The Mary E Sailed into Bath on Sunday, April 24. I was standing near the water’s edge watching her approach, just as I had been the first time I saw her 46 years ago in Boothbay Harbor.

The 53-foot (73 feet including the bowsprit) gaff-rigged schooner coming up the Kennebec River under full sail was a spectacular sight for the large crowd that had gathered at Maine Maritime Museum to welcome her back to her home port.

For me it was an emotional homecoming. It was like seeing an old friend. The Mary E was home to me for three summers and a winter in the early ’70s.

It was the summer of 1971. I had come to Boothbay Harbor looking for a job. One day I ran into a friend while walking down Townsend Ave. He told me that his friend Bob Morse had recently bought the Mary E, and that the 1903 clipper-bowed vessel, the oldest Maine-built fishing schooner still in existence, was in Stonington having some work done.

When she was shipshape, Morse would be using her as a charter boat out of Boothbay Harbor. He was looking for a captain and crew. Other than a 26-foot sailboat owned by the Witt family on Cameron’s Point, I had never stepped foot on one, but somehow, through sheer luck, and some fast talking, I was hired as a deckhand.

Morse was in Stonington overseeing the work being done on his new acquisition, and as the time drew near for the Mary E to be launched again, he knew he needed to find a captain. One morning, two young backpackers stopped to admire the old schooner. The 20-year-olds were in the beginning stages of an adventure, hitchhiking around the U.S. for the summer.

Fate stepped in. One of them, Stanton Parks, happened to have a 100-ton captain’s license. From Camden, he had been crewing on windjammers since his early teens. Morse hired him on the spot, and a few days later the Mary E sailed into Boothbay Harbor with Capt. Parks at the helm.

I was waiting for her down by the Tugboat Inn Restaurant. Parks was wearing a dark green watch cap, and his long, thick curly dark hair was blowing out behind him. (It was hard to focus on the boat.) The captain secured the schooner to a mooring, I rowed out to meet him, stepped aboard the Mary E, and fate stepped in again. I moved my meager belongings onto the schooner a week later, and three months later I married the captain.

Living aboard and sailing the Mary E that first summer was a life-changer and an eye-opener. I had to learn, quickly, not just to sail, but to be one of a crew of two, not including the captain, on a big, heavy, old gaff-rigged schooner. Stan bought me a copy of Royce’s Sailing Illustrated, “the sailor’s bible,” and I studied that little book till it was dog-eared.

I learned the lingo: Spars, sheets, lines, rigging, topsides, bowsprit, crow’s nest, and “down-below,” “galley” and “head.” I learned to haul and furl the heavy gaff-rigged sails, coil the fat, heavy lines and throw them in a way that they would uncoil perfectly to someone waiting on a wharf. I learned to sand and paint the deck, rails and topsides. I learned to grease the masts with Vaseline while being slowly raised on a small swing. I learned to swab the deck, clean the head, and cook on a small wood stove in the galley.

I learned that big, strong men who should have just been along for a fun sail on an old schooner, felt compelled to help raise the heavy sails, which I was perfectly capable of doing myself. They never offered to help swab the decks.

That first summer was indeed a learning experience. It's not easy being at least partially responsible for five to 20 people – many of whom had never been out on the ocean.

Oddly, I don’t remember much about the food we ate on the Mary E. I do remember we didn’t have a lot of expendable cash though, so there were probably a lot of peanut butter and jam sandwiches. And when the mackerel were running, we caught them, cleaned them, and fried them in an old frying pan on the wood stove.

One of our charters that summer was a week’s trip with a group of young teenage girls from a summer camp. One night we were anchored off Monhegan. Stan had gone ashore for provisions. I was on the deck when the girls surrounded me, giggling, asking if Stan and I were married. Stan was a good-looking 20-year-old sea captain and the girls all had crushes on him. 

More next week ...