PASSION FOR ALL ΤΙΜΕ

For a sailor who loves SCHOONERS, few places compare to the coast of Maine in the summertime.

- ANGUS PHILLIPS

Well, two, actually: the schooners Woodwind I and II. They are swan-white 74-foot twins that carry tourists on two-hour cruises daily from early spring to late fall. They're just too pretty to ignore.

So it is with schooners. There's something about the beamy, swooping hull shape and the dynamic angle of the rig that demands special notice. With a short mast forward and the tall one aft, the sail plan looks like a butcher's knife cleaving the wind.

When all the canvas is up and pulling-two or three jibs, foresail, topsails, and main-these graceful boats carry an air of timeless utility and majesty.

Imagine the scene 150 years ago, when schooners by the hundreds roamed the coast, laden with cargos of lumber, coal and other dry goods. What a sight to see them tacking and jibing off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, or Provincetown, Massachusetts, killing time waiting for a fair breeze to make the rounding.

No boat is perfect, of course, and schooners have their downside. Fred Hecklinger, the late guru of wooden boats around the Chesapeake, used to say, "If you love schooners, get a picture of one and put it on your wall." It was his way of acknowledging that for all their beauty, schooners of old were also heavy, not particularly good at going to windward, and relatively slow except on a screaming reach.

There's only one place left on the East Coast where you can reliably see a gaggle of schooners hard at work on any summer day, and that's Penobscot Bay off midcoast Maine. A dozen or so of the wooden beauties up to 100 feet long charter, offering four- to six-day trips out of Rockland and Camden. Smaller ones run daily excursions. A few are purpose-made for the charter trade, but most are meticulously maintained relics of the freight-carrying past, including two-Lewis R. French and Stephen Taber-that each turned 150 years old in 2021.