May 2015 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 5. Passed Over the Bar - Peter Chase and Clair Whitten


the yard, and there he made many lifelong friends. He also built a dozen Peapods in Jimmy Steele’s shop. Finally, he got to work in his back yard building his own small craft designs, the Cape Rosier Wherry, the Cape Rosier Guide Boat, the Cape Rosier Cradle- boat, and the yawl boat tender – Voluntary II. Building his own designs he was the happiest.


Peter A. Chase


HARBORSIDE—Peter Augustus Chase was born March 20, 1950, in the middle of a family of seven, and the fi rst of that brood to depart this life. He died Monday morning, March 16, 2015, four days short of his 65th birthday.


Peter was a boat builder. He came by it naturally; salt water was in his veins as it had been in his fathers’ and his forefathers’ for countless generations. Born and raised in ru- ral Connecticut, he spent all of his summers on Horseshoe Cove in Brooksville. He was fortunate to have attended North Country School in the seventh and eighth grades, where he was liberated from a traditional curriculum to a school life that included the great outdoors and the arts. It was a farm school, and on his fi rst vacation home from that school he won the appellation: “Big Barn Smell.” He went on from there to Putney School in rural Vermont, where his particular learning style continued to fi nd nourishment. There, he also found a high school sweetheart, in the 11th grade, and in due time married her. With Sophie Spurr, he built a home that seemed to house us all. Peter went on to the Philadelphia School


of Art to Ireland, to the Washington County Vocational Technical Institute to study boat building in Lubec; to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Md., and fi nally back home for good to Cape Rosier. He and Sophie built their home on Horse- shoe Cove in 1979, raised two daughters, Karina and Rosie, and made their way as boat builder and lawyer. They were a team, no strangers to hard work, exuberant parents and the souls of hospitality. Peter’s year in Ireland fi red his love for traditional working vessels, and his designs and workmanship never wavered, from a loyalty to the honesty and elegance of the useful. Design was his life’s passion and he became known for his skill as a master boat builder. He worked at St. Michaels’ Maritime Museum and then with his brother, Carl, fi nishing off Jarvis Newman Friend- ship Sloop hulls. He designed and built the Dirigo 17 kayak at Webber’s Cove in Blue Hill, and then went to work at Brooklin Boat Yard for 20 years. He loved his time at


Peter was taken by a rare neuro-degen- erative disease known as frontotemporal degeneration. He packed a lot into those last years as he faced the known unknown, and built half-models and small craft as if his life depended on it, and indeed it did. Peter was a peacemaker; he will always be remembered for his generosity of spirit, his quiet, mischievous sense of humor, his way with few words, and the simplicity of his joy in life. Peter was a teacher who wanted to share traditional boat building with anyone who would listen. He is survived by his two daughters, Karina and Rosie, their husbands Billy Dailey and Jason Bartsch, his four be- loved grandchildren, Liam, Parker, Linnea, and Anders, his mother, Mary Chase, six siblings, Carl Chase, Arria Bilodeau, Eric Chase, Lisa Chase, Johanna Chase and Andy Chase, and by his life mate, Sophie Spurr. In lieu of fl owers, donations may be


made to www.theaftd.org (The Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration)


ing, Whitten and Dylan had gone to play pickup basketball at the town gym, where he collapsed and later died. “He seemed so healthy, so full of life,” said Bierman, who now lives in Hancock. “It was just way too soon. We are all in just a state of shock.”


Whitten was born and raised in Winter


Harbor, the son of Clair and Truth Whitten. After his father’s death in 2009, Whitten took over the family business, A R Whitten & Son.


Whitten and his wife, Lori, who runs


the offi ce along with his mother, Truth, would have celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary this May.


“He continued the legacy of my grand-


father’s business that started here in the ’50s,” Bierman said. “My dad dedicated 60 years to it. [Cook] did it so well, even though it may not have been exactly what he wanted to be doing.” Without question, he’d rather have been lobstering, scalloping or fi shing for halibut on the boat he co-owned with his father, CC & Water.


Billy Bickford, who had known Whit- ten since childhood, couldn’t help but laugh when recalling Whitten’s limitless energy. “He’d pull up to my house at 5:30 a.m. with Scout and yelling, ‘Come on, let’s go fi shing.’ He never stopped,” Bickford said. “He was just full of life.”


Scout, his bluetick coonhound, was his “constant companion” on hunting and fi shing trips, his sister said.


Bickford chuckled when he remem- bered once seeing Whitten towing Scout on a raft behind his boat. The duo could often be seen driving around town in Whitten’s white Ford pickup truck, Scout braying at


Clair "Cook" Whitten


WINTER HARBOR — The day Clair “Cook” Whitten died, he had been doing what he loved: snowmobiling with friends and his 18-year-old son, Dylan.


“He was an avid outdoorsman,” his old-


er sister, Michelle Bierman, said. “Fishing, hunting, snowmobiling — anything to do with the outdoors.”


During their trek, the group came upon a sick deer and spent hours talking with the Warden Service about how to help it. “He couldn’t bear to leave the deer there for the coyotes,” Bierman said. “He would stop to help anyone or anything in need.” That altruistic spirit is one of the reasons why his loss has hit the community of Winter Harbor so hard.


“The whole town is just stunned,” Town Manager Cathy Carruthers said of Whitten’s March 12 death. After a day of snowmobil-


passers-by. said.


“Everything he did was big,” Bickford


Whitten’s love for the outdoors was passed along to his two children, Morgan, 22, and Dylan. Morgan is an accomplished hunter and is in the running to become Miss Maine Sportsman 2015. But after Morgan bagged a moose, deer, bear and wild turkey to join the Maine Antler and Skull Trophy Club’s Royal Crown Club, Whitten couldn’t be shown up.


“He was so proud of her doing that he had to go do it himself,” said Bierman with a laugh.


Her brother was “gruff and direct,” says Bierman, but was “take-charge and would do anything to help anybody.”


Bickford echoed that sentiment, saying, “Cookie was always accessible. He’d holler and moan, but he would always come. He was just one of those guys.”


It will take a long time for the commu- nity to get used to Whitten’s absence. “He is synonymous with Winter Har-


bor, and it feels as though it is a gigantic hole for the locals that are here,” Bickford said. “He passed well before his time.”


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