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Is anyone else looking around right about now and wondering what the hell happened to summer? It’s over. Gone. A wrap. And yet I feel as if it should just be getting started. To be honest, I tend to feel this way following even the meatiest of summers. It’s my favorite season, and it’s never long enough or slow enough, but this year it was positively lean — and fleet. Despite my determination to have a boat in the water by Memorial Day, fate (and a faulty turbo) pushed it closer to the Fourth of July, which in my mind is summer’s halfway point. Still, I planned to make the most of what was left. Soundings editor-at-large Bill Sisson and I had a mantra we would throw at each other…
Jim Flannery’s September piece “Sail Freight Experiences A Rebirth” caught my eye. As a mate and later driver for eight years on the schooner Harvey Gamage, I look forward to hearing more about this new chapter in her log book. Being old enough to remember the resistance from the trucking unions to sail transports back in the 1970s, I wish her well in her new endeavor in commercial commerce. To punctuate the decline of freight under sail, Ned Ackerman’s John F. Leavitt — a 97-foot schooner built in Thomaston, Maine, the first sailing cargo ship built in the United States in 40 years — sank on its maiden (and final) voyage in 1979, heavily laden. John Barry Oak Island, North Carolina PARALLEL COURSES It is interesting that Mary South and…
ICONIC BEACON: The federal government in August transferred ownership of Ledge Light, which marks the entrance to the Thames River in Connecticut from Long Island Sound, to the New London Maritime Society. Constructed in 1909, the unique beacon is a three-story brick-and-granite structure with 11 rooms, a mansard roof, an octagonal watch room and a cylindrical lantern. It will remain an active aid to navigation. Many new boats have become laden with creature comforts, so it’s refreshing to happen upon a simple, no-nonsense vessel such as the Albury Brothers 33, a center console with no grill, hi-def television, air conditioning or other luxuries. Albury Brothers has been building small boats on Man-O-War Cay in the Bahamas since 1952. In 2003 the family agreed to allow Albury enthusiast Jeff Lichterman to…
It was June 17, Hillary Schmitt’s birthday, and she had a “good feeling,” a mood that became infectious as Aarrr Booty, the Schmitts’ 44-foot Marine Trader, set out for another day of treasure hunting on a 300-yearold Spanish wreck off Fort Pierce, Florida. Most days when the crew is feeling lucky, they’ll return to the dock empty-handed, though undaunted because a treasure hunter always has to believe that tomorrow is another day, says Eric Schmitt, Hillary’s brother, and a diver and co-captain on Aarrr Booty. “We went out that morning just like any other, but she kept telling me she had a good feeling,” Schmitt says. “She was definitely right this time.” Working 1,000 feet off Fort Pierce beach, Schmitt used Aarrr Booty’s twin “mailboxes” — metal tubes at the…
The last few months have been an exciting time for treasure hunters and fans of historic wrecks, as the oceans yielded surprising secrets. Three of the most interesting are the 15thcentury Hanneke Wrome in Finland, the Spanish Armada ship La Juliana in Ireland and the polar explorer Maud in Canada. La Juliana The stormy North Atlantic swallowed up 26 Spanish warships along Ireland’s rugged northwest coast in 1588, and now the seas are coughing up the wreckage of one of those ships after two years of severe winter storms uncovered her remains. Off Streedagh Strand in County Sligo, archaeologists this summer recovered six bronze cannons, a gun carriage wheel, a copper ship’s cauldron and a number of smaller items from the La Juliana, an 860-ton Sicilian merchant ship that had…
If we’re lucky, most of us stumble into doing something we enjoy. Few of us are born to a purpose, as Matthew Stackpole seems to be. A descendant of a whaling family, he spent the first seven years of his life on Nantucket, Massachusetts. His father, Edouard — the author of 28 books and monographs on whaling and Nantucket — moved the family to Mystic, Connecticut, in 1953 when he was made director of Mystic Seaport Museum. Stackpole grew up playing aboard the whaleship Charles W. Morgan, then worked as a rigger at Mystic. He spent five years crewing on the topsail schooner Shenandoah and fell in love with Martha’s Vineyard. In the early 1970s, Matthew and his wife, Martha, bought the 50-foot Concordia schooner Mya. They were schoolteachers at…
