schooner

Listmates: I'm back at work after a week on a replica 19th century Great Lakes schooner, our local /Madeline/. Here she is: > http://www.maritimeheritagealliance.org/madeline_mha_boats.html We sailed her around from Traverse City in Lake Michigan to Bay City in Lake Huron for a Tall Ships Festival with 11 boats in attendance. We had a crew of 8./ Madeline /is 55' LOD, 92' LOA, 52 tons displacement, two masts. I sailed as 2nd mate. !st and 2nd mates each were "captains in training" for one day, responsible for managing the vessel that day. My day was the one with pea-soup fog, of course. Radar is my friend. We missed all the freighters. I rotated the vessel in the harbor, took her out, chose courses, and brought her in to the dock (fog gone, luckily) at the end of the day on the longest leg of our voyage. In the fog, a black-crowned night heron found us and landed on the forestay, clinging there for about 2 hours. The last leg was the arrival at our destination, which is where my other boat lives. There's a long dredged shipping channel in the shallow Saginaw Bay. We were under sail and I was at the helm. /Madeline/ has a traditional worm-screw steering gear, and when she's overcanvassed the steering is really stiff. _Really_ stiff. And it was. We'd round up in the puffs, heading toward the windward edge of the channel, the the seas would knock the bow down to leeward. Oops, don't hit that red nun. Oops, don't hit that green light. Etc., etc. But we made it in, lookin' good under sail, even if it was a bit anxiety-provoking. Our trip had stops at Beaver Island (19th century home of King James Strang, a rogue Mormon who proclaimed himself king), Hessel in the eastern Upper Peninsula, Presque Isle, Tawas, and then Bay City. At Hessel, we went down the road to Cedarville to visit the Great Lakes Boatbuilding School (http://www.glbbs.org/), a cool place with a nice new facility, lots of room, and a good curriculum. If you know some young (or even mid-career) people who are looking for a trade involving both manual skills and mental challenge, this would be a good place to look. They also take in some old folks who just want to build boats for the hell of it, which is about as good a reason as any. Here's a photo of yours truly at the helm, in port, wearing his "Juke Joint" t-shirt to send to the blues program's DJ. Chris Campbell