#Sailing

The Waterfront Today

Enduring Gloucester 1 Comment

Patti Page

Boats in Harbor, Gloucester. 1911                Hayley Lever (1876-1958)

Rowing season is underway in Gloucester harbor.  Gig rowers from Maritime Gloucester have been in the water for several weeks.  The dories tied at St. Peter’s Commercial Marina are seen moving around the harbor with more women rowing this season than I have noticed in the past.  The Gloucester High School sailing team started their season in March.  They are well underway to their third consecutive winning season.

As small boats maneuver around the harbor, they negotiate the coming and going of fishing boats.  Gloucester lobstermen are busy shuffling lobster traps from land to sea for the harvesting season.

More than two million pounds of lobsters were landed in the port of Gloucester in 2017.  Gloucester leads the State in lobster landings each year.

In April, approximately eight Maine scallop boats visited Gloucester to harvest scallops.  These vessels, referred to as transients because their home port is Maine, contribute to the economic viability of our working waterfront.  Each boat lands 400 pounds of shucked scallop meat per day.  In Harbor Cove, both Ocean Crest and Fishermen’s Wharf offload day-boat-dry scallops.  This is high quality, locally harvested and landed seafood. With a boat price of $8 per pound of meat, their landing value is appreciable.  In addition to the value of their catch, these boats contribute to the local economy in other ways.  Dockage fees paid for otherwise empty wharves, temporary housing for crew and supplies for fishing trips.  Some boats tie up at The Gloucester House and several others dock in Smith Cove.

All these activities, fishing, rowing, and sailing are important historic cultural activities.  It is who we are.  It is our identity.  All these activities require access to the water.

Is there adequate public access to the water in Gloucester harbor?

Let’s look at the City’s inventory of publicly accessible waterfront locations in the harbor.

County Landing is the only point of public water access to the harbor.  It is located at the beginning of the Boulevard, abutting the Tavern.  This landing was once used for launching boats from trailers and amphibious vehicle tours.  It is now in such disrepair it is difficult and dangerous to launch kayaks or paddle craft there.

The City has entered into a 30-year lease agreement with National Grid for 19 Harbor Loop which houses the Harbormaster.  The City is seeking $2.5 million to invest in the building to develop a public boating facility.  That seems to be ample funding to develop a dual purpose boating facility.  A boating center which serves the community with amenities for use by residents and seasonal visiting yachters.

For those interested in participating in a discussion on Community Boating and expanding public waterfront access, there will be a public discussion held in the Friend Room at the Sawyer Free Library on Tuesday, May 29th at 6:00 pm.  Come meet Guy Fiero, Executive Director of Cape Ann Community Boating to learn more.  For more information email CapeAnnCB@gmail.com.

 

Patti Page, of Gloucester, is retired from a career in federal fisheries regulatory compliance work and a past member of the City’s Waterways Board.  She is a founder and former director of Sail GHS, the sailing program for students across Cape Ann, and is dedicated to a broad range of working waterfront advocacy issues.

 

 

Principles

Enduring Gloucester 4 Comments

By Holly Clay

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It’s Labor Day in Gloucester Harbor. Eve Robinson sits composed and dignified in Principles’ cockpit.  Though Eve is legally blind, she appears to gaze out over the glistening water, to engage me with her eyes. At peace on Principles, the 48-foot schooner owned by her partner Derek Durling, she nonetheless senses the splendor of the decorated schooners, the high energy the visiting vessels bestow.

Eve hails from Tunstall, near Kirkby Lonsdale in Lancashire, the North of England.

“It’s the kind of place you do not criticize anyone because you know they belong to someone else,” she says.

Her remark could equally apply to Gloucester. It reflects a principled approach to life. No wonder she feels at home on a mooring in the “Inner Harbor.”

Though it was only recently, in 2016, Eve and Derek first encountered Gloucester, they are solidly hooked. “We were racing last year; that’s when we discovered Gloucester. It’s a special place; the people are special. They have time to talk and be nice,” says Eve.

Derek says they returned this year, ostensibly, for the Gloucester Schooner Festival on Labor Day weekend. Principles was already at its mooring in June, so it’s clear other attractions worked their magic on Eve and Derek. Friendships have a lot to do with it, like those with Inner Harbor folks, sailors mostly, like Fred Shrigley, Beth Leahy, Rob Bent, Mark Sheldon, and Bradley Royds.

Bradley Royds trimming sails

Royds piloted Principles north from the Bahamas at the start of Summer, with then skipper Justin. The meaning in the associations doesn’t escape Derek.

Quite simply, “we made friends here. We like Gloucester. There’s a nice mix and it’s not touristy.”  He says he and Eve are more than comfortable just being on the boat. They feel part of the community.

Derek first saw the schooner Principles in 1995/96 at a Newport, RI rally.

“I thought she was the most beautiful vessel I’d ever seen,” he remembers. Her name comes from the first owner. A corporate leader, he left his company when the board made an unconscionable decision.

“He said he resigned, because ‘It was the principle of the thing,’” Derek continues, adding that he narrowly missed a chance to buy Principles in 2006. Nevertheless, in due course, his turn came. He’s owned Principles for three years now.

She “definitely has” kept him and Eve young, Derek says.

When young, Derek married an American woman. Ironically, he didn’t reside over here until after her death several years ago. He lived mostly in the U.K., minus a brief Royal Air Force posting here or there. Derek’s first opportunity to own a sailboat and learn the sailing arts came while he was stationed in Scotland. The North Sea was his teacher.

Meanwhile, Eve, also married with one son, Malcolm, made a pleasant life for herself in England. In fact, she made a career out of her passion for kitchen arts, beginning as a cooking demonstrator in Manchester, England auditoriums. It wasn’t long before the headmistress of a nearby independent school approached her to teach home economics.

The Clergy Daughters’ School in Casterton, Cumbria, where she taught, “was a special place, because the Bronte sisters attended services and classes there,” explains Eve. “I had no experience with teaching,” she continues, but she always heeds the principle, “answer when opportunity knocks.”

“I stayed there for many years…I loved it.  I had an affinity for it. And better yet, it supported my cars.” Eve loves classic cars.

The same principle, combined with more than a little spunk, propelled Eve into a sailing life in 2013, even though, by then, she’d lost her eyesight.

“What would I have done sitting in a big house all by myself? Life needs to be more than that. You lose heart if you don’t get out and do something, anything. It would have been just existing. I’m not decrying it,” she adds.  But she knew, she was made for something more exciting.

Deric and Eve set out from Glasson Dock, Lancashire on a cold day in December 2013. Companions in the years after their spouses’ deaths, they share a love of music and each has an indomitable spirit, just what they needed to face a ferocious Atlantic in winter. As became their custom, they had a skipper named Euwin, on board.

“The idea was to go round the coast ‘til butter melts,’ then have a go at the Atlantic.  When we got to Hollyhead, Wales, trouble with the engine generator stalled us. Don’t ever go to Hollyhead! We finally did get over to Cork.”

In Cork, more challenges, topped with dollops of good fortune, awaited. As Eve tells the story, “Euwin approached us, declaring ‘by the way, I’ve engaged a nurse.’ Hannah the nurse arrived with a suitcase, a big one, an electric blanket, and a teddy bear,” not the usual comportment for a sailing lass. Clearly, she had been invited aboard for a variety of reasons, not least of which was Euwin “fancied her.” Eve smiles. But wouldn’t you know, before the ship had left Cork, Eve broke her wrist, another disappointment causing another delay. Nevertheless, Hannah brought joy to the situation. “She was well-organized. The medicine kit was complete. And she gave me the Teddy Bear,“ Eve says. “And so, we dawdled…” until Eve was fit for travel. They headed first to Belize, which didn’t suit them, and ultimately to Treasure Key in the Bahamas where they bought a house.

Eve doesn’t shy away from talking about her lost eyesight.

“Back in 2007, I was driving along when I almost drove right into the back of a tractor-trailer,” she explains. “It was my sight, you see. Something was affecting it.  We drove to Liverpool. It turns out I’d had a hemorrhage. The surgeon said, ‘we can operate to clear the damage,’ but not without grave risk.”

He then suggested a less risky surgery that would restore a vague sense of dark and light. Eve opted for the latter operation. It was successful. Light and shadow provide guidance. She’s holding out hope for stem cell replacement, once it’s invented for vision. She giggles: “At my age, I don’t have a lot of time to wait.”

“All my life I’ve been age-conscious,” Eve continues, speaking of another heartfelt principle. Put another way, she doesn’t talk or think about age, “consciously.” “When asked my age, I always say, ‘What’s it got to do with anything.’ I’ll be 90 in September. One time I was driving in England. Someone passed me recklessly, took off the side of the car. The driver apologized and took the blame; we exchanged information. I left the scene, thinking ‘well enough.’ But my husband Eddie, retired by this point, was adamant I must report the damage to the police.”

Off Eve went to the police station where she sidled up to the Sergeant. They were well-known to one another, yet he had to pose the usual questions.

“He asked, ‘what’s the damage?’ And, ‘what’s your name?’ He knew my name perfectly well. Then, he asked my age. ‘Guess,’ I shot back. ‘30,’ he said. ‘That’ll do,’ I said.” It was the principle of the thing.

Eve comes by her principled nature honestly. Her mother, half Lebanese and half French, arrived in England a child bride. A marriage to a man 20 years her senior had been arranged. She spoke no English.

“I think my grandparents thought, ‘we’re giving her a new life.’ It was bad in Syria and Beirut.”

The union was unhappy. Her mother made the best of it, eventually accomplishing much in her own right. WWII trapped Eve’s father in West Africa, primarily in Lagos, Nigeria, running the southern hemisphere portion of his shipping business. There was no one to run the U.K. business, so Eve’s Mother took over.

“She had to do it all. Unusual for a woman of that generation and one who’d been as privileged as she.”

His return after the war was difficult.

“My mother had gained much independence and sovereignty,” reflects Eve, who learned by example to cultivate the same for herself.

The joys of experiencing a new way of life – being in America, or spending time in Gloucester – endure.  Eve and Derek tested their feelings on the matter this last June, returning to England for her granddaughter’s wedding. It was their first visit since they embarked in 2013.

“It was funny going back. I was dreading it, but the visit turned out to be just lovely,” Eve says. “But, I wouldn’t consider going back for good. We really don’t like the weather. This,” she says sweeping her arm before her, as if to embrace the whole of the Inner Harbor, “is living.”

And then the wisp of a lady, with more than her share of pluck asks, “Do you know, I got to go up in a glider, in Franconia, this summer?”

About the 2017 Race

Principles placed first in her class of mid-size schooners and second overall, behind the world-class contender Columbia, who dwarfs Principles, in size only. Eve’s and Derek’s Gloucester friends comprised the bulk of the enthusiastic crew, who brought her victoriously through the race.

Parting After the Race

 

Holly Clay is settled in Gloucester after many years of living overseas and in Washington, D.C. Holly is a member of the Gloucester Historical Commission and the Annisquam Historical Society.  With a background in education and writing, her professional energies are currently devoted to studying and teaching yoga and meditation.

Tribute to Kent Bowker (1928-2017)

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Peter Anastas

 

I grew up in San Francisco, knew the old California of cities with limits, bare brown hills dotted with live oaks, glorious orchards, and deep dark redwood forests.  San Francisco’s fog, shifting beauty filling voids, never either hot or cold, chilly often, no more. The smell of ocean sweeps through the gate, tumbles over the hills. North end bars filled, fifty years ago with poets, before money came.

My old California no longer, I depart, return
to my New England home, to the marshes,
granite ledges of the older sea.                     (Kent Bowker, “The Hand Off”)

 

John Donne wrote that every death diminishes us.  I thought of Donne’s words after a mutual friend emailed me on June 24 to report that Kent had died at 7 a.m. that morning at Kaplan House, following complications from a pacemaker procedure.

I had known Kent for nearly thirty years.  We’d sailed together, dined with our families, and worked together on the board of the Charles Olson Society.   In recent years we met regularly for lunch and conversations that ranged from the day’s pressing political issues to Kent’s years in Berkeley during the 1950s, where he studied physics and became friendly with some of the Bay Area’s finest writers, including poets Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, during the era known as the San Francisco Renaissance.

Kent really was the “Renaissance Man” that his Gloucester Times obituary and the family’s Facebook tribute describe him as being.  He’d studied theoretical physics at the University of California in Berkeley and worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, where the Manhattan Project had originated.   Concurrently, he painted and wrote poetry at a time when writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, John Wieners, and Charles Olson were either living in San Francisco or passing though.

After Kent moved to the Boston area to work at the Lincoln Laboratories and Itek, he continued to write, adding sailing to his repertoire.   He designed the house in Essex he and his art historian wife Joan lived in.  Filled with books and paintings and situated on a hill surrounded by fields, forests and wetlands, it was an ideal place for meditation and creativity.  After he retired he devoted his entire time to painting and writing—when he and Joan were not sailing or traveling.  Kent was also a superb cook.

When I first walked into Kent and Joan’s house for a Christmas party, I was attracted to Kent’s impressive library.  Personal libraries tell us much about the person who has created them.  As soon as I discovered the collected poems of Charles Olson on the bookshelves, along with those of the San Francisco poets Kent was close to, I knew that I had met someone I could talk with about the things that meant the most to both of us, not only poetry but the larger cultural and social issues the poets we both admired addressed.

Kent was always modest about his learning.  Berkley at the time Kent was a student there, along with Gloucester novelist and playwright Jonathan Bayliss, and woodworker/sculptor Jay McLauchlan, was arguably the most exciting place to be in America, especially if you were a writer.  New York, yes—and always.  But there was an atmosphere in San Francisco the likes of which we had never seen and, sadly, would never see again.  The Pacific light, the blue ocean itself, the astounding Bay and its iconic bridge were part of that atmosphere, along with North Beach bookstores like City Lights, cafes and housing that was affordable to writers and artists.

But Kent did not engage in nostalgia.  He did not romanticize Berkeley.  He lived in the present, depicting the marshes and woods around his house, the beaches of Ipswich and Plum Island he sailed past; himself and family members.

When we started Enduring Gloucester five years ago I asked Kent for a poem.  It would be the first of many he contributed—wryly humorous or passionate.  Poems about the passing of time, the changes in nature; about Gloucester lobstermen and the sea itself.

Kent was a Progressive long before those who use the term today.  A conversation with Kent was like his poetry—articulate, knowledgeable, and deeply humane.  We will miss Kent while cherishing the gift of his poetry.

 

Peter Anastas, editorial director of Enduring Gloucester, is a Gloucester native and writer. His most recent book, A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester, is a selection from columns that were published in the Gloucester Daily Times.

Captain Karma

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On our way down the dock to practice for the upcoming International Dory Race, I noticed two of the dories were half sunk with about 100 gallons of rain water from the last two days of heavy rain. I commented to my dorymate, Capt. Rick Miles, “Somebody should bail those boats”, knowing that if they remained that way, they would absorb more seawater and be heavier for whichever unlucky competitor drew them next week.

“Let’s do it!” he replied, even though we were laden with thwarts, tholepins and oars.

I thought, “Damn! Shoulda kept my mouth shut!” We were on our way to do wind sprints, where we row so hard in bursts it induces nausea. So I tried to get out of it, “Let’s do it after practice.”

“Come on!” he says, “I’ll take this one, you take that one”, and he jumps in one of the dories and starts bailing. I had no choice. Being the competitive fool I am, I start bailing for all I’m worth, so I can finish faster and gloat about how good I am. Just as my back was stiffening, when I had about another 25 gallons still to bail, my dorymate says, “coming in.”, and jumps in my boat to help. I couldn’t help the overwhelming feeling that my dorymate had just taught me ANOTHER very important lesson.

Fifteen minutes later, as we turned North in our dory, ‘rounding the Coast Guard Station to head up into the North Channel to do our wind sprints, there was a fishing boat coming in, way out in the Outer Harbor with its long outriggers up. “Is that the ‘Midnight Sun’?” Rick asked. We could tell it was blue but couldn’t read the name yet.

“Can’t tell yet”

Well, we did our wind sprints and on our way back toward Harbor Cove I looked over my shoulder and there, dead ahead and directly in our course, was the boat that was coming in, and I could clearly read the name now, in bold capital letters: “KARMA”

One minute later as we were coming by the Maritime Heritage Center, here was good friend, Capt. Tom Jarvis, just pulling away from the dock in his beautiful Friendship Sloop, “Resolute”, and he hailed us, “wanna go sailing? I’ll pick you up at the Town Landing!”

Resolute

One hour later we were completely engaged in idle talk of boats and weather. Totally present. Three Gloucestermen. Our ears filled with every sound: the surf pounding the Magnolia coast, the waves lapping Resolute’s hull, the occasional luff of a sail, the Groaner. The setting Sun illuminating everything: Sails, Spars, Ten Pound Island, us in particular. Our nostrils full with sweet, salty sea mist with just a hint of seagull guano from Norman’s Woe. Our very skin and hair telling us the wind is out of the Southwest. The temperature had already dropped 10 degrees, even though the Sun hadn’t quite set, and the three-quarter moon had risen a half hour ago.

We were one with everything around us, in our element, fully aware we are blessed to be part of this special place and time.

 

James Tarantino (Jimmy T.) is an exemplary outdoor enthusiast who heralds his love of family, friends, and his passion for all things Gloucester.