Racing with the wind

Pelagians Attend the 2024 Gloucester Schooner Race

Fall 2024

By Brian R. McMahon

Over the Labor Day Weekend, Russ Vickers and his Apple Blossom crew, Brian Herr and his Imagine crew, and your author and his wife Martha with Barbara Iannoni onboard En Garde! joined the spectator fleet off the mouth of Gloucester Harbor. Eric Cordis was onboard the Denis Sullivan, and got to see the competition from the inside, and he also took the helm of the three-masted schooner on the final leg of the race course.

As victims of caution, and hearing threats of rain, adverse wind while at anchor, and the possibility of morning fog, we chose to operate from a Cocktail Cove mooring, which is one hour from Jubilee YC and two hours from Gloucester.

On our way to Gloucester’s red #2 bell buoy approach, Apple Blossom joined us.

and Russ had Larry Lapson assist on the helm, with Jill Hallisey working the daily grind to keep the two jibs in trim.

The genesis of the Gloucester Schooner Race was the International Fisherman’s Cup races in the 1920s and 1930s. Gloucester’s Nova Scotia sister city, Lunenburg, telegraphed America’s oldest seaport, challenging Gloucester to a race against their fishing schooner Delawanna for a silver cup, prize money and the ability to boast about the victory — a major consideration.

But why were utilitarian fishing boats designed to be sleek and fast? Wouldn’t tubby cargo ship hulls hold more fish? They would, but before the advent of refrigeration, fishing boats depended on blocks of ice to keep the catch fresh. As the ice loaded onboard at the start of the voyage melted, it was substituted with the 90 tons of halibut that were brought onboard, fileted, and iced down during 20-hour work days. Fishing schooner skippers knew they had to return to port quickly before the ice was gone and the fish started to rot.

Speed not only guaranteed the profitability of the voyage, but the first fully laden schooner to unload was typically paid the best price-per-pound for their catch. Captain and crew were paid in shares based on the financial success of the voyage, not on the number of hours that they worked while underway, so crews may have chosen to forget harsh taskmasters when paid in cash before heading off to The Crow’s Nest.

In 1920, Gloucester’s Esperanto (owned by Gorton’s), under Captain Marty Welch, won, but the Canadians won back the cup in 1920 with Bluenose, her name being a joke about how cold it gets up north. The Nova Scotians were unbeatable until the 1930 race, when Gloucester’s Gertrude L. Thebault won the Lipton Cup. During the 1920s Essex, Mass., boatyards popped out a number of legendary schooners when sail-powered fishing boats had already reached their peak, and were starting to wane. They included Mayflower, Henry Ford, Puritan and Columbia. It may be hard to imagine now, but these fishing boat races in Gloucester or Nova Scotia engendered the same kind of hoopla as America’s Cup races fostered in Newport, R.I., in the 1950s and 1960s. Even today, Salem, Mass., has its Halloween, but Gloucester, Mass., has its Schooner Festival.

Some notable entrants this year included When and If, which was commissioned by Colonel (and later General) George S. Patton in 1939. As Old Blood and Guts said, “When the war is over, and If I live through it, Bea and I are going to sail her around the world.” Sadly, he made it through WWII but died in a post-surrender car accident in Germany. Like PSC Commodore Russ Vickers, When and If divides her time between Salem, Mass., and Key West, Fla.

Schooners can be classified as sailing ships with more than one mast, with sails arranged fore-and-aft along the centerline, as opposed to square-rigged ships that set oblong sails from yardarms across the deck. Two-masted versions featured a shorter foremast and a taller main mast; others had more masts that were more equally sized. Note that two-masters with shorter second masts are ketches or yawls. Schooners were usually employed on coastal voyages, while square-riggers plied the oceans.

The 2024 Gloucester Schooner Race did have an anomalous three-masted schooner as a contestant. The Denis Sullivan was the former official Tall Ship of Wisconsin, and Pelagic’s Eric Cordis was onboard during the race.

Denis Sullivan is now owned by a Boston non-profit youth training organization, but built according to the Great Lakes design standards, since she was launched in 2000 to promote Midwest American maritime history. The vast Great Lakes that include American and Canadian territory are “terra incognita” to most of us in New England.

Sailing ships there built to transport cargo and were significantly different from East Coast commercial vessels. They had shallow-draft hulls that did not taper inboard past the waterline, in order to carry heavy loads. Because of this they had limited ballast and used centerboards rather than deep-fin keels. During a recent visit to the maritime museum in Manitowoc, Wisc., I saw a mockup of a traditional Great Lakes “Clipper Ship” that shows the waterline-beamy design of ships built in our Midwest.

The draft of Denis Sullivan is officially 8.75 feet, but Martha and I were surprised a year ago when moored in Cocktail Cove to see this schooner (a 98 foot LOD ship) anchor between Great Misery Island and the Manchester, Mass., shoreline, which has depths ranging only from 10-20 feet.

We hailed them in the morning to ask for either a wheel of America’s Dairy State cheddar, or a six-pack of Milwaukee beer but to no avail, since she had shifted her flag to Mass. by then.

During the 2024 Gloucester Schooner Race, Denis Sullivan underperformed, perhaps caused by rigging problems. When Barbara Iannoni scrutinized my pictures from the race, she spotted a crewmember high in the rigging of the schooner. When asking Pelagic SC’s man on the scene, Eric Cordis about this, he sent this photo from Denis Sullivan’s main deck:

Certainly, Denis Sullivan’s four jibs would also cause a problem to a volunteer crew and prevent any quick coming-abouts before the race start and afterward during the competition.

The schooner was also a newbie to the Gloucester Schooner Festival, which began in 1985, and was initially planned to be just a rendezvous of the historic, sail training and daytripping schooners from around the Northeast and also Nova Scotia. Quickly, the idea of sponsoring a race was adopted and the 40 sailing ships competed in the Esperanto Cup race, with Fortune as the winner. They were awarded the same cup won by Captain Marty Welch and his crew on Esperanto. With that successful first year, succeeding years have featured the schooners divided into separate classes (Large Vessel, Medium Vessel, and Small Vessel) with trophies awarded to the winners of each fleet. The longer the waterline, the faster the boat as you can see in the 2024 race results.

The overall winner by a wide margin was Columbia, a steel-hulled replica of the 1923 original fishing schooner designed by W. Starling Burgess that sank with all hands in a hurricane off Sable Island, N.S. in 1927. The 2014 version arrived in our area early, and we saw her moored in Salem Harbor when a lack of wind had us do some local sightseeing under power.

Unlike all the other large schooners that participated, the 132 foot length-on-deck Columbia is a private yacht — and looks it. Three years ago, she was listed for sale with the Frasier yacht brokerage. Here’s an excerpt from their listing:

Columbia “has state-of-the-art navigation equipment, air conditioning and all mod cons. The interior is in mahogany and accommodation is currently configured for up to 12 guests in four cabins consisting of a master and VIP with Pullman berths and two twins with bunks and Pullman berths. The open-plan main saloon of this yacht for sale has seating on comfortable settees to starboard, a dining area for ten guests to port, a bar, fridge, ice maker, wine cooler and an entertainment center, including a 46-inch HD television screen.”

If you were interested in purchasing her, you’d need a deepwater dock (Columbia draws 19’6”) and even deeper pockets (“asking $11,950,000”).

Columbia quickly pulled a “horizon job” on the rest of the fleet, making the required two circuits of the course 15 minutes faster than American Eagle, the second place Large Vessel.

With a strong 15-20 knot “schooner breeze” blowing, En Garde! was doing 5 kts with just the genoa up. The sky had clouded up after the race start and it looked like rain, so we headed back to our forward operating base in Cocktail Cove. Just as we arrived, furled up, made fast a mooring pennant to a bow cleat and got ready to relax, the sun came out. Another perfect day in Paradise.

Brian and Martha McMahon live in Burlington, Mass., 20 miles northwest of Boston. He fell in love with the ocean in 1972 while serving in the U.S. Navy on USS Fox, a destroyer based in San Diego, Calif. Back on the U.S. East Coast, Brian and Martha rented sailboats on Boston’s North Shore before purchasing their first sloop, Cyrano, a Bristol 19 Corinthian in 1976. Brian is a Life Member of Jubilee YC and a 47-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.

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