Aboard: EIDER

Penbo cruisers are unique in the annals of wooden yacht building. The company that built them, Penobscot Boat Works (aka Penbo) of Rockport, Maine, was founded by the father-and-son team of Carl and Bob Lane in the early 1950s to build wooden runabouts. At the time of the company’s founding, Carl was already well known as a writer of maritime fiction and nonfiction and an avid powerboat cruiser, and he brought to the boatbuilding endeavor a refined taste and sensibility for boats he liked to call “one-couple cruisers.” Bob distilled these ideas, doing the design work.

When the fiberglass revolution of the 1960s was causing many wooden-boat builders to either adapt to the new material or shutter their doors, Penbo took a different tack: they offered a line of semi-custom cruising powerboats. The hulls were similar, but the wooden-boat tooling allowed clients to customize their orders in ways that expensive and rigid fiberglass tooling could not. Thus, while each Penbo is unique, there is a distinctive New England workboat appearance to all of them, a look readily identifiable as “Penbo” by the experienced eye.

On a trip to Hope Town in the Bahamian island chain of the Abacos last February, photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz first encountered the 1961, 36' Penbo cruiser EIDER when the boat was being towed into the harbor by a ferry due to a corroded and failed fuel-pump relay. Upon getting to know her owners, Andy and Cathy Washburn, Ben learned that they were neighbors of his on Eggemoggin Reach in Maine. In fact, EIDER’s Maine mooring was visible from Ben’s living room with a pair of binoculars. They resolved to reconnect in Maine in the summer.