Fire & Water Blog: What it’s all about . . .

A few months ago, I got hired to cook on a fleet of nationally recognized schooners (two masted sail boats that do tourist trips) out of Camden Harbor in mid-coast Maine.  When I got the job, I was house-sitting in Blue Hill, Maine a few hundred feet from where I was born.  With all my things, including my car, in Colorado, I bought a ticket to Denver and returned west to wrap up my life there, visit friends and retrieve my belongings. I was there for three weeks, then drove back to Ohio, then on to Maine.

I arrived in Camden on April 29 at about 4:00 on a sunny Monday afternoon.  I had only met Captain Ray and he wasn’t there that day.  I walked onto the public landing and out to the end of the dock where the 3 boats in the Maine Windjammer Cruises fleet are docked —  a little nervous — and introduced myself to Andy (the first person I saw).

I landed there on the deck of that boat like a fish out of water and a child at the circus.  Everything was brand new and interesting.  I couldn’t stop gawking as I took in the gleaming wood of the house tops, the dull wood of the deck, the vertical height and heft of the huge wooden masts rising 70 feet above where I stood, the gentle horizontal curve of the deck surface, the many ropes running in various directions, the crew scattered about the boats, the sparkling water all around, the subtle shift from solid ground to the constant movement of water, the sounds of Camden Harbor — the Megunticook River emptying loud and persistently into the sea just behind the boats being the most prominent — all this left me awe-struck and even a little frightened in an exciting sort of way.

The only times I’d been on a boat as an adult was ten years before on Lake Titicaca in Peru and eight years ago on the Staten Island Ferry — both had been shaped like tanks with loud chugging engines.  From the time I was five up to about ten years old, I had traveled regularly on ferries off the Maine coast and in small row boats in Bass Harbor.  But these sail boats are altogether different; elegant, beautiful, strong, solid, fluid, downright sexy creatures.  They have attitude, personality and a presence that is undeniable.

This blog is called “Fire and Water” to honor the woodstove I will tend daily, which sits just above the water line of the Atlantic Ocean in the belly of two schooners, one aged 97 and one aged 126 years old, as I feed passengers and crew day in and day out as we sail up and down the Maine coast over the next 6 months.  The stories here will be of these two elements, Fire and Water and the adventures of yours truly as I tend to each of them and to the feeding of many hungry bellies.   I hope you’ll join me for what is sure to be quite an adventure