Roadtrips with Liz: Sailing back in time

By Liz Nelson
The Village Reporter

A staff member on shore tosses the docking line aboard, and the Thomas E. Lannon slips away from the dock. Powered by a quietly rumbling diesel engine, we motor out of Gloucester's inner harbor. A steady breeze blows from the southeast.

Captain Don Steele points the schooner into the wind and invites guests to help raise the sails. My son, David, takes hold of the throat halyard; my other son, Mark, helps with the peak halyard. "Haul away!" calls the captain. The peak of the gaff-rigged main sail rises faster, and Mark's side has to stop while David strains to raise the throat the last couple of feet up the mast.

Minutes later the foresail is up, then the two jibs. The sixty-five foot wooden schooner turns gently, wind fills her sails, and the captain cuts the engines. Virtually no one speaks as the vessel glides through the water-we're all savoring the silence.

Stage Fort Park passes on our right. We tack and sail toward Ten Pound Island and its lighthouse. Small waves slap against the hull as it rises and falls ever so gently with the motion of the sea. Quiet conversations begin around the deck. Owners Tom and Kay Ellis mingle with their guests, ready to answer our questions or just chat.

Schooner Lannon is new and old. She was built in Essex by Harold Burnham, an eleventh generation boat builder who based her design on the Nokomis built in 1903. Essex County Greenbelt, The Trustees of Reservations, and local landowners donated wood. Masts, gaffs, and booms, for example, came from Eastern white spruce felled on Hog Island. Caulking was all done by hand- the old fashioned way. Thomas E. Lannon, named after the owner's grandfather who fished out of Gloucester form 1901-1943, was launched in June '97, eight months after work began.

We sail past Dog Bar breakwater and Eastern Point lighthouse into open ocean. In the 19th and early parts of the 20th centuries, hundreds of schooners flew out of Gloucester Harbor under brisk winds. Some were used in coastal trade. Others headed for the Grand Banks with dories stacked on their decks and lines with hooks attached at short intervals awaiting use. Fortunate vessels returned to port laden with cod, haddock, halibut, mackerel. But thousands of fishermen were lost at sea.

Danger and hard work have no part in our sail; serenity prevails. I listen to the bell buoy rolling with the waves, alerting mariners of the harbor we just left. The same wind which streams through my hair skims the surface of the sails overhead and propels us forward. I have left my hectic life on land and sailed into tranquility on a vessel which reaches into past centuries.

Though Essex built close to 4,000 two-masted schooners, more than any other town in the world, the first was built in Gloucester in 1713. A fair number of people came to watch her launching because word had spread about her odd (gaff) rigging. Legend has it that as the vessel slid into the water, a bystander called "see how she scoons!" The builder broke a bottle of rum over her bow and shouted, "a schooner let her be," and thus this class of vessels became known as schooners.

Far too soon for me, we are heading back into the harbor. Non-sailors may well have missed it, but those of us who have tried to set a course (and often failed) take note of the fact that the captain sets her sails just after we clear the breakwater and does not need to tack again as he sails the Thomas E. Lannon all the way into inner harbor.

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