SAILING BACK IN TIME

My journey on a historic schooner

- Susan Nerberg

STANDING BESIDE THE tall ship’s mainmast, my shipmate and I reach as high as we can. With a nod, we grab the halyard—the rope used to raise the mainsail—and pull hard, throwing our weight to the wind. “Heave!”

Just as our knees are about to hit the deck, two of my fellow sailors—we are 20 passengers in all on this three-day cruise—spring into action, grabbing the rope and taking their turn pulling it down. “Ho!”

And so we go, back and forth: “Heave!” “Ho!” “Heave!” “Ho!” Slowly, the mainsail rises up the mast until it’s flapping in the breeze, waving goodbye to the port of Camden in the eastern US state of Maine.

Captain Garth Wells gives us a thumbs up. But when we start looking for a comfy spot in the sun to relax, Brent, the first mate, shakes his head. “Foresail!” he yells. We haven’t finished our work just yet; time to hoist up sail number two, on the mast in front of the mainsail. Luckily, it’s a bit smaller.

As the Lewis R. French, our 30-metre, two-masted schooner, sails out onto the glittering Penobscot Bay, cellphone reception cuts out. “There goes connectivity,” says one of my fellow passen

gers, a man in his 50s from Arkansas, as he stows his phone with a sigh. It’s hard to tell if he’s miffed or relieved about losing access to social media. The only wavelengths at our disposal now are the ones beneath our feet.