In which Sid and Doris relax, for several minutes at a time, while watching other people working.
One of the best things about this Interlude is that Sid and Doris are living with everyday people – in contrast to the rather detached travelling/hotel life that forms the usual Epic Adventure. So we are learning to talk like Americans talk (“Oh. My. Gawd. That is Ossome Cawfee!”), walk like Americans walk (“Use the SIDEWALK!” shouted, sorry, hollered, a passing motorist on a quiet suburban street) and think like Americans think (“There needs to be more ice in this drink”).
We are also realising that the other friends that Joe has brought on this trip have substantial amounts of sailing experience and love to tinker with their boats. As they haven’t got their boats with them, they tinker with Joe’s boat instead. Eric also teaches Sid how to splice Dyneema rope, using a very natty set of fids. And Joe and Betka mend Doris’s delaminating boat shoes, which goes rather beyond the level of goodnatured helpfulness usually required of hosts. Wes continues his never-ending quest to get the boat’s internet working reliably without needing him to sit in the comms cupboard all the time.
One of the extra treats in this mini-regatta was a regatta party on the Saturday night. It was held on the dock right next to the Classic Yachts (of which Black Watch is the Most Classic – in the picture of the masts, Black Watch is on the left).
Sid joined in with the partying for a polite length of time and then wandered away to explore the restoration in a nearby boatshed.
Doug worked in the boat yard here in Boothbay Harbor. In fact he worked on the fishing schooner Ernestina in for its umpteenth rebuild since launch at Essex, Mass in 1894. It is 156’ long including the boom, 26’ wide and draws 13’. The centre of the boat was all fish hold but later converted to passenger accommodation. With the two mast and boom it could carry over 8,000 square feet of sail, so it was fast. And now it is in the shed here.
Its first role was fishing off Newfoundland. From 1926 it was used for Arctic exploration and in WW2 supplied airbases on Greenland. In 1947 it caught fire in New York but was rebuilt as a packet working to and from Cape Verde. The boat had no engine or radio and in 1953 was becalmed 100 miles off Nantucket for fifteen days, survived and carried on with the Cape Verde trade. In 1957 28 Cape Verde carpenters worked for a month on a refit. Ernestina was on the way to the US for the 1976 Bicentennial when dismasted and towed back to Cape Verde. The boat was given to the US and used for educational purposes. There seem to have been some issues around the foundations that ran it and now it’s owned by the state of Massachusetts.
In 2016 Doug’s son delivered Ernestina to Bristol’s yard here in Boothbay Harbor though it was so rotten it was a dangerous voyage. Now it is being rebuilt again for educational sailing. Doug takes Sid, Joe and Doris into the boat shed for a tour of the works. The keel has lead about two feet square section all the way along. The timbers are massive, as you need for Arctic seas. The holes in the deck for the mast are about 20 inches. The boom will be like a telegraph pole. There is a new diesel, no more being becalmed.
We finish off our stay in Boothbay (or Boothbay Harbor, or Boothbay Harbor Bay) with a final mechanical challenge: how to dismantle and stow Nereus’s extremely lovely but somewhat over-complicated passarelle.