In the mid-1970s, I and my wife Joanna sailed around the world in a 1931 Alden schooner named Mariah, with a rotating cast of crew members. After we returned home to Maine, we founded Portland Yacht Services. As we gradually built our business, we spent years chasing the dream of another schooner on which we could sail with our growing family.
There was a point when John Alden’s schooners defined purposeful elegance in amateur sailing, while embodying the renowned qualities of Grand Banks fishing vessels. The lines of working schooners designed by the likes of Tom McManus and B.B. Crowninshield were the inspiration for Alden’s swift, seaworthy racing schooners. They were built when hull shapes were in part determined by just how much the designer could safely torture pieces of wood. And a beautiful sheerline as drawn by Aage Neilsen could make a sailor weep. In the years following World War II, modern glues and materials gradually freed naval architects from traditional limitations, and their designs began to evolve rapidly. Wetted surface area was reduced and boats became ever lighter and faster.
As we chased Etesian, an Alden design (1044A), we were led by chance to an unfinished sister hull lying on the West Coast (1044B). This afforded us the welcome opportunity to work with Niels Helleberg of the Alden office to collaborate on a modern version of our 1931 schooner. The result would be an exceptionally strong vessel that also would have pleased the eyes of sailors back in the 1930s. The build-out process was lengthy and fellow Cruising Club of America members and many of our friends in the boating industry helped us to brainstorm and work through all the many details.
The hull had been cold-molded with layers of Alaskan and Western red cedar. We added considerable internal reinforcement, nearly tripling the thickness of the structure and improving our chances of surviving a collision with a floating object. The interior was finished out along traditional lines, complemented by up-to-date systems. We specified carbon fiber spars painted to look like wood. These, in combination with the substantial ballast keel, would provide for admirable stability and sail-carrying capacity. Teak decking and varnished mahogany deckhouses conveyed a classic look. Our completed vessel, christened Lion’s Whelp, was launched in 2003.
The Next Generation
Lion’s Whelp is a powerful sea boat, and though heavy when in cruising trim, she can kick up her heels impressively while moving around a racecourse. Our boat was not conceived for racing, but rather for safe cruising virtually anywhere. Her primary mission is to keep the Sprague family’s next generations engaged with the ocean and connected to our boatyard in Portland. The boat reflects well on the competence of our workforce and this attracts knowledgeable sailors to the operation.
When Lion’s Whelp was launched, the next generation was still in school. We planned our adventures around their vacations, taking the boat south for the first few seasons, proceeding via Bermuda to a winter base in Antigua. Routines changed as our children completed college and found spouses and our schooner now sleeps through the winters in Maine.
In recent years, each cruising season has begun with an early shakedown phase, intended to offer six growing grandchildren the opportunity to become more comfortable on the boat. This stage involves numerous day sails as well as the artificially intense environment of racing, where quick reactions and good seamanship are paramount. If luck is with us, a trophy rewards their dedication.
I have happily watched as the twin boys have grown older. Patience, I tell myself: there is an enormous difference in awareness and physical strength between 10 years old and 12. This past summer brought a significant transition
The grandson who is fluent with devices but disappears whenever physical work is anticipated had himself an epiphany – the chartplotter is a practical “game” application that is critically important for boat and crew and using it is a full-time job that does not involve physical work. Bingo.
He proceeded to navigate the boat around the racecourse during four regattas, which brought us two firsts and a third. The other twin found his place by leaning into the work that his brother shunned. He is clearly assimilating his SailMaine small boat training into the ability to anticipate the complicated steps necessary to affect a successful tack, jibe or spinnaker set aboard a large vessel.
Time Traveling
After our shakedown period each year, the boat is directed to the north. The Maine coast and the beautiful Atlantic provinces of Canada offer varied and challenging cruising. As the latitude numbers climb, the number of cruising boats decreases. Though there is magnificent scenery, our most treasured reward has been meeting the welcoming residents, whose lives necessarily conform to the harsh conditions.
Each year I set a goal for our travels, and friends thinking of signing on as crew can assess what they might be in for. In 2019 the twins were 8, old enough to sail on the boat with supervision. The mission for that year’s cruise was a reconnaissance north, with the twin aspirations of finding an iceberg on the Labrador coast and circumnavigating Newfoundland. During our first time in an area, there is much to learn about opportunities and logistics. There are so many miles to cover and too many places to see in too short a time; we were constantly taking notes on places to revisit. The grandchildren and their parents flew into St. Anthony, at the northern tip of Newfoundland and their first adventure began at the reconstructed Viking site at L’Anse aux Meadows. Keeping the young ones busy on the boat was a full-time occupation for their parents.
Canada has invested in marine infrastructure in the harbors that it envisions as hubs for a future fishing economy. In the smaller ports along the coast between St. Anthony and Lewisporte, there was usually a wharf or a sliver of a finger float that we could use to come alongside. The 10-year-olds and their younger sister, confined on the boat, had become a study in frenetic motion. The ability to walk them right off the boat and wear them out ashore was a blessing.
There were fortified rubbish bins outside the homes in St Anthony. “Do you have bears,” my son asked pointedly. Locals emphatically replied, “We don’t have any bears here.” As we worked our way to the south along the coastline, afternoon strolls with the children were exploratory and blissful. When we tied up in Great Harbor Deep, the houses elbowed each other for a grip on the base of the fjord, all of them fronting on a short road to nowhere. There were locals in the houses and children playing on the lawns. As my son passed by with his kids in tow, clearly headed out of the settlement, a man appeared at the door of a home. “Best you not go. There be baaars.”
The routine we fell into was to leave early and pick a port that would allow us to tie up and do our exploring on the same day. There were more opportunities and nooks and crannies than a lifetime of sailing would allow a person to visit. It was painful to pass them by, but one must keep moving steadily when fall is coming.
Satellite Challenges
In this region, there are consistent issues involving the integration of GPS satellite triangulation coordinates and chartplotter cartography, with the satellite position of the boat often not displayed correctly on the plotter. I had become complacent as GPS and chartplotters evolved in Maine, because they have been well synchronized. The same is not the case for Atlantic Canada and discrepancies of up to half a mile are at times encountered in Newfoundland and Labrador. Fortunately, radar can serve as a position source independent of the GPS offset – and my plotter happens to support a radar overlay that can clarify discrepancies.
To make things even more exciting, in this region the paper charts often display just one sounding for a relatively large area. It usually is the shallowest sounding. The harbor of Fleur de Lys, Newfoundland, has no soundings at all on chartplotters or paper charts. Yet the Canadian fishing fleet tends to be deep draft, and it is a good bet that wherever they berth there will be adequate facilities and sufficient water. At Fleur de Lys we found a well-buoyed channel and a thriving town.
The harbors where houses cling precariously to the fjords and islands were all chosen generations ago because their inhabitants could row to the fishing grounds. As technology evolved and stocks became overfished, the government began to cull legacy communities by ceasing to provide services. Thus, many of these once vibrant communities have slowly emptied out. The remaining populations are old, resigned to the inevitable grinding of weather and time.
Our 2019 trip was a memorable success, and more voyages followed during the succeeding years. In the summer of 2024, the grandchildren received their dose of the racing circuit, this time as “apprentice” crew, and they stayed with Joanna and me as we moved the boat between race venues. Though the two of us often sail Lion’s Whelp doublehanded, we decided that we needed another person aboard this year to help direct the youngsters’ energy in a positive way. We had been entrusted with a friend’s teenage son Noah for our 2023 voyage, and he joined us again in 2024. The goal was to take the twins on their first offshore trip.
There is something magical about the accomplishment of arrival at one’s first “foreign” port. Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, was a traditional schooner base, and it has reinvented itself of late after losing the scallop fishery. Now a “foodie” town and catering in part to tourists, Lunenberg offers a fine harbor and has an outstanding waterfront museum. Lunenburg Shipyard is being revitalized, and the old foundry area offers shelter, fuel and newly installed transient dockage. This year we hid from weather on those docks coming and going. Most importantly, the town is well populated with kindred souls and many good friends.
The bulk of the crew departed at this point, and Noah and I headed for Baddeck via Saint Peter’s Canal, a distance of 175 miles. We had additional crew, as Captain Dan Moreland had offered us two of his Bosun School students, and we enjoyed a spectacular run with our asymmetrical spinnaker. Baddeck’s inland saltwater lakes are a benign, wonderful place to cruise. Government has invested in Baddeck’s waterfront and the freight wharf and shed have been converted into an excellent restaurant and transient marina. The community is energized, and positive changes are noticeable with each successive year.
Over the years we have made crew changes in Baddeck. Although there is an airport nearby, a 12-hour drive from Portland has been our usual choice. In 2023, a one-way Enterprise car rental was possible, but such was not the case in 2024. A long-suffering friend volunteered to make the round trip. The Great Bras d’Or Channel is about 20 miles from Baddeck and it presents a small challenge because the tidal range in the lakes is 2 feet while the Laurentian Channel between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland has about a 6-foot tide. The exit from the lakes is a narrow gap and when the difference is 6 feet over just a couple of miles, the ride can be exciting. If you miss slack water, it could take an hour or two to work upstream, even in good weather. And in bad weather, things can rapidly become nasty. The rule of thumb is that slack water is three hours after low or high tide on the ocean side.
It is about 200 miles from Baddeck to Saint Pierre et Miquelon, an archipelago of eight islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. These self-governing islands remain a French Overseas Territory, and they are on the bucket lists of many sailors. I spent many hours watching the rhythm of the GRIB files and planning optimum departure times. Lion’s Whelp’s B&G Zeus3 system has PredictWind routing and Sirius weather overlays and we use TZ Professional navigational software, which has its own weather modules that can be downloaded via Starlink and cover large areas for as many as 15 days out.
When we are monitoring for hurricanes, our selected area covers from Bermuda to Labrador. The internet affords access to Bermuda Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather faxes and the National Hurricane Center. If a storm is in play, we also make voice over internet phone calls to weather routing services to hear their opinions. Hurricanes are normally somewhat concentrated and moving 75 miles one way or the other can make an enormous difference. Which way to move is the question. In late August and September, venues including Cape Hatteras, Nantucket, St. John, Halifax and St. Johns become a kind of “hurricane alley,” so it is standard procedure during those months to pay keen attention to the tropics and to the various tracking models.
Saint Pierre is a high island, barren of trees and blends or anything else that a sailor might use to take bearings or eyeball relative distances. As you approach from the southwest there are offshore shoals and you must make easting before the narrow south channel opens. From there the entrance is straightforward. The breakwater to port has an opening, but no soundings were shown on our chart, so I decided to go a bit farther and enter by the main shipping channel; we later found that there was plenty of water after all in the first opening. Taking a friend’s advice, we headed for the yacht club’s wharf at the head of the harbor, finding room alongside in 13 feet of water. Formalities were simple. A receptionist at the yacht club called customs and immigration, and everything went easily from there.
As we docked, a man approached to take our lines. He had been busy working away on a tiny sailboat. After asking whether we had a bow thruster and hearing “No,” he decided that we were OK and the next evening he invited us to dinner at his home. Rudolph Victorri is a French engineer and architect. He was assigned to Saint Pierre and never left. His dwelling is a converted switching station for one of the early transatlantic cables. I was astounded to learn that he had competed in four trans-Atlantic races, all on a boat that looked like a wet daysailer; the gudgeons for the twin rudders were standard rudder fittings for an Optimist.
In Saint Pierre we received wonderful invitations to homes nearby and to outlying communities. I was educated in cheeses, wine and croissants. A highlight of our experience was investigating an adjacent island, with a former Basque community now preserved as a museum.
The next afternoon, the southeast wind brought fog. As I was investigating the fishing shacks and the windlasses used to pull the dories onto the shore, I was swept up by members of the local dory-rowing club. They introduced me in turn to the last active builder of the renowned Saint Pierre dories. He just had to show me his workshop, which held a recently completed power dory. The gentleman showed me the stem of the dory his father had been working on when he died right in the shop. The walls were covered with retired tools and the memorabilia of hundreds of years, all carefully placed as if to display the precise stubbornness of the soul.
When some local fishermen came by, I told them that I had a bone to pick with PredictWind, Windy, TZ Professional and GRIB files in general. The 200-mile beam reach from Bras d’Or that I’d been anticipating earlier in the cruise had not panned out because the breeze had instead come light and from astern. It was so light that there was no point in trying to tack downwind. In 2023 we had experienced something similar. What was supposed to be a close reach in 16 knots had turned out to be a long, uncomfortable beat-against-chop in 28 knots of apparent wind, all the way from Corner Brook to Port aux Basques.
The fishermen confirmed our long-standing suspicions that are often incorrect and they noted that standard forecast models regularly conflict with one other. Thus, they do not go out unless they can compare at least three weather opinions. They use a weather web page called Cheznoo.net, which has a Windy function that displays, for any location, specific flags for the respective predictions of each of the models. I found that when three of four models agree on wind direction, the odd GRIB that is 40 degrees different often emerges as closer to correct.
In every port my crew favored long hikes up into the hills, while I stayed around town and puttered on the boat. On the following morning the weather improved rapidly and we were now free for the short trip to Fortune and our reentry into Canada. We crept carefully past a pod of killer whales that were lurking about off the mouth of the harbor. We chose to ghost close along the shore, inspecting a puffin rookery before heading toward Cape Perce for a peek at a community we had been invited to visit. The natural arch in the rock cliff made it clear where the venue’s name had come from.
Once we had poked about sufficiently, we hoisted our sails and had a lovely reach to Fortune, a protected, busy commercial port. There is a sleepy boatyard at the head of the harbor, and floating docks with plenty of water. Customs clearance involved a telephone call and no officers visited the boat. But there were complications when refueling consumed some time and we shifted to Grand Banks to get fuel. Next time we would head directly to Grand Banks.
By this point we had missed a pleasant weather window. When we left, the wind was blowing a stiff 18 to 20 knots and a chop from exactly where we wanted to go, though with a promise of clocking to the northwest later in the day. We headed out with a reef tucked in.
Hermitage, our intended destination, looked a long way off. Yet the wind blessed us, and soon we were lifted just enough to push on to an arrival in Hermitage before sunset. It was a tight harbor and we were running downwind. Once we were committed and inside, we discovered that the free wharf space carried numerous “Do Not Use” signs. There was little I could do but stop and idle in reverse in front of the wharf. A loud, disembodied voice coming from an adjacent house issued us permission to ignore the signs and we made our third port in Newfoundland.
The southern coast of Newfoundland is one of high cliffs and deep fjords. There are no roads connecting to the interior of the province, and many remaining outports are served only by small ferries. After Hermitage we worked our way west, stopping at conveniently spaced ports — McCullum, François, Ramara, Grand Bruit and finally La Poile. We then waited for a good weather window for crossing the Laurentian Channel to the Bras d’Or Lakes.
Every one of these communities but the island of Ramara is perched precariously on the walls of glacial fjords. Their populations have been declining precipitously. Where there were still markets, their near-empty shelves and resigned proprietors suggested a dismal future. Schools built for 400 children were empty (or in the case of Ramara, served but 12 students). McCullum had only 34 people considered full-time residents. When we tied up in Grand Bruit, we encountered the sole resident, a part-timer. During previous cruises we had encountered the verve and fortitude of residents directly connected to recovering economies in Quebec and Labrador. But the spirit of these out port Newfoundland communities has largely been crushed, replaced by stubborn resignation. We did notice, however, that given continuing ferry services and the possibility of renting houses, travelers seeking off-grid experiences and magnificent hiking trails are beginning to be attracted here.
We used the fall NW winds to work our way back to Lunenburg, our final Canadian port before Lion’s Whelp was pointed toward Portland and home. n