Camden, Maine
The coastaltown of Camdenis a picturesque place to board a classic wooden schooner for a short seafaring adventure.
The little town of camden sits at the mouth of the Megunticook River, on Penobscot Bay. The bay is named for the people who inhabited the area forthe 11,000 odd years before white settlers arrived in Maine. In theirlanguage, the river’s name means ‘great swells of the sea’,referring not to the ocean it pours into in Camden, but to the rolling hills that the river drains. Rising above the bay, these hills are among the tallest coastal peaks along the North Atlantic seaboard.
Down below, Camden’s harbour is packed with sailboats of all sorts cutters and sloops, schooners and catboats, ketches and yawls. Their masts stand high in the air, their slack ropes slice the cloudless blue sky, hulls gently rock at anchor. On a century old wooden schooner called the Surprise, captain Will Gordon and his first mate, Laird Kopp, greet passengers as they board. Soon, the boat is motoring out, Laird coiling the stern line with his hands and steering the helm with his boot. When he was eleven years old, Laird and his family visited the area on holiday and took a ride A view from the Surprise towards a fellow vintage schoonerin Penobscot Bay their home port, the small town of Camden, has a long history of shipbuilding great escape coastal maine on a historical wooden schooner. ‘I fell in love with the big schooner’s lines and rigging, with the huge sails, the wind and the waves,’ he says. ‘With the raw beauty of the mountains and sea.’
Many years later, he came back to the area, was introduced to a schooner crew and spent a summer with them learning as much as he could. Now, he is a first mate and part of what he calls ‘this neat community of sailors and boaters’. Out on open water, he yanks atropes to hoist the sails up the ship’s original Douglas fir masts. The sails flap exuberantly and catch the wind. As the boat heads east toward Mark Island, Laird retrieves a journal from below deck. It is the sailing log that May Kattenhorn, wife of the first owner, kept in the summer of 1934. Inside she pasted colourful postcards and wrote long entries about their days at sea. Her angular cursive is scrawled across the pages: ‘Low lying coast hills an inky black… bold rocky coast of Maine… beautiful pine clad shoreline… lovely Camden Hills showing blue in the distance.’
I look back towards shore. The view she described is little changed. The wind is strong and brisk, pushing the boat further out to sea over the choppy waves. Bright sun lights the ocean’s surface; it fragments into a thousand shimmers. The rhythms of the sails billowing, of water slapping the wooden hull of the ship, send the mind into a welcome lull. With easy sailing, time spools gently out.
The captain tacks south of Curtis Island and its lighthouse, where the sun is setting behind the lighthouse keeper’s cottage. We skirt the island, pushing back toward shore. Those same hills that May Kattenhorn wrote about during the summer of 1934, the hills the Penobscot called the great swells of the sea, are sloping above, framing the harbour as the crew brings the Surprise nearer the shore. ‘This is among my favourite approaches to a harbour in the world,’ Laird says. The soft blue lines of the hills curve downward and draw us in.