart problems, nevertheless, he was pretty much his own man and once he made up his mind that was it.


Getting the smack off the mooring and underway was relatively easy alone, but if he needed a meal or two it might be a prob- lem unless he hove to. And, docking her


more carefully generally have such cars pass us, and when we see them again they are off the road and in the ditch, because they have been careless or driving too fast. In Maine we have huge powerful snow plows with dedicated drivers who keep main roads open whenever possible, those main roads have priority, back roads take longer to be cleared. In many cities further south snow can cause terrible accidents in cities where traffi c is heavy and chain accidents are common. These areas have problems even when little snow falls be- cause they do not expect snow and they do not have the proper equipment. Driving in heavy city traffi c almost necessitates fast stops and starts, which are extremely dan- gerous even with a small amount of snow. In winter time, during the days of sail,


in Portland was yet another matter, as the Caterpillar was engineroom controlled and changing speeds and reversing, and back to forward meant going down into the engine room, tending the engine, going back up to the pilothouse to handle the wheel, maybe another trip to the engineroom and back, and getting a line to the wharf. All those things come into play when docking and if you are alone thatʼs what you have to do by yourself. Papa was an expert boatsman, and could handle boats and smacks with the best of them. He delivered his Aerolite safely to Portland. So, the Aerolite was sold and thus ended that lobster smack being a member of our family.


* * * * * ADJUSTING THE COMPASS We


took the fi rst load of lobsters in the brand new well smack Arthur S. Woodward from home to Stonington, ME. Since the smack was new her compass had not yet been adjusted. We had to have that done. Adjust- ing the compass means compensating for anything aboard the vessel that would draw the compass off from its accurate magnetic readings. In our case permanent magnets in the form of bars a few inches in length would be screwed in place around the compass, as needed, for proper adjustment.


Dad engaged a professional compass adjustor to come aboard and we left Ston- ington and went down the bay toward Isle Au Haut where weʼd have plenty of room to sail the different directions necessary for him to set the permanent magnet bars in place to make the box compass as precise as possible. The adjustor knew his marks on the land around the bay and the courses on lines between them, viz., what line was magnetic north, and therefore reversed course would be south , and the line for east and west, and the intermediate lines for NE, SE, SW, and NW. He may have had a comparison compass with him. Once the bar magnets were all in place, as necessary, the compass adjustment was complete.


He could tell the declination between Magnetic North and True North for our area of the world from charts. Nautical charts indicate declination for places on the Earthʼs surface.


When your magnetic compass is the instrument you have to rely on to indicate direction, as was the case before LORAN, inertial guidance systems, and global posi- tioning systems, you must be confi dent that it is adjusted properly.


When you think about it, thatʼs the way


life is, isnʼt it? Your Life Compass must be properly adjusted if you are going to make your Destination safely.


Washington County schooner captains and crews often left snow covered homes and chilly weather on or near Christmas car- rying dried fi sh or lumber products to the West Indies and the Caribbean. The times and places from which they sailed varied according to wind and weather, but de- pended mostly on their location, where they were inland ports or on the salt water. When rivers or bays froze, vessels became frozen into the ice until spring thaw; perhaps late December until March or April. Salt water ports remained open all winter, only occa- sionally visited by blocks of fl oating ice. Downeast sailing vessels had further to travel than other Maine vessels, increas- ing their time on the open sea and creat- ing greater risk. E. Longfellow & Sons of Machias had the 150-ton schooner JA- SON built by John Shaw, and launched on October 29, 1863. After being rigged and fi nished, the JASON was loaded by her owners with a cargo of lumber for the West Indies. By now the season was getting late and the captain feared getting iced in. He was irritable and impatient with all hands until the JASON safely cleared the river. Not as fortunate was the brig OLIVE FRANCES, she was launched in January 1864 when ice in the East Machias river


was ten inches thick. The Wiswells, own- ers of the brig, hired a crew of thirty men, and in three days the men sawed a channel wide enough to get the OLIVE FRANCES from the Wiswell shipyard to the Simpson’s wharf.


The weather was increasingly cold in late Decem ber of 1866, and early in January all vessels in the Machias harbor “dropped down river” to escape the possi- bility of being frozen in. The older people were reminded of the time Boston vessels anchored above Round Island and became frozen in the river. The ice became so strong then that it supported wagons, hors- es and teamsters, who unloaded the freight and delivered it across the ice to awaiting Boston merchants.


The Machias River was not alone in having problems with ice. In March, John- son’s bay near Lubec had more ice in two weeks than had been seen in twenty years. The steamer TYRO had great diffi culty making trips between Lubec and Eastport. The JASON, owned by the Long- fellows of Machias, had quite a different problem when anchored in the harbor of Ponce, Puerto Rico. Captain Sawyer and the mate were below eating breakfast when rumbling sounded and the schooner rolled and then pitched sharply. The men thought the JASON was dragging anchor, but when they got on deck, they found the anchor had held. There was no wind or heavy sea, but on land the hills were rolling and trembling, houses and chimneys were falling and the native people were running in all direc- tion, crying and praying to be saved from God’s wrath, thinking something they had done had caused the calamity. On board the JASON, the pig and the goat were so frightened they jumped into the schooner’s hold and hid in the cargo, and the crew had a hard time getting them out.


Through the years, the captain and the crew of the JASON were typical of the many Downeast sailing vessels that had a wide variety of problems and experiences.


Seventies Memories, Trial(s) By Fire(s) By Lee S. Wilbur


1973. Phone rang in my old shop.


“Jock’s boatshop is on fi re!” John “Jock” William’s shop at the time was less than a mile from us so I ran for the truck and raced up the road. Town fi refi ghters were futility pouring water on what little remained of the wooden structure and the superhot fi berglass mould and hull being laid up inside. Felt terrible for my friend Jock and couldn’t help but think of the hard work he’d put in to get his business going. In minutes there would be but ashes. How quick situations can change. The four of us who got into the boat business about the same time, Jock, Jarvis Newman, Tom Morris, and myself all started in cramped quarters, whatever space we could fi nd, working with highly fl ammable materials, and would hazard a guess all of us had, as in any Maine shop, a wood stove to burn the scrap and keep the early morning chill off. Talking with Jock this week--he still comes to work when he and wife Debbie are not in Hawaii -- we spent some time remembering our startup days. Talked of the long hours, the crazy things done to keep momentum forward, way events kind of fell into place because the opportunities were there, and how each step, nay each obstacle, was another learning experience. Jock, of any of us, had more credentials to go in to boatbuilding. He’d at least had a year of apprenticeship with the renowned


Paul Molich in Hundestad, Denmark. He’d worked summers in a boatyard since age 13, and then had a couple of years managing the Fiberglas shop at the Hinckley boatyard in Manset before striking out on his own. “Norma Stanley (wife of wooden


boatbuilder Lyford Stanley) came up to me one day, spring of “73” and said ‘you know Jock, Lyford was saying to me the other day it won’t be long before lobster fi shermen and commercial fi shermen will realize the days of wooden boats will soon be over and they’ll be looking to build in fi berglass. Now Lyford’s just fi nishing a new 36’ for a guy to the west’rd and I think you and I should go over and get Lyford to let us take a mould off her”


And they did. Nights and weekends. Boat had been painted, so Jock “shot” four coats of PVA (parting agent) and waxed it well to boot.


“Mould came off with just a few pieces of seam compound sticking,” Jock recalls, “Good thing, cause I told Lyford it’s easy laying this sticky stuff on.... but I’m not sure how easily it will come off.” “We got both sides off okay, but it was a while before I could get back at it again and get it cleaned up and waxed. I had Debbie and my entire savings wrapped up in that mould.”


By December, Jock, with Norma’s ever ready help had moulded his fi rst “Stanley


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