22 minute read
Lewis R. French: Midcoast Methuselah
Marlinspike: Out of the thousands and thousands of schooners built in Maine in the 19th century, the French is the last survivor. What was it that enabled her to last so long?
Garth Wells: We’ve thought about that a lot. I think there’s a couple factors. The first one is luck. So many boats just went up on the rocks during storms and were abandoned. The fact that that never happened probably speaks to the way that she was built, that she was strong enough to withstand that, that she had the captain and the gear to get through the storms and to be anchored in the right place.
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But the other part... she’s changed her living through the years, in order to keep herself viable as a business. She began sailing in 1871, carrying cargo, and then in the 1920s, they took out the mast and added an engine. She was a sardine carrier from the ‘20s up to the ‘70s. And then in the ‘70s, when the sardine business was going down in Maine, and the windjammer business was becoming more popular, she transformed back into a schooner. She had 50 years of sailing cargo, 50 years of motoring cargo, and now 50 years of taking passengers out. So, amazingly, she’s been a viable business for 150 years.
MS: I saw that she was substantially rebuilt in 1929 after a fire. I guess if she had been carrying a flammable cargo, that might have been the end of her story right there.
Garth: Right — that’s the luck part. That fire actually occurred in Belfast at the dock while they were filling up fuel, probably for the yawl boat or for the docking engine, and they were, of course, smoking while they did that… anyway she sunk there at the dock.
But the owners, the Gray family, they saw that she was still a viable vessel even after that explosion, so they’re the ones who put the engine in her. They said that really saved her, because then she was running bricks up the river into Bangor. She could do three trips a week motoring, where she could only do one trip a week sailing with a yawl boat. So it kept her economically viable through that transition where all the old schooners, a lot of them, were lost, because they were just too slow. The world was speeding up.
MS: Now, you say she was converted into a windjammer back in the early ‘70s. Who owned her at that point? How extensive was that rebuild?
Garth: Massive. She was owned by the Seaport Navigation Company, which transported sardines, canned sardines, up in Lubec, Maine, the furthest downeast you can get. They sold her to a young man by the name of John Foss, who now owns the American Eagle. He rebuilt her over three years, very extensively, probably 80% of the frames and the whole deck, all the deck structures, and he had to put the rig back into her, so that was a massive undertaking. She was 100 years old at that point. And she’d gotten work done, of course, to have lasted 100 years, but that was by far the most extensive rebuild. John Foss tore her all the way down and built her back up.
MS: Now, the French has come full circle. She started out with no engine, and once again, you’re operating her with no engine. I assume that means you have to pay a more attention to weather and route planning than some of the other windjammers, but I guess it also means that there’s more room for cargo, whether it’s bricks or people. Are there other aspects to running an engineless windjammer?
Garth: It’s an entire mindset, running a yawl boat-powered schooner. Just what you can do and what you can’t do, power-wise. You can’t really back down very well; some things like that, you just get used to. There are advantages, too. I can spin in my length very easily by putting that boat perpendicular to our stern and pushing.
But when we’re sailing and the boat’s hauled in the davits, you do not have a quick fallback plan if you suddenly need a push with an engine. The way that you sail the boat has to be altered slightly to know that you have to be able to sail out of whatever you sail into. You can’t just flip that engine on and pump her in forward for 100 yards. So it’s definitely a challenge, but once you’re in that mindset and you think that way, then you just adjust.
The other nice thing is to work on the engine in the yawl boat is a lot easier than most engine rooms I’ve been in. You can get all the way around the boat and all the way around the engine.
MS: And do you have to train a mate to be in the yawl boat each season?
Garth: Oh, yeah. That’s another factor, that it is a twoperson operation. It’s not just your own self, so you do lose a crew member. But we train all the crew members to use it. For many years, the cook ran the yawl boat, and it just...
It’s like being in an engine room in a submarine. I tell them, “You just watch me. You don’t really make any decisions on your own down there. So even if you think what we’re doing is wrong, you just keep looking at me.”
MS: Jenny, I know you had a lot of sailing experience before you came to Maine, and were sailing as a mate on a windjammer. Can you talk about your path to Maine and to windjamming?
Jenny Wells: The first windjammer that I worked on was the Angelique. I had previously worked on the Spirit of Massachusetts, and on the Amistad. I did that on and off for about five years. I also worked on the Isaac H. Evans as a mate. That was maybe in 2001 or 2002? And then Garth bought the French, and so then I switched my allegiance over to the Lewis R. French.
MS: And how did you fall in with Garth?
Jenny: The Angelique and the Lewis R. French dock right next to each other in Camden, so all those schooner bums know each other.
The FRENCH tearing across Penobscot Bay
MS: You guys have been married now since 2007, and you have two kids.
Jenny: That’s correct. I run the office now, so I don’t get out on the boat quite as much as I used to. But I did cook on the French for a year before we had kids, so I was the yawl boat driver also. Now, I just get out off and on, and our kids go sailing too, sometimes.
MS: Do you ever swap off and take a trip as captain?
Jenny: I have never been the actual captain of the Lewis R. French! I do have a license; I need to renew it. But I just decided that for myself, I didn’t want to be the actual captain. I did all the other positions. I’ve been the cook. I’ve been the mate. I’ve been the mess mate.
MS: That must be helpful in running the business end, having worked in every role on board.
Jenny: Yeah. Actually, it’s interesting to do all the different positions and put yourself in those crew members’ shoes, and know what the mess mate is really going through and what the mate is really going through. So yeah, that has helped a lot.
MS: And Garth, you’ve been on the boat for over 20 years now, right?
Garth: My first year as the mate was 1998.
MS: Amazing. How has the windjammer business changed since you guys signed on for the first time?
Garth: Great question. I’ve seen a move to shorter trips. My first year, I’d say three-quarters of our trips were six days, and now, maybe one-third of our trips are six days long, so that has been a change.
Jenny: I feel like it’s kind of bouncing back now, where our longer trips now suddenly will be sold out before the shorter ones. It’s almost like a pendulum swinging back more toward the longer trips. I don’t know what would account for that.
MS: I noticed, looking at your schedule, that the fourday trip seems to be your sweet spot.
Garth: We feel like that is long enough that they get a good experience on the boat, but short enough that they can carve out that time among their Maine vacation. But like Jenny said, the six-day trips do get a lot of repeat sailors, who sign up earlier. Perhaps people are ready to not have a vacation where they’re jumping from one thing to the next the whole time. Certainly the internet has changed not only how people learn about us, but even what we do on the boat, in some ways. It sounds silly, but ten years ago, I was really the only one who knew what the weather was like on a daily basis by listening to the radio, or whoever was around me when I listened to the radio, and now everyone knows what the forecast is, even more so than I do sometimes. Every passenger has checked their phone in the morning and knows exactly what’s going to happen, so there’s no way I can get away with saying it’s not going to rain today. No way! That is a thing.
I’ll see a video of a trip, an old video from the ‘60s or ‘70s, and it’s so the same, what we’re doing and what the experience really is — so the same. It’s getting away, and seeing how this old boat sails, and seeing a bit of the Maine coast. In some ways, the windjamming experience is exactly the same — just some of the outside stuff is different. But you can almost go on a trip now and it feels very much like a trip from 30 years ago.
The LEWIS R. FRENCH in an earlier life
MS: Getting back to what Jenny was saying about the swing back towards longer trips, is the profile of your passengers changing at all?
Garth: I don’t think so. I do feel like the shorter trips are younger people now. On the shorter trips, we get a lot of young parents who are getting away for the first time, and their kids are with the grandparents and stuff like that. The longer trips are for more of our hardcore, and I would say there’s a slightly older crowd on the longer trips.
Jenny: Yeah, they just have more time.
MS: And there are no kids on the French.
Garth: Our rule is that no one under 16 comes out, except for our own kids, who are younger than that. I tell the passengers that they can come because I can actually yell at them. I can’t yell at your kids. No, that’s not proper.
I don’t think the demographics have really changed that much. Do you agree, Jenny?
Jenny: We’ve added some things, like sailing and hiking and kayaking, to try to attract some younger people who want to do several things on their vacation, and now they can do it all on the French. I guess our marketing, in that sense, has changed a little bit. I don’t know that it’s necessary to add those things, but from a marketing standpoint, I think it works.
Garth: We’re trying to get people to understand that part of a windjamming vacation is being at anchor and using the small boats and going ashore and doing other things. It’s not just the sailing. So it’s just trying to educate people about what the trips are really like.
Jenny: There are people who come every year and all they want to do is be on the boat. For them, they prefer not to go ashore, not to kayak or even to go for a hike. For them, the getaway and the beauty of the experience is just being on the boat and having the peace and quiet of it.
MS: The Maine Windjammer Association announced in February that the J&E Riggin had changed hands. Did you guys have a reaction to that? I’m sure it wasn’t a surprise to you.
Garth: No, I think that one had been in the pipeline for a couple of years. It’s actually a classic way that one of the windjammers up here transitions. It’s a crewmember that sailed on the boat for a while, and over the course of a couple years slowly but surely worked his way up, and…
Jenny: Both of them did.
Garth: And then they bought it. So that’s usually the perfect recipe for success for a transition. There’s continuity with the boat and the passengers and the business, so I think they’ll do great. John and Annie have run a great business for 20-plus years, and that’s the right way for a boat to change hands.
The FRENCH on deck...
...and down below.
MS: I asked Kip Files [formerly of Victory Chimes] about this a couple years ago, when a bunch of the boats were on the market: “What’s going on?” And he said, “It’s really just a natural changing of the guard. The boats are just passing into younger hands.”
But there’s been a lot of turnover in the last few years. The Evans became the Sheppard… the Bowditch got rebuilt into Ladona… and the Chimes, the Riggin, and the Heritage were all passed on to new owners. That’s a big chunk of the fleet. You guys are rapidly becoming two of the senior operators.
Garth: We laugh about that. I bought the boat in 2004, and we were always, ourselves and Noah and Jane [Barnes, of the Stephen Taber and Ladona], were the youngest ones. For years we were the youngest ones, and nothing changed at all in the fleet. But then you’re exactly right. In the last few years, there’s been a lot of transition, and I’ll think you’ll see more.
I mean, there’s a lot of owners that were... It was a pretty old ownership group for a while. If I’m the youngest one in there, at 45, that’s not a young group of people! But out of nowhere, I’m one of the older group, and I’m excited for that.
MS: Is there something else going on here? I mean, is the nature of the business changing?
Garth: I don’t think the group is changing. I think it’s just timing. A lot of times, it’s like sort of what John and Annie are doing: your ownership is about 20 years. But a lot of those older owners, Kip [Files] or John [Foss] or Doug [Lee, of Heritage], or Ray [Williamson] on the green boats [Mattie, Mercantile, Grace Bailey]... they’ve done it way longer than that. John and Doug’s ownership is almost 40 years! They sort of skipped a transition there, doing a Tom Brady, and so then they all got into their 60s and 70s. And then they all put their boats up for sale sort of at the same time. For a little while, when the boats weren’t selling, we wondered if there was no new guard of young people to come in. But now that I see that they are selling, I’ve regained confidence. There have always been young people that want to sail; the question is, are
We’re seeing that there are. In this rising generation, there are young people that want to own a boat.
MS: But are there people that want to own a 150-year-old wooden boat?
Garth: [Laughs] There are crazy enough people that do. I’m confident. When I bought the boat, I was 29, and I couldn’t think of anything greater in the world than to own an old wooden schooner. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. I think that there are still people that want to do that. We’re seeing that with the Riggin, with the Chimes — there are still young people that want to do this for a living.
MS: Talk a little bit about the commitment though that it takes to be the steward of 150-year-old wooden boat that is certified for passengers.
Garth: We’ve done it long enough that I feel like it’s just what we do, but it is a total commitment. I was actually attracted to that, in terms of the decision-making and the responsibility of it. I thought that just seemed so great. I was looking at the owners of the windjammers, and I just thought, “That is the coolest thing. Those guys and their wives are just running a boat as a business.” I was attracted to all aspects of it. I don’t shy away from... I’m not afraid of Excel spreadsheets, and I’m not afraid of a welder. I like that combination of things that you have to do.
But Jenny and I talk about the boat all the time, ad nauseum. If someone put a recorder in our house, they would probably be shocked at how often we talk about wording on the website, or mattresses for cabin six, or LEDs for the running lights, or crew training. We just go on and on, all the time.
It’s nice too, because Jenny has the experience of crewing and being on boats, and maintaining them, and running a paintbrush, and running a yawl boat, so we can talk about it and share professional skills.
Jenny: I think that might be one of the changes over the years: it’s definitely a yearround job. It’s not just a seasonal job. I don’t know if the internet probably has a huge influence on that, but there is no offseason, even though it seems like there should be. The decisions, and the behind-the-scenes stuff is constant.
MS: I wonder if that’s the reason some of the owners hang on beyond that 20-year period, and end up running the boats for 30 or 40 years. Because what do they do next? It’s not a lucrative enough business where you could say, “OK, I’m 60, I’m going to sell out now and be retired.” No matter how long you’ve owned one of these windjammers, you probably still need to be working. Like you said, the boats aren’t selling for cash. They’re mostly being handed on to crew, people inside the windjammer community, on terms I assume are buyer-friendly.
Garth: Yeah. Yeah.
MS: Is this a business where you need to work until you die?
Garth: [Laughs] Well, that’s what we all say! But I bought the boat from a family, and he was only about 45 when he sold me the boat, and he had done it for, I think, 18 years.
Jenny: Dan Pease.
Garth: And Dan did not retire. He went on and drove a tugboat until his very recent retirement. So you’re absolutely right. You ask about selling the boat after 20 years, at which point I would be 50 years old. Well, I’m obviously not of retirement age, or in a position to retire financially. So what do I do from there? What do I do that could be more exciting than owning a schooner?
I don’t know. That’s a question we all ponder. We may think, “I’ve had enough of owning this boat,” but what else are we going to do? Although I do believe our group of older owners truly, truly loved — and still love — the boats, all through their ownership, like John and Doug. I don’t think they thought for one second that they wouldn’t run their boats until they died, or were up into their 70s.
MS: The Maine Windjammer Association, of which the French is a member — I find that fascinating. Here you’ve got a group of very similar businesses — competing businesses —working together to market their product and their region. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with the MWA?
Garth: The value of the association is that it lets us pool our resources and hire a professional to do the marketing for us. Marketing is a very, very hard thing for us, and I think for a lot of the owners up here, because we don’t have enough money to get a big bang for our bucks, and we don’t have very much knowledge about how to do it. By everyone getting together and pooling our resources, and hiring someone to spearhead that for us, it’s just so much more effective.
Marketing… you’re never quite sure what’s going to work and what’s not, but it’s so much more effective than if we were all just doing it individually.
And then the other part that’s great is that we all get together, once a month during the winter, or sometimes even more often, to make some of these marketing decisions, and to organize some of the group events, like the Great Schooner Race. We also talk about Coast Guard regulations and all the other stuff that’s going on.
It’s nice talking to other owners, and hearing what other people are doing, because you just learn so much more. Different owners are specialists in different areas. We’re better friends with some people in the fleet than others, but then we’re getting together with everyone during those meetings, and that part of it is so valuable to our success, talking over different issues.
When COVID was an unknown last March and April, everyone would get together and talk about what they were going to do, what ideas they’ve heard, ways to do cleaning, ways to do to testing, ways to do all these things, so that part is super valuable.
Jenny: And it lets us advocate for our industry. We spent a lot of time talking to the state of Maine, which was crafting guidelines for all the industries. With the Windjammer Association, we could have one person do it on behalf of the group. That was a really effective way for us to have a say in crafting the COVID-related guidelines for the industry.
MS: The Maine windjammer operators are in a unique position — all those boats clustered into the same area, with so much in common — and you’ve overcome the idea of competing to work together. I think that’s an amazing model.
Garth: I sometimes think about what it would be like to be the only schooner in Camden. What’s really so great for me, and maybe it’s my personality, is to talk to other owners about how they’re dealing with things. Even little things, like “Those are really cool lights that you have in your cabin. Where did you get those?” That sort of sharing is so valuable. It’d be really hard to be out all by yourself, and own the only wooden schooner in a harbor full of modern boats.
MS: Obviously, the thing that sticks out about the French — especially this year, because it’s her 150th birthday — is that she’s the oldest windjammer. But what else is unique about your boat?
Garth: I think that the coolest thing about the French is the fact that its entire history is along the Maine coast, and that ties the boat to the area in a way that I didn’t fully comprehend, initially. People had a personal experience with the boat when it used to be in Lubec, or when it used to be homeported in Boothbay Harbor, or their great-great-uncle used to work on the boat, and they’ll come down and see it. That connection is just so neat, that the boat has been around that long, and has done so many different things. When someone comes down and says, “My greatgrandfather used to load this boat up in Lubec with sardine cans” and he has a picture of his dad standing on the deck, an old black-andwhite picture — that’s just, wow! That’s what this boat did. And there’s still people that are tied to the boat in that way.
Jenny: There are still Frenches that live in the area and own their own businesses. We recently drove down and saw Lewis R. French’s tombstone, and all the French brothers, down in South Bristol.
Garth: We were down there to look, because we were going to bring the boat back to Christmas Cove, where it was built, going to bring it back in June. We went down there just to check out the dock and whatnot, and as we’re leaving, I stop to get gas, and next to us is a van that says ‘Lewis R. French, Plumber’. That dude had a hat on that said, Lewis R. French Plumbing, and I had a hat on that said, Schooner Lewis R. French.
MS: Tell me you swapped hats!
