March 2014 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 5. Giffy Full Remembers the Old Yacht Captains
BROOKLIN – There are a lot of very inter- esting people on the coast of Maine with a lot of great stories. One person that is well known on the coast for that, is yacht captain and marine surveyor Giffy Full of Brooklin. Awhile ago we did an in-depth interview of his time as a yacht captain and marine surveyor. About a year later we returned and documented the boatbuilders that he knew over his career. Last fall I returned and asked Giffy to talk about a long forgotten aspect of our maritime history, the professional yacht captains he had known. Giffy begins back in the early 1960s. He said, “I was working on as a deck hand on a fairly large yacht from Marblehead. We made a trip up the coast of Maine with the owner and some of his people and when we were through with that trip we went into the marine supply place at Camden. All the yacht captains would go in there to get whatever supplies they needed. It was kind of a clearing house for all the waterfront rats there. I had been there as a child with my parents going through there on our way to Mount Desert Island. There was also the old Camden Shipbuilding where they were building yachts. It was an older harbor with no modernization to speak of, which made for a real interesting place. One of the fi rst people I met there, who was never a yacht skipper, was Mac, Charles MacMillan. Eventually he took over Camden Shipbuild- ing with the backing from Tom Watson and turned it into Wayfarer Marine. At that time he was a young man, approximately my age. He was working there as a deck hand on a schooner skippered by Capt. William Stanley. He was a Nova Scotia native and came down to this country a long time ago. He was a real gentleman, always properly dressed. Capt. Stanley was the professional skipper for Miss Grace, who had a big estate on Islesboro. He was her captain before World War II and for some reason when the war broke out her schooner was put away, not taken over by the Coast Guard. Why I
don’t know. Anyway she was put away in one of the buildings they had at the head of the harbor. She stayed there all during the war. Miss Grace had two boats; the other was a consolidated commuter. When Miss Grace wanted to go shopping and or do errands they’d take the commuter and run over. She was quite a fast boat. That boat got taken and was used during the war as a mail boat. I guess she delivered mail to maybe Vinalhaven or North Haven and she got wrecked on one of the ledges. “I don’t know what Capt. Stanley did during the war because Miss Grace kept him on the payroll forever. After the war was over, they brought the schooner right out again. Three man crew and very beautifully kept. Shortly after the boat was re-commis- sioned Miss Grace became seriously ill and passed away. Capt. Stanley went to work for the Pingrees that owned a motosailer. Capt. Stanley got them to buy the American Boathouse so they had a place to keep their motorsailer. Sometime in the early fi fties he had a stroke and passed away.” Another man Giffy remembers is Cap- tain Frank Rossiter. He added, “I believe he was originally from Vinalhaven. I think he was a deepwater man. He had an ocean going license to sail any vessel, but he liked to work in yachts. ELIDA, she is still going, she is now a passenger boat down to Portland way. She was built in 1922 for an owner on Islesboro. I guess the fi rst captain didn’t work out and very shortly after she was built Captain Frank Rossiter took her over. He ran her from about 1922 right up to the World War II. The funny part about it is the owner in Islesboro only kept her a couple of years and she was sold to the treasurer of Harvard University and he kept his boat in Marblehead. Captain Rossiter said that he would deliver the boat to Marblehead, but he said that he wouldn’t stay there; he would be coming back to Camden. Well, he went to Marblehead with her and didn’t leave until the start of World War II. He obviously got
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along well with the owner. He brought the boat home to Camden every fall when they were through with it and kept her afl oat at the old Camden Shipyard. He was another one of those guys that could do anything. ELIDA was originally a double topsail schooner and so she had four in her crew, captain, cook and two deck hands. But after the war, when they got her back from the Coast Guard the owner wanted the rig changed to a Marconi main. Captain Rossiter was never happy with that, I don’t know why. One fall, after they had laid her up, he was working around her and discovered the transom had rot. The more they looked the more rot there was. He, and I think it was probably Orville Young, they got a boat and put it under her stern took the transom out and put a new one in. During World War II, when the Coast Guard took that boat, Capt. Rossiter did something dif- ferent,” said Giffy. “He went scallop fi shing with another man Arthur Bane. He had a scalloper built, I think she was built some- where near Rockland, and her name was the MUSKEGON. Arthur apparently was a fi rst class scalloper. She was not a bay scalloper she was a bigger boat, she fi shed offshore. The last I ever saw of her that boat was down to Boothbay. Captain Rossiter was a fi rst class yacht skipper. He was never any- thing but a gentleman and always properly dressed. They had work uniforms and dress uniforms. That is the way it was in those days. All the yachts I ever worked around as a young man, you could wear khaki work clothes up till about 8:30 or 9 o’clock in the morning if there was guest or owners there. Then you changed into the proper uniform. “Another person is Ryan McDonald, but I can’t remember the people’s name he
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worked for,” explained Giffy. “They had a big house down on Deadman’s Point. You remember the people who had a house brought down off a hill and loaded onto a barge in Phippsburg and brought to Rock- port? They had a nice Alden yawl called the FOAM. I don’t know if that boat is still going or not. I think she wound up going to California.” Giffy said all these captains were very competent and polite gentlemen. It was a very different time; it changed because the boats and the people died out. The difference today Giffy explained, “These fellows have become more or less managers and not hands on do it yourself skippers. I am not saying that they aren’t competent and capable, but the men I knew they were all hands on guys. They never hesitated to do any work that was necessary. When I was young fi rst working out of Marblehead on yachts I think there was about 50 some odd professional working there. Now they are all gone.”
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