Song of the Lakes

In Traverse City, Michigan, the schooner Manitou and the cutter Scout, comprising the Traverse Tall Ship Company, are under new ownership. Jamie Trost and Kathleen Moore have long-standing ties to the area, while third partner Alysia Johnson is a commercial mariner whose experience on steel hulls like Manitou’s will be invaluable. We spoke in March to the trio about their plans for the business.

Marlinspike: Let’s start with the schooner Manitou herself. She was built in Portsmouth, NH and finished on Lake Champlain?

Jamie Trost: A couple named Doug and Pegeen Greason, I’ve never actually met them, built the boat to do Maine-style windjamming on Lake Champlain. She’s a steel boat that’s only been in saltwater for about three weeks of her whole life. She operated on Lake Champlain for about seven years, and then shifted to Traverse City.

MS: So she was built for windjamming, and I assume she had a COI to match. But it sounds like on the Great Lake she’s mostly been doing shorter trips, is that right?

Jamie: It’s been a combination. I don’t know what they originally had for a COI, but she has 24 bunks for passengers and 12 cabins, all double occupancy in two different compartments. That’s her original layout. Manitou’s daysail capacity is 59 guests.

When she first came to Traverse City, Traverse Tall Ship company already had Malabar, which sadly you’ve seen — I think you posted something recently about her. When Manitou first came here, she was running out of a port about 30 miles north of Traverse City and doing six-day windjammer trips. Due to the problems that Malabar experienced, Manitou became primarily a day-sail boat in 2001. But after the tourists depart Traverse City after Labor Day, we do four windjamming trips to round out the year.

MS: So where do you three enter the picture? Jamie, you’ve been all over the map, working on all different kinds of vessels. What brought you back to the Great Lakes?

Kathleen Moore: Jamie and I actually met in Traverse City when Jamie was an unlicensed deckhand and I was doing other things, and we ended up moving away from Traverse City to further our careers. Jamie with sailing, and me with other stuff. We’ve talked for a long time about how do we get back there, how do we get back there?

We also, at various points, talked about what it would be like to own our own boat. So for Jamie and I, it was a culmination of a dream of getting back to a place we never wanted to leave in the first place. But then Alysia came into our sphere, and I’ll let her pick that up from there.

Alysia Johnson: Gosh. I just got dragged along for the ride!

Kathleen: The hell you did!

Jamie: Guys, remember, this is going to be in print.

MS: Yeah, keep it clean.

Alysia: I’ve been adjacent to the Tall Ship industry, in and out of it since 2008, and have been trying to find ways to be able to stay more involved in a way that was sustainable, relative to my other career. And so the last couple of years, every time I’ve had a chance to volunteer to take some fill-in work on a boat, the easiest way to arrange that has been to come to Jamie. Once I knew that Jamie and Kathleen were looking at Manitou, I got involved too. I’m riding their coattails for sure. In terms of Traverse City, I had never been until we went out there to check it out.

Jamie: Alysia and I sailed together in 2018 on Lady Washington. I was out there May through August as captain. Alysia came to relieve the mate for a two-week stint. She actually joined the ship in her homeport of Astoria, Oregon. So I got the grand tour of all the best coffee shops and later, the best bars of Astoria. Our working relationship started there. By the end of our first watch turnover underway up from Astoria back to Puget Sound, we were essentially finishing each other’s sentences. So the synergy of how well we worked together started very early on.

Not long after that, Kathleen and I both independently revisited the idea of Manitou in conversations with Alysia. We both talked to her about it without having brought it up as the three of us at any time. And the response from Alysia was, “I want in.”

MS: And how did you know the Traverse Tall Ship Company was for sale?

Jamie: We’ve been talking to the previous owners; they put the word out that they were looking to sell. I’d had a number of conversations with Dave McGinnis over the years, from 2016 onward. We were both good friends with

Tom Kelly, who passed away early in 2016. Tom was the founder of Inland Seas, the organization that had brought me to Traverse City in the first place. I’ve been here doing fill-in work for Inland Seas a couple of times since then, and every time I was in town, Dave and I would have a conversation about where things were going.

Then in 2020, things got pretty serious. Kathleen and I actually bought a house here to gain a foothold in town and establish ourselves. And that was when the conversation started to really heat up and we started to talk to the banks and all the other players. That is mostly finished now; there’s still a couple details of wrapping up.

MS: Did Manitou and Scout come as a package deal?

Jamie: Yeah, there had been at one stage the idea that the Scout was going to go separately, or the McGinnisses were going to retire on the Scout, but they got the classic ten-foot fever. And so they have a larger boat that’s going to be their retirement boat now. And Scout became part of the package.

MS: She’s a Cabo Rico 38?

Jamie: Yes, that operates as a six-pack with a Jones Act waiver, mostly doing two-hour trips through the season. There’s one really cool trip that we do with her where there’s an island in Grand Traverse Bay that’s only accessible by private boat. So Scout takes people out to that island.

MS: As you take over this business, are you going to continue what the McGinnisses were doing, or do you have a different plan for moving forward with these two vessels?

Kathleen: Theirs is a model that works. I mean, we want to put our own stamp on some of that, but it’s definitely a model that works.

MS: So tell me a little bit about the McGinnis model. They have been running Manitou since she came to the Great Lakes?

Jamie: Dave and Mary were involved from 1990 until last fall.

MS: And how did the business plan evolve from when Dave got involved as ownership, and up to the point where he sold the vessels to you?

Jamie: I think it had evolved based on the fact that when they bought the company it was a single boat. The current structure that they have is that from Memorial Day through Labor Day, the ship does an aggressive daysail schedule, up to 24 sails a week. And then we switch over to the overnight windjammers. That was something they wanted to continue doing because he had grown up in the Maine fleet and really enjoyed that programming, where you get to know folks a bit better and you get to stretch your legs more.

But the [daysail aspect of the] business model was better, with the tourist traffic in Traverse City. It’s a Mecca for people from other parts of Michigan and the surrounding states in the summertime.

One thing that has changed is that Manitou used to offer a dockside bed-and-breakfast, but in the wake of the new regulations and increased manning requirements from the Conception disaster, that became untenable in terms of the number of crew involved. So we pivoted, and now the new thing is a Friday, Saturday, Sunday brunch cruise.

MS: You’ve got a lot of cards up your sleeve, with the brunch cruises and the ice cream cruises and the music cruises! Were those things happening under the previous ownership, or is that an attempt by your new group to throw pasta against the fridge and see what sticks?

Kathleen: They were already doing ice cream and Song of the Lakes music sails and the brunch cruises. That’s part of what was very attractive about the business — it had a variety of small tweaks to appeal to children, or people who appreciate maritime culture, or…

Jamie: Or appreciate ice cream.

Kathleen: Or appreciate ice cream. And we have some of our own ideas about adding to that programming. Jamie, you can talk about that since you’ve been spearheading that effort. We also have some other things in the mix that I don’t think we are ready to talk about just yet.

MS: Well, tell me more about the windjamming, then. I know Jamie has sailed on both coasts, on the Great Lakes, and grew up in that area, but as far as I know, you haven’t done much windjamming.

Jamie: I like to tell people I’ve sailed all four coasts! This one is the North Coast, and I’ve sailed as a guest officer on Elissa, so I’ve been down to the Gulf Coast as well.

But yeah, I had done a tiny bit of windjamming. I worked for the Portland Schooner Company back in the early stages of that company’s existence. I was on board when they bought Wendameen and started doing one-night overnights, which are better suited to Casco Bay because there are not as many places to go.

I think it’s a great model, an excellent way for people to experience a deeper connection with the natural environment. And obviously, some maritime culture. There are so many studies that show that whether you’re getting on a boat or in a kayak or going for a hike, that’s so big for everyone’s psyche.

And the windjammers are a much more immersive experience than a day sail, while still being in the realm of what normal folks can afford. It’d be great if everybody could do a circumnavigation or an Atlantic voyage, but their vacation time tends to get eaten up long before those sorts of things are possible.

MS: You mentioned Casco Bay being suited to a shorter form of windjamming, as opposed to Penobscot Bay. What’s Northern Lake Michigan like? Are there good anchorages for all wind directions? Are there different routes to take?

Jamie: We’re actually in a really amazing place for that. It’s not as densely packed as Penobscot Bay where every time you throw a rock, there’s a picturesque town. You have to skip the rock a few times, so to speak. But every 12 to 15 miles there is an attractive anchorage or quaint little town to go to. The only disadvantage is that we’re starting out of Traverse City, which is at the bottom of our body of water. So we have to be careful if it blows out of the north.

For a three to five-day trip, off the top of my head, I’m thinking of nine different options for anchoring. Some of them are pretty aspirational. You need a specific set of wind conditions to get to and from Beaver Island, or one of the Manitou Islands, those are the Holy Grails. But there’s no shortage of other small places that have access to a gorgeous island, a really nice beach, or a cute little town. And this part of the world is where Hemingway grew up, spending his summers. So we have that American literature going on, too.

MS: It sounds like you’ve got enough there that you can get people to come back year after year, knowing that every trip is going to be different, as they do in Maine.

Kathleen: You find a lot of generational tourism up around the Traverse City area. People who’ve been coming up there because their grandparents used to go there. So you get really deep-seated family roots in the tourism industry.

MS: Let’s follow up on that. Tell me what you see as your market for the windjammer cruises and during the summer for that aggressive day-sail schedule. Who are you selling these trips to, and how do you do it?

Jamie: Traverse City itself needs very little advertising; millions of people come to this region in the summertime. We’ve got, at this stage, essentially tropic-blue water. A variety of invasive mussels in the Great Lakes have cleaned things up, and we’re still waiting to see how that impacts the ecosystem.

But in the meantime, the water’s clear down to like 35 feet. You can see the bottom, the hillsides are lush with trees. They’re just farms and vegetation all over the place. And the town itself is a small walkable thing. We don’t need to advertise to get people to town. We just need to advertise to get people on the boat when they’re here.

So the summer season is a combination of return business from before, people who heard about us through the local media, and of course the classic tactic of, if the later daysails aren’t sold out, we’ll make sure to sail past the downtown on our first trip and show the flag!

Kathleen: It’s not dissimilar to Erie, Pennsylvania, where so many businesses have appropriated the image of the US Brig Niagara. You’ve got a lot of businesses advertising and marketing an image of a schooner or tall ship, and we’re the most prominent one in town. In people’s minds, there’s this idea of the boat with the big sails. And while there are other boats around the area, we’re the ones around the waterfront, downtown.

MS: You’re being helped by the marketing, the perception of the Traverse City area. People see it as a port, a place where people go out on the lake.

Kathleen: Actually, when people think Traverse City, they think cherries! That’s the first thing that comes to mind. But you still have such an incredible waterfront tradition in this town.

MS: Did you say cherries?

Kathleen: Traverse City claims to be the cherry capital of the US. I’m not sure current economics upholds that, but we’re sticking with it. The National Cherry Festival draws over a million visitors over 10 days to Traverse City.

Jamie: Kathleen’s talking about these are two different eras of Traverse City’s history. I mean, obviously the original residents here were a combination of Ottawa, Chippewa and Potawatomi Native Americans. But the first real industry that existed in Traverse City was logging. And there’s a river and a lake system here that had enough power to run as many as six sawmills. And schooners were bringing the goods in and the timber out, so Manitou fits right in with that tradition.

Unfortunately the lumbering practices weren’t sustainable and eventually all the land was cleared. Farming took over, and cherry farming became the key crop. And it didn’t take long before people started to come to Traverse City to get the cherries and realize that this is a beautiful area to hang out in.

MS: You Great Lakes sailors have the Tall Ship Challenge blowing through every three years, bringing all kinds of vessels to the area. Is that a game-changer when that happens? Do you sail away and join the circus, or let it kind of wash past you and around you?

Jamie: Oh, it’d be great to see some of the boats at the pier that we’re at. But because of the established nature of this business, it actually doesn’t work for us to go to the festivals. The business model is to stay here because we’ve got our own dock, we’ve got a pretty good feed of people, and we’re not set up to make passages like that, where we’d be underway constantly with passengers on board.

Traverse City, unfortunately, doesn’t see as many of the boats that visit the Lakes because we’re like 60 miles out of anybody’s way when they’re heading in between ports. But we have this amazing pier that was the old coal pier in town. A local nonprofit has been refurbishing it. They’re going to landscape it, put a pavilion on it, it’s going to be a public event space, and there is room for a visiting ship to come in.

MS: Here we are in March. You’re getting ready to take the cover off your 40-year-old schooner. What kind of shape is she in? What projects do you have on tap for the spring?

Jamie: She is quite frankly in amazing shape. The previous ownership and the owners before that have always done a great job of taking care of her.

There’s a relatively new deck on her. We took that down to bare wood and oiled that up over the last winter and springtime. The hull, because we’re in freshwater all the time, does not look like a 40-year-old steel boat by any means, compared to saltwater boats. And the sails have been replaced on a regular basis. The ship’s just been well maintained.

We have some things that we need to do, regulatorywise, because we’re an overnight tour boat so we’re captured by some of the new post-Conception rules. But for the most part it’s business as usual.

MS: Tell me how this triumvirate of yours is going to run things. You’re going to be the principal skipper, I presume?

Jamie: At the moment I’m the only one of us who’s an employee of the company; we’ll see how that unfolds as the years come by. Alysia should elaborate more on her maritime credentials because they’re significant. But she holds a 200-ton Ocean Master’s license that’s sail endorsed. And Kathleen has a tremendous amount of background before the professorship, in business opera- tions because that’s what she was doing when we first met. So we have a good Venn diagram between the three of us.

Alysia: The Venn diagram is nice because it’s not a circle, but there’s a significant amount of overlap in this center.

I’m a Kings Point graduate and I’ve worked my whole professional credential career as an officer on cable installation and repair vessels. For the last two-and-a-bit years I’ve been the Chief Mate of a 20-yearold surface lay ship. I think I’ve done more shipyard in the last two years than all of the rest of the ships in my cable fleet combined — seven other ships. So I’ve gotten a lot of experience with the project management, the shipyard piece, steel hulls obviously. I am used to the saltwater side of that.

So I’ve got more of the sort of operations and project management side. And then like Jamie said, I do have that 200-ton Oceans sail endorsement and I’ve moonlighted through the fleet on and off over the last eight or 10 years as a senior deckhand and a mate. As I look to the future, it’s a question of how to balance my commercial career against the allure of Traverse City in the summertime. It’s pretty strong, strong inducement to swallow the anchor a little bit.

MS: Does Traverse Bay have good facilities? Are you able to work on your boat where it is? Is there a good haulout facility?

Jamie: Oh, that’s a great question. We’re in the Great Lakes where a steel hull only requires haulout every five years, so that’s another benefit. In the past they’ve been having to cross the lake to either Wisconsin or the Lake Michigan side of the Upper Peninsula…

MS: How long is that trip?

Jamie: It’s a 116-mile trip. Nowadays though, at the Straits of Mackinac, just on the north side in a town called St. Ignace, there’s a yard that recently acquired a 200-ton lift that has a wide enough lift well for us. So that’s a more north-south route, and a shorter distance, and it provides more options if we needed to bail out someplace and tuck in for the night. So that’s on the docket for this year at the beginning of May.

MS: And when does your season start?

Jamie: For the whole life of the company up to this point — since 1989 — some portion of the spring has been dedicated to being chartered by Inland Seas Education Association for programming. In fact, when Tom Kelly started that organization, they didn’t have their own boat. So they just chartered Malabar and then later Manitou.

But as you posted this online, Inland Seas just bought another vessel [the threemasted schooner Alliance, formerly sailing out of the Jamestown River in Virginia]. So we’re looking at this being the last year where we do some of that programming, although that’s up to them — we’re willing and able to help out. As

Kathleen points out, my second boat was Inland Seas, as a deckhand. So we’re always eager to help them out, but we’re unclear if that will happen in the future.

This year the first programming with them will be the 22nd of May. If we didn’t have those programs, then Memorial Day weekend would be when we officially start with the public.

MS: What else do you want people to know about your business and your boats?

Jamie: Sailing, as I see it, is nature therapy. I actually went through a course to become a certified forest therapy guide and visited Japan as part of that process to investigate how they do it. Just getting people to experience things outside of their normal zone, and to feel that the sensation that we refer to as awe, is what we want. Manitou and Scout are both excellent for that. They’re both great boats, and they’re also guest stars to the beauty of Grand Traverse Bay.

Alysia’s credentials come with a whole bunch of training, and that’s always been a focus of my career. We’ve got some qualified assessor credentials between the two of us. She has a lot more than me, because of her licensure, but we can help people advance their careers. And we’ve also navigated the NMC process to a pretty hefty level. So we want to put a renewed emphasis on the professional development part of the career.

We want the ship to be more deeply engaged in the local community. The name Manitou comes from a local Native American word that means spirit. Literally, the boat is the spirit of Grand Traverse Bay. And ever since I’ve been here, we have been flying the Grand Traverse Band flag as a courtesy flag to acknowledge that these are the ancestral land and waters of the Band, and they still have the strong fisheries that goes on here. We’re hoping to get involved with some programming with them.

MS: I’m sure like everybody else in North America, you guys are hiring. So let’s insert a plug for whatever positions you need to fill between now and May.

Jamie: We’re still looking for a last deckhand and a relief captain. We’ve got two vessels. We’ve got another individual who’s not on this call right now, the captain of Scout, and she’s got that covered. I’ll be on Manitou, but we’ve got two boats that run seven days a week. So because we’d like to take a breath sometime during the summer, we need some relief help. We’re flexible on that and those ads are up on our website as well.

Alysia: It’s obvious which one of us is a full-time employee of the company right now. But I think I can speak for all three of us when I say that buying a business is a big project, and it was a big new thing for all three of us in different ways. But I think that we have a very solid group, we have a lot of overlapping experience, and we have already proven to ourselves that we have a good leadership team and a shared vision.

So it’s exciting to look ahead and think about all of the opportunities that we have, and all of the good sailing and ice cream-eating that we’re going to be able to share with the people who come out with us.

For more info, visit:www.tallshipsailing.com