Schooners Under Sail, and a Step Back in Time

Of the 21 schooners that started, 15 finished and six decided to retire.”

Each Labor Day weekend, Gloucester Harbor seems to slip backward in time as schooners from up and down the New England coast gather for the Gloucester Schooner Festival, a celebration of the city’s maritime heritage and the vessels that once defined its working waterfront.  

The weekend culminates offshore with the Mayor’s Cup Race, when schooners large and small leave the harbor and meet under sail off Eastern Point for one of the festival’s signature events.

This year, 21 schooners crossed the starting line, ranging from sleek ocean racers to historic working vessels whose designs reach back to the age of sail.  Among the most imposing was Gloucester’s own Adventure, the 122-foot fishing schooner launched in 1926 and now preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

Before helping run the race last weekend, I wanted to learn more about Adventure, the oldest and largest schooner in the fleet entered in the Mayor’s Cup Race.

It was a surprising step back in time. Captain Phil Dunn welcomed me aboard and brought me down the forward companionway into the crew’s quarters in the bow of the boat.  Three of the student volunteers welcomed us into their small but neat cabin, which had eight bunks tightly packed on either side.  It was a bright, cozy space, with curtains covering each bunk, a polished table and white overhead beams.

A Life at Sea

Originally, there were another four berths farther forward, which have been removed to create more space below.  In her fishing days, however, this space would have been crowded with 12 sailors and their cumbersome gear, with poor lighting, little headroom and a rough wooden table.

The crew of 24 fishermen, plus captain, cook and engineer, would have spent two to three weeks at sea on each voyage, fishing constantly, year-round, even in winter.  Conditions offshore from November through March would have been miserable, with no change of clothes, little heating and very little lighting below.  Just imagine being on a sailboat a thousand miles offshore on the Grand Banks, in a storm in mid-January, with just woolen clothes topped by an oilskin jacket.

Aft of the bunkroom was a large galley space the width of the boat, followed by a carpentry shop and space for equipment and sails. The next space aft was the fish hold, divided by partitions into six huge bins for stowing fish.  On the outward leg, they were packed with block ice. As the fish were hauled in from the dories, they would be gutted and cleaned on deck, so the remains could simply be tossed overboard, and then packed down on the ice, with more ice piled on top.  Each day, a new layer of fish would be added until the hold was full.  At that point, they would turn and sail as fast as possible to Gloucester to get the precious cargo to market.

Finishing my tour in the captain’s cabin, now beautifully restored with detailed woodwork, I had a chilling reminder of the ever-present danger.  It was a plaque bearing the names of seven crew members lost at sea, one of whom was Capt. Jeff Thomas, who died of a heart attack while chopping ice off the rigging.

Imagine being in a storm, in freezing weather, with ice forming on the shrouds, sails and rigging, and knowing that the extra weight high above deck could cause the vessel to capsize and, of course, go under.  And—not to be too melodramatic—another fearful image is the sense of terror any fisherman must have felt when out in his dory, laden deeply with fish, losing contact with the ship in fog, darkness or heavy seas, trying to find his way back to the vessel.

Underway for the Mayor’s Cup

On the morning of this year’s Mayor’s Cup Race, one of the highlights of the Gloucester Schooner Festival, conditions were not what we had hoped for.  At the skippers’ meeting at 8 a.m.  Sunday, the wind was blowing solidly from the north at 12 to 15 mph, but the forecast called for it to rapidly diminish over the next few hours, die completely, and then come back in lightly from the south by 3 p.m.

Our flotilla of four boats left Manchester at 10:45 a.m. to be ready to start the race at 12:30 p.m. at the whistle buoy off Eastern Point.

Rounding House Island into the breeze, we were met by strong wind and sizable swells, forcing us down to a slow speed.  Our smaller mark boats had even more trouble in the waves and had to throttle way back.  But we arrived at the whistle buoy off Eastern Point, dropped anchor and set the starting line, while one of our mark boats headed back west two miles toward Magnolia to drop a reach mark near Kettle Island.

Following our instructions, the first group of schooners—the large and medium vessels, 55 to 122 feet long—converged on the starting line at the gun at 12:45 p.m., reaching on starboard tack at their best speed toward the turning mark.  Fifteen minutes later, the smaller schooners crossed the starting line in their wakes.

A Race Against the Wind

After a few minutes, we knew the leaders would be the medium-sized schooners, with lengths from 45 to 65 feet.  Most of these boats were built in the 1930s for ocean racing. Having started at 12:45 p.m., four of them rounded the reach mark and were back at the finish by 2 p.m.

Spirit, a beautiful white racing schooner built in 1934, finished at 1:28:10, followed by Malabar X at 1:29:45, Adirondack III at 1:58:42 and When and If at 1:58:55, the latter two separated by only 13 seconds.  When and If, designed and built for Gen. George S. Patton, was a longtime fixture in Manchester’s outer harbor.

The next boats to finish came in an hour later, having slowed considerably when the wind died and hampered by the leftover slop from the overnight northeasterly and a strong westerly current setting them back toward Magnolia.  Of the 21 schooners that started, 15 finished and six decided to retire, needing to get their passengers back on shore.

In the Medium Schooner class, Spirit, from Newport, Rhode Island, was first; Malabar X, from Salem, was second; and Adirondack III, from Boston, was third. In the Large Schooner class, Ernestina-Morrissey, from New Bedford, was first, only 90 seconds ahead of Adventure, followed by Tabor Boy, from Marion, Massachusetts.  In the Small Schooner class, Phra Luang, from Bristol, Rhode Island, was first, with Strombus and Green Dragon, both from Gloucester, second and third.

At the awards ceremony, following a large dinner hosted by Maritime Gloucester for all the contestants, the crowd gave a hearty cheer for the captains as they came forward to receive their plaques.

And it seemed to me that the loudest cheers were for Gloucester’s own Adventure and her skipper, Christa Miller-Shelley.

Tony Leggett leads the Gloucester Schooner Festival Mayor’s Cup Race Committee with a team of volunteers from the Manchester Yacht Club, where he serves as the club’s commander.