New England 2021
by Mike Thompson, 9/25/2021
We boarded our American Cruise Lines ship, the Independence, in Bath, Maine. We spent one full week aboard the the ship, cruising along the Maine shoreline to the northeast as far as Bar Harbor, then circling back to visit ports on the return trip to Portland. The itenerary included stops in Portland, Bath, Bucksport, Bar Harbor, Belfast, Castine, Rockland, Camden, Rockport, and Boothbay Harbor.
Cruise ship life is definitely different. The Independence carries about a hundred people including the crew, thus we experienced the small cruise ship variety. On a smaller boat the daily ports of call provide the focus of interest and activity, there being no room for water slides or sport courts. Eating is a big part of the program, and it's pretty non-stop between breakfast, Cookie Time at 10:00 AM, lunch, Cocktail Hour at 5:30 PM, and then dinner. The food was delicious, and there were always two or three desert choices at lunch and at dinner. I tried not to think too much about the weight I was gaining.
We took this trip so we could see the coastline of Maine, and the big benefit of doing it as a cruise is that we were on the water along that coastline for the entire week. I don't know how we could have seen half as much of the truly breathtaking scenery or understood the intricacy of the waterways if we had traveled any other way. And it was really convenient never to have to pack up and move our belongings, and never to have to look for a place to eat, because our hotel room, balcony, and restaurant went along with us.
Bath, our starting point, was a great shipbuilding center in the days of sail. At the end of that era Bath shipyards were turning out huge, six-masted schooners, including the Wyoming, which at over four hundred feet was the largest wooden ship ever built. We visited the Maine Maritime Museum, just downriver from General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works shipyard that now turns out naval vessels like the destroyer USS Zumwalt, which is currently there being refitted.
The Independence pushed off from Bath in the middle of the night and headed down the Kennebec River and into the North Atlantic, where we felt the last of the southwest swell generated by Hurricane Larry. In the morning we sailed up the Penobscot River, docked at Bucksport, and took a bus to Bar Harbor, where we visited Acadia National Park.
The next morning we left Bucksport, sailed to Belfast for a brief visit, and then crossed the bay to Castine, where we docked right next to the Maine Maritime Academy. While looking around the waterfront in Castine I came upon Eaton's Boatyard. The owner, seventy-seven-year-old Kenny Eaton, spotted me standing there and asked if I knew how to run an outboard. He was looking for some help fetching a boat that he needed to do some work on from its mooring out on the harbor, and I said I was game, so we jumped in his skiff and motored out. On the way Kenny told me a little of his story, being the third generation of his family to run the business. It was a real stroke of luck to get a chance to meet and listen to to him. So glad that I strayed from the scheduled historical walking tour of Castine!
Next stop was Belfast, where we toured the Front Street Shipyard. It caters mostly to the privately-owned yacht business, including those huge, gaudy, fiberglass things belonging to the mega-rich, by which they make conspicuous their wealth and poor taste. Sadly, it's a significant chunk of what's left of the Maine boatbuilding/repair/storage business. Front Street Shipyard has a huge haulout crane, one of the few in Maine that's large enough to accommodate big, wide catamarans. Even though the water at Belfast is brackish, it still can freeze over during the winter months. It used to always freeze a century ago, when Belfast was a large producer of the block ice used up and down the east coast. So before winter hits everyone in Belfast either pulls their boats out of the water or sails them south.
On a bulletin board I saw an advertisement for DoryWoman guided rowing excursions/lessons, texted Nicolle Littrell, the owner of the business, and then went rowing with her in her Swampscott dory. We rowed up the Passagassawakeag River and then back to the harbor, arriving just before dark. It was really nice to get out on the water in a small boat, and to get some exercise while doing it. Also in Belfast I saw about a half-dozen team rowing boats that looked very practical for use on rough water, having lots of freeboard compared to a standard collegiate racing shell. I've seen them called pilot gigs and they seem to come in two sizes, one with three sweeps on each side and the other with four sweeps per side. We saw a crew of high school students training in one of them.
The forests here are a mixture of smaller pine trees and a variety of deciduous trees such as maple, oak, and elm, as opposed to the big Douglas fir, hemlock, Western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and alder forests that are found west of the Cascade Mountains. However, for the most part the plants that we found along the coast of Maine are ones we're used to seeing in the Pacific Northwest. We saw lots of hydrangeas, but these are larger and have a more cone-shaped flower than the ones back home. Hibiscus grow big here and are plentiful. We found lots of the magenta-colored wild roses that are very common in the PNW.
Before making this trip we had no idea how amazingly long and intricate the Maine coastline is. It's a maze of saltwater. If you zoom in on the map it must measure a million miles in length, and due to the steepness of the glacier-carved geography, there's deep water close to shore nearly everywhere. Maine has over four thousand islands of one acre or more in size, and over sixty lighthouses. The map below shows only the section of the central Maine coastline between Bath and Rockland - there is much more!
When the forests were still uncut and the waters were still full of fish (of which pretty much only the lobster remain), it's no wonder that this place was so attractive to the early settlers from Europe, or that it would become the center of the shipbuilding industry in the United States during the 19th century.
Next the ship spent two nights in Rockland harbor. After breakfast on the first morning, Jane and I caught a cab out to the tip of the peninsula just north of town and did the one-mile walk on the breakwater to the lighthouse. The jetty was built in the late 1800's and is topped with big, rectangular granite blocks, so the walking is easy. We watched two old wooden schooners sail past the lighthouse, and also watched two lobstermen tend the traps they had set near the jetty.
That afternoon we took a bus to Rockport and went on a lobstering excursion on the Periwinkle, one of the many small powerboats that are used to tend the vast number of lobster traps here, whose buoys dot the surface of the water. The lobster boats are the real working boats here, and they're found in every harbor. They have inboard motors, a crew of two, and handsome, 1950-ish lines, with a covered cabin near the bow and an open deck aft.
Thankfully we also saw many beautiful old wooden sailboats of 50 to 100 feet in length, probably owned privately or by some foundation, possibly part of the Windjammer cruise fleet. There are also lots of smaller cruising sailboats as well as cruising powerboats of various sizes. And in every harbor there is a cluster of little tenders for all the larger boats noted above. These days those tenders are mostly inflatables with small gas outboard motors. Sadly, we saw very few of the small wooden rowboats and sailing dinghies for which traditional New England boatbuilding is so famous, or even modernized versions of the same constructed of plywood. The prettiest collection of tenders that I found was at the Rockland harbor tender dock.
"Down east", meaning northeast of Portland, tourism is largely what keeps the lights on in Maine these days. With no new industries to generate jobs, thus to attract immigrants, Maine is still amazingly white. 80% of the people are either of French Canadian or Scottish descent, as it was in the days of their ancestors. Almost all of the remaining 20% of the population are of northern European descent. Ethnic diversity-wise, Maine outside of Portland is a step back in time. We found Mainers to be nice, hard-working people with a great love of their history.
At the end of the Maine cruise we took the train to Boston, where we stayed for two nights just south of the Boston Commons. We took the T, as Boston's subway system is known, out to Fenway Park and saw the Boston Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles. We signed up for a walking tour of the Freedom Trail. We did a couple walks through Boston Common, including one through the old cemetery.
We picked up a rental car and drove south out of Boston toward Cape Cod. Our first stop was at Plymouth, where we toured the replica of the Mayflower, the original being built about a decade before it brought the Pilgrims to New England in 1620. Walking through it was quite a revelation. First, it was almost impossible to imagine 102 Pilgrims jammed together on it's small, enclosed first deck, along with their food and animals, for the two months it took to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Second, it was surprising to see the advanced state of European shipbuilding at that early point in history, just a few years after the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizibeth I. Certainly many improvements were made over the course of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, but the Mayflower is technologically impressive in her own right, with tall, stayed masts and complex rigging.
In Hyannis we visited the Cape Cod Maritime Museum. We also took a beautiful walk through the forest to the beach near Chatham at Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge. The beaches of Cape Cod are gorgeous, and it's no wonder that both New Englanders and New Yorkers flock here in the summer. The sand, made of quarts from the granite of the New England coastline, is almost white. There are sand spits, barrier islands, and little inlets that offer cruising in water protected from the open Atlantic. It's no wonder that Cape Cod is synonymous with sailing, being so perfectly suited for it. At Monomoy we watched a twenty-something-foot cat boat glide by, waved to its crew of two, and wished we were on board.
Then we drove west in the direction of New York City to visit maritime museums: the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Herreschoff Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island, and the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut. We caught the first two museums on the same day, then spent that night in a hotel in Bristol, Rhode Island that was just up the street from the Herreschoff Museum. The following day we drove into Connecticut and went to the Mystic Seaport Museum. Wow! It's similar to the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, but on a vast scale!
We walked through the Charles W Morgan, the last surviving wooden whaling ship. We saw the Viking longship Draken, all 115 feet of her, in the drydock having work done on her hull. We visited the cooperage and learned how wooden barrels were made, including those used to hold the oil that was cooked down from whales. We saw Gerda III, the Danish lighthouse tender that was used to smuggle Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark to Sweden.
We visited the extensive shipyard where several boats are being rebuilt. There we saw their big, old ship saw, their 85-foot-long spar lathe, and some of their shipbuilding lumber stores. Then I asked a Mystic staff member that was passing by if he knew where Jane and I could rent a rowboat. It turned out the guy I happened to ask is Quentin Snediker, the longtime Director of the shipyard and now the Curator for Watercraft. He walked us over to the small boat center, grabbed a pair of oars and two PFDs, and sent us off across the harbor in Captain Hook, a beautiful 12' lapstrake Maine pulling boat that's very similar to a Whitehall rowboat. I asked Quentin if there was some volunteer work in the shipyard that we might do, and he told us to come the next day and ask for Carl in the paint shop.
We showed up the following morning and met Carl and Brianna, staff of the museum's paint shop, who put Jane and I to work. They were preparing three rowboats for an indoor window display, and let us pitch in with some of the sanding and painting.
Late in the morning we were taken on a small guided tour of the museum's extensive archives, which are stunning in size and scope. Mystic Seaport Museum has over 500 ships and boats in their collection, along with countless other artifacts, most of which are held in storage in two brick buildings at the northeast corner of the property. There we saw boats of all imaginable kinds: native dugout canoes, sailboats by Herreschoff, an unremarkable-looking Boston Whaler that just happened to be owned by John Steinbeck, and racks filled with small rowboats, sailboats, canoes, and kayaks. We saw hand-sewn canvas sails from America's Cup winners, spars, rigging, and cannon. We saw steam, diesel, and gas engines of all types, including a Packard engine used to drive a World War II PT boat and dozens of old gas outboards. I can't imagine that there is a collection of this quality and size anywhere else in the world.
Still having fun, we went back to Mystic for a third day, on which we visited some of the collections that we had missed earlier and than went for a row and a sail at their small boat livery. And the day after that we drove back to Boston and caught the plane home to Seattle.
