6/10/97... Aboard Chessie.

The ebb was running hard when we lugged our gear and groceries down to Capt. Ken’s float. Chessie, Ken’s 32 foot Samurai sloop, is moored on the Arrowsic side of the Kennebec, directly across the river from Bath Iron Works, just below the entrance to the Sasanoa River. Standing on Ken’s float the towering red and white cranes, the dark gray shapes of Aegis cruisers, muscular yard tugs, and all the jagged angularity of an active shipyard are spread out before you. Osha beeping backups and the industrial hubbub carries across the streaming Kennebec. But we’re headed out the back door, away from the hustle, down the coast.

We load our dunnage aboard Elmer, Ken’s homely hard chine skiff, as he swoops and lurches in the choppy current. Something like a third of the waters of Maine dump to sea through this slot, and full ebb, even on a small tide, makes anything untied eager to get away.

I’ve been away all year, and it takes me a minute or two to find my legs, shift into nautical gear. Chessie is familiar ground, however. I’ve taken a number of cruises with Capt. Ken over the years, and the ritual moves are just below consciousness. How you have to legover the safety lines coming aboard, and duck under the deckbeams going forward. THUNK. Now I remember.

We don’t dawdle on the mooring to stow gear, just fire up the glowplugs, crank the diesel, get up to running temps, and cast the pickup. The ebb’s about run, and we want to be through Upper and Lower Hell’s Gate before the tide turns. Chessie points upriver toward the Carleton Bridge, with its twin lift towers and green double decks, until we’re clear of Arrowsic Island, then we swing into the flow and scoot out under the graceful girdered arch of the Sasanoa Bridge. We’re away.

The City of Bath, Maine, just disappearing astern, is the county seat of Sagadahoc County. I don’t know what the Algonkian word meant, but I’d bet it had to do with “many waters.” Up where I live, on the Cathance, the complex tidal hydraulics of this estuary raise and lower the fresh river water over a nine foot range. The Cathance joins five other rivers in Merrymeeting Bay: the Muddy, Eastern, and Abbigadasset, short rivers draining the local basins; and the Androscoggin and Kennebec, two of the great rivers of New England. All this hydro funnels out of Merrymeeting through a swirling drain called Chops, and enters the lower Kennebec.

At Bath the river splits again, most of the flow stays in the deep channel of the Kennebec headed for Popham, but some pours east and south into Sasanoa. This back channel forks in turn, making a net of cross connections between the Kennebec and the Sheepscot Rivers, turning Arrowsic, Georgetown, and Westport into islands. Where the back channels narrow there are turbulent tide races, and the braided hydrology produces tidal anomalies which have puzzled mariners all the way back to Capt. Cartier. We’re avoiding puzzlement. There’s not enough wind to sail us out, so Chessie is thrumming her revs as we thread the serpentines between the reds and greens.

There’s something about Sasanoa that transports me to a simpler era. The few houses and cottages up these gigs and gurgles are modest, even seedy. These are mosquito plagued hideaways up muddy drains or along inaccessible tideraces, so the big outastate money hasn’t bragged all over here.. yet. The crooked shore pines make oriental gestures above glittering ledges, and reaching oaks come down to the waters. Racing currents stream over black ledges, whirling eddies yank the tiller hard over. It’s too early for stripers and blues, and it’s mid-week: the blue-collar power squadron is tied up. The yahoos are busy working at the yard. Only the ospreys are out in force. Half a dozen are diving on fish in Hockamock Bay.

By the time we are crossing the lower Sheepscot, open to the gentle ocean swells, everything is stowed away, the sailcover is off the main, the working jib has been rigged, we’ve disgorged all the local news, and told the requisite jokes. I’ve already broken into Melissa’s cookies (to be sure they’re fit to eat). Ken doesn’t have a sweet tooth, but Melissa bakes double when I’m crew. We break out the chart just to be sure of the marks.

Capt. Ken is far and away the most cautious sailor I’ve every gone out with, but he’s not immune from mistakes. He’s only struck one rock in all his years along this coast, which is a remarkable testimonial, and it happened here in his home waters. Peggy, Melissa, and I were along for the ride that day, and Ken had decided to sidle over into Kennecook Harbor and pick up a mooring to have lunch when CRUNCH we ground up onto a sunker just behind Green Island. No harm done, but we had to wait out the tide, red faced. We were now threading the same passage, and Ken had the chart out.

Through Townshend Gut we idle down, admiring the glistening brightwork and classy lines of the local pleasure fleet at anchor, while the bridge attendant lowers the road traffic gates and swings the Southport Island Bridge wide. “Owner’s name?” he shouts down at us. We throttle up, and mutter out among the islands off Boothbay Harbor.

Along the Capitol Island shore the air begins to move, fitful and uncertain as to direction, but enough to feed our hopes. We haul up Chessie’s wings and spit to windward. The forecast was for a sweltering day ashore, Maine’s first taste of hot weather this year, but we’ve moved out of the land smother, and the light air through the islands is just about perfect. Maybe 75 degrees, smelling of rockweed. Out of the lee, headed for Fisherman’s Island Passage, the breeze steadies and picks up. Chessie settles onto her course. Middle of June, a fine sailing wind, a smattering of lobster boats, and not another sail in sight. We’ve got the coast of Maine to ourselves.

By the time we’re off Pemaquid, Chessie is dancing along nicely with Otto at the helm. Ken researched autohelms for various mags some years ago, trial ran some proffered samples, and bought the best of the lot. Perks of a boat writer. This season he’s enjoying a new pocket GPS and a pair of self-focusing binoculars. Techno magic. These satellite positioning devices have transformed coastal cruising in Maine. Now the biggest danger sailing in fog is colliding with another boat on the same electronic pathway. Ken enters waypoints (course targets) just a bit off the charted paths to avoid such unpleasant surprises.

It’s clear sailing today, however, and we’re playing with the binocs instead of navigating by satellite. The optics in these self-focusing jobs would make Goethe gasp, and could convince me there are ghosts in the machinery. As we surge past Egg Rock, in the outer reaches of Muscongus Bay, I scan the islet for puffins. All I see are some rare roseate terns and a gaggle of Homo saps, camping on the Egg to chase off seagulls and uninitiated yahoos. The guardian initiates are jumping up and down on planks of driftwood and feeding the pieces into a roaring fire. Some sort of ritual, I presume.

Our course intends to thread the islands of eastern Muscongus Bay, up to the entrance to Port Clyde, then duck round the corner into the Penobscot approaches. The wind continues uncertain, puffing up occasionally and quartering around from the westward. Otto is reliable in anything but a tailwind, so we are content to gawp at the spruce and granite dotted panorama, and soak up the sunshine. I’m reading Devoto’s COURSE OF EMPIRE, with the new eyes of a continental traveler. Ken’s into a sailing mystery. A long, sleek, prewar vision mumbles up from astern, a classic bubble-sterned powerlaunch, maybe 50 feet long, all black gloss, bright brass, and mahogany. It blows by us like a rumrunner of old.

Going through Davis Strait, Ken points south, remarking, “There’s your favorite anchorage.” He’s referring to Georges Harbor, the gunkhole between Allen Island and Benner. Late one evening a dozen years ago we dropped a hook there, sheltering from a stiff southwesterly. After we’d secured everything, and before making a meal, we’d gone for a sunset row, as is Ken’s custom.

The sights were anything but customary. Some weird mythos was afoot on Allen Island. A huge granite cross stood on a briny ledge, and a black, fat-sterned lobsterboat nodded at a private dock. The ARCHANGEL. A 12 foot high cyclone fence surrounded a yard maybe 40 feet square, and two wolves were running circles silently inside it, never taking their eyes off us. There was a flock of sheep hunkering in the lee of a grassy hillock, and the shore was lined with signs reading “PRIVATE. TRESPASS AT YOUR OWN PERIL.”

Our anchor dragged a bit in the night on the hard bottom, and we were glad to get away in the morning without a more fabulous encounter. I later discovered that the granite cross stands where George Weymouth made landfall in 1605. He raised a wooden cross celebrating a safe passage. But don’t come ashore for any thanksgiving in the late 20th century. It’s all private property now. They’ll sic the wolves on you.

The day’s declining now, but the wind is puffing up and veering more northerly. We’re closehauled as we try to pick out the marks for Port Clyde. Lobsterboats are converging toward home, and a barge-ferry splashes its way toward us, a homemade rig, perhaps, with two long metal ramps winched up vertical in front of a big 4X4 pickup which takes up the whole deck. A square conning tower juts up behind the pickup, and the whole rig makes me smile at the ingenuity of islanders. How many boat bums have dreamed of running a little island supply rig like this? One of my childhood dreams, and adult illusions. I’m pen-and-inking the scene. Ken just shakes his head at my enthusiasm.

Once clear of Allen ledge we can ease the sheets and run off toward Mosquito Island, watching the Monhegan boat pounding in from offshore. We spent a night off Mosquito once, as well, and decided that truth in advertising had probably saved that rocky wilderness from development. We’d proposed renaming our favorite gunkholes “bloodsucker bay”, “running sore cove”, “nasty nubbin”, “foul anchorage”, in hopes of averting the inevitable. Now, we find, it’s too late for Mosquito Island, despite its name, and the abundant justification. That long black cigarillo we saw earlier is anchored just off a granite pier abuilding, and the walls of an immense fieldstone house are rising in the westfacing field.

At least this bit of conspicuity looks to be a conventional barn-shaped mansion in golden-yellow stone. Most of the new “cottages” befouling the Maine scene are exhibitions of architectural absurdity and bad taste. Ken and I have a running argument about the built coast. He says it’s their money and their property and they have the right to do what they want with it. I say that people come to Maine to enjoy the beauty of the coast, then insist on building an ugly house in the middle of the view because they are too stupid not to shit in their own bed, and they should have their nose rubbed in it. Ken doesn’t get hot about endangered esthetics. I applaud the downeast tradition of winter arson. We both agree that the new mansions are astonishingly ugly.

Once clear of Mosquito we are close-hauled for Whitehead and the entrance to the Mussel Ridges, the outer limits of my childhood turf. The wind has gone Northwest and is freshening off the land. Hot gusts, sometimes tinged with the scent of lilacs, set Chessie on her ear, and Elmer to slapping. Another yacht, inbound on a converging course, is the first sail we’ve seen all day, and she’s laboring under too much canvas as the wind stiffens. We’re flying.

Usually the wind slackens in late afternoon, but not today. Thrashing up Mussel Ridge Channel we’re pinched as tight as Chessie can sail, and the gusts are putting her rail under. Our companion is inching up on us, but the puffs are laying him right down. Off to leeward the granite idylls of Dix and Andrews and the other Mussel Ridges glitter in the low-angled sunlight.

During the last summers of my adolescence I explored among these islands in a 14 foot runabout, and thought them the most romantic places on earth. Dix had been a quarry island in the 19th century, with a large resident community. Stone from here went by schooner to build many of the national edifices in Washington. Then the granite business collapsed overnight, and the island was abandoned, furniture left in the houses, hymnals in the pews. The fields are still scattered with half-finished capitals and pillars, or were in the late 50’s. After the quarries died, fishermen camped on these islands to be near their gear, before the days of racing lobsterboats, and occasional parties of daytrippers might sail out and picnic on a July afternoon, as we did in my childhood.

Now Dix Island has been condominiumized. You can buy a houselot and build your island dream under restrictive covenant, all very environmental.

I’ve sailed over here from the ramp in South Thomaston in my 19-foot sharpie with Peggy and the dogs, and clambered around the old diggings. Something about the combination of sparkling stone, hot balsam, and rockweed lifts me onto another plane. Nostalgia for childhood, of course, and the voices of women now silenced, but something else as well. A yearning for a home of the heart. Maybe it’s the radon.

The sun was in full retreat as we beat up toward the Owl’s Head Light and into the harbor. The wind finally decided to ease for the evening. We fired the diesel and doused sail. A Rockland headboat, one of the charter schooners, was anchored on the edge of the channel, with awning spread, and the evening meal in progress. We puttered past, as I directed Ken toward a mooring, tucked up into the Dodge Point cove. The same place I used to keep that runabout. Here was another dream come true.

I’d promised myself one day to sail to the Head, pick up my old mooring, row ashore, and walk up the hill to Hope’s house. I’d actually sailed past on various occasions, but the timing was wrong, or the wind too right, and the promise was unkept until now. But not to hurry. We had a meal to conjure and stow, and I wanted to paint that schooner in the sunset pinks and purples. Another, smaller schooner, with tanbark sails was sporting up and down in the last of the wind, came close aboard the headboat to shout salutations, then disappeared around the corner into Rockland.

Nostalgia cruises can be disorienting. The landforms are the same, but everything else has blurred. There’s a familiar bone structure.. some old houses, Pete Reed’s wharf, a decayed spindle on the end of Monroe’s Island, the shape of a ridgeline.. but the face is a stranger’s. A newcomer. The lobster pound is now gigantic. There are new houses between the old, the spruces on the point are taller, and the harbor is jammed to the gunwales with boats. Lobsterboats, almost exclusively. One resident yacht, an eastern style dragger, a handful of pocket cruisers, and a glut of lobsterboats.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen to the lobster fishery. The biologists have been predicting immanent collapse since the mid seventies, while the lobstermen just keep catching more. The groundfish are gone, of course, and the herring come and go. There were booms in mussels and urchins, as these under- utilized species found markets, but they are now about harvested out. The result is everyone is crowding into the lobster fishery.

Lobstering is different from other fishing. It’s more like farming. The small fry are being fed up on the bait, and can escape from the traps until they approach legal size. Lobstermen get to see the state of the juvenile population every day, and report that the bottom is crawling with small lobster. The fish that used to eat lobster are gone, the urchins that destroyed lobster habitat are gone, only the seals are competing for the catch. And the other lobstermen.

More and more traps go in the water every year. Huge fleets of gear, hauled by more and more men, in faster and faster boats. The catch per unit effort, as they say, continues to decline. But they are still catching more lobster. The biologists are concerned that 98% of the catch is just over the legal minimum limit. Which is to say they are catching every last bug that comes of age. But at least one lobsterman I know says, “Yah, Yah... but other species are thriving. The small cunner are so thick they’re a pest in the traps, eating all the bait.” Cunners are a once common finfish that had all but disappeared from Maine waters by the 1950s. Many fishermen believe that the ocean will always be full of life, though the commercial species will come and go. And they keep fishing.

Out of places like Owl’s Head. Of course the lobstermen can’t afford to live on the coast any more, what with all the summer money and shorefront taxes. So they commute to harbors like the Head, and the local convivialities tend to erode. Smalltown Maine starts on the other side of Route 1. Down along the shore the palaces are rising up, and the class friction is hot enough to smell in high summer.

And I’d forgotten the flies. Or maybe they’ve increased with the fleet. We’d hardly done our housekeeping when Chessie was full of small blowflies. Not the biting kind, just the bait-eating variety. I decided it was time for a run ashore, while Ken flailed the air.

I was first brought down to the Head as a toddler. My parents boarded in the home of Hope Bunker, a spinster schoolteacher in Waterville, who shared an inherited saltwater farm here with three cousins. Tom, Phil, and Florence. I’m told that on arrival I announced that this new wonder at the foot of the field was “Hope’s Ocean.” Subsequently my mother and I spent more and more of our summers here. First at “Hope’s house”, and then in one or another of Tom’s cottages. Tom and his wife Ruth had bought Dodge Point, which encloses the harbor, and rented them out to the likes of us. I caught a bad case of Maineitis here, which isn’t cured yet.

Tom is the only surviving cousin, and I left Elmer at Pete Reed’s, to walk up the hill to see him. The road here is one I return to in dreams. It drops precipitously from the local store and post office, splitting just above the waterfront. A sharp curve takes you around the harbor to the lighthouse, while the other deadends at Pete Reed’s. I once missed that curve at 4AM in a ‘52 Pontiac four of us had pooled our coins to buy, plowing though the dooryard below, flattening a little ornamental spruce. That tree is now 30 feet tall. But in my dreams Owls Head is even more transformed. There is a boardwalk honkytonk and Massachusetts style cottages are jammed along the foreshore. The reality is still sagging baithouses and windrows of jetsam along the foreshore, although there are houses between the houses higher up the by the road.

One of my first paying jobs as a kid was packing baitbags in one of those sheds. The fishermen would buy a pickup load of herring and salt it down in their buildings. A layer of herring, a heavy dose of salt, a layer of herring, and so forth. Right on the shed floor, or in barrels. Then it was left to ripen. The choice bait was then stuffed into twine pockets (hand-knitted bait bags) and used to replace the empties in hauled traps. Baiting pockets is sternman’s work aboard a boat, and I’ve done my share of that, but most men fished solo back then, and preferred to have baited pockets ready to go when they set out. It’s hard to imagine how rank a job baiting pockets can be on a July day in a close shed. God knows what we were paid. Penny a bag maybe. I remember the price of lobster was 40 and 50 one year. That’s 40 cents a pound for shedders, 50 for hardshell. But I was proud of the work. And I took up smoking in a serious way that summer. A Camel smoldering away on your lip was an improvement over the prevailing ripeness. You can see why journalism appealed to me later on.

Another paying gig was cutting the alders in the brook that runs alongside Hope’s driveway. I saw that they are still competing with a bush-hog for precedence, as I hoofed up the drive in the purple light. Tom was surprised to see me, and we recited our family news, and commiserated over the state of the universe. Sitting in that kitchen is as close to home base as I ever get. There’s pumped tapwater now, and a furnace in the cellar, a new airtight cookstove.. but everything else is just the way I walked away from it as a child. The tocking of the wallclock is the heartbeat of a thousand memories. The thumbtacked doryman is still rowing in the fog on the dishes cupboard. I can’t stay long, for fear of going awash, but it’s always sweet to visit.

It’s dark by the time I row Elmer across the harbor. I remember how intensely proud I was the day I was allowed to row alone from the point to Reed’s and go up the hill for our mail. How old was I? Seven? Eight? I know I was given my first rifle at 8. That must have been about when I started packing pockets.. to earn money for 22 shells. The fact that I was mostly shooting at the toggle bottles on the lobstermen’s traplines makes me wonder why they indulged my money quest. They also were watching to make certain I got across the harbor OK, I’m sure. Not that they’d let on and rob me of my small boy glory. How many of the commuting lobstermen would have the time to watch over a kid in the harbor now, I wonder, or hire him to pack bait?

I tump-tumped against Chessie and scrambled aboard. Just about perfect. Except for the flies.