Maine’s Iconic Sardine Carriers

It was one of those phone calls that you never forget. My wife and I were on a late-summer cruise in our schooner, SARAH ABBOT, anchored at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. I remember a day of soft sunshine and light wind, perfect for reading in the cockpit, when my phone chimed. The screen announced a call from a fellow workboat addict, the oysterman, artist, and boatbuilder Jonathan “Johnny” Waters. He was already laughing when I answered.

“This might be one of the craziest things I have ever done,” he chuckled. “I bought the damned thing.”

By “damned thing,” I knew he meant the last working Maine sardine carrier, DOUBLE EAGLE. His daughter, Emilie, had told me that her dad was on the Maine coast, helping to paint the bottom of a beast of a boat and “crushing hard on it.”

Johnny said he wanted to put DOUBLE EAGLE to work in his shell-fishing enterprise at Stony Creek, Connecticut. He just wasn’t sure how, yet….

“I’m going to need some help to get her home,” he said.

“Count me in,” I blurted.

All my adult life I have drooled over the sweet lines and rugged look of these nautical dinosaurs, boats such as PAULINE and the JACOB PIKE, when I spotted photographs of them in Benjamin Mendlowitz’s Calendar of Wooden Boats or in person when they were deeply laden with a load of fish transiting the Fox Islands Thorofare in Penobscot Bay.

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