Many will remember her as the two-masted schooner JANET MAY, named for Steve Pagel’s wife, which was built in Cherryfield back in the early 1980s. Don Bamman worked with Phil Shelton and the two built her from stump to ship. Don explained, “I have always been interested in boats that was one of the reasons I moved up here was to get into wooden boatbuilding. I had the opportunity to go to the Boat School in Eastport, so I went there the freshman year. Then I ran into Phil Shelton, who has a classic background in boatbuilding. You know he was sweeping shavings in his grandfather’s shop. I never would have attempted to build the boat without having him on board. He built another boat for Steve Pagels, one called SQUAW. It was kind of a big plywood sharpie, that he would take people for boat rides down the Great South Bay. Then he wanted to come up here and get some of the Bar Harbor action, but he needed a bigger boat. He and Phil had been talking about it for years and I guess Steve finally sold SQUAW, and he had enough money to do it. Phil had this commission, but he really didn’t have any place to build it. I was just out of the Boat School and I was planning on going back for the second year. I lived near the Narraguagus River and it had a big barn and 40 acres of land. That kind of gave him the location so the two things kind of dovetailed. I did not go back for the second year as I figured I might as well work and learn and get paid as opposed to paying in. We started lofting it probably in ’81 and then launched her in ’84. She was modeled after a Biloxi freight schooner, which is pretty shallow and has a lot of curve to the chine. Phil said, “Well if we have got that kind of curve let’s get some hackmatack knees, so we decided to make the whole boat out of hackmatack except the keel which was oak. We cut down the trees and not only did we cut them down we took them out by the roots, so we could get that knee. There was a precedent for building larch boats. In some places we had a horse and a driver to get the logs out in smaller wood lots, one place had a tractor, then St. Regis had a lot of land off of Wyman’s blueberry barrens. That was quite the location and Wyman’s was willing to allow us to go out there and have equipment on their barrens as long as the ground is frozen. Phil and I went out there and just cut down a whole bunch of trees. We would ski in there in the winter. We would have a little sled that we would pull and we would have the chainsaws in the sled. It was pretty basic and a lot of hard work. We got two skidder operators who came down and yarded them out. Good thing there were two of them because when one got stuck the other one could get it out. Larch tends to grow in some pretty wet places.
“That is kind of how we got our wood and then we had to mill it out,” continued Don. “There was a trap mill in Cherryfield and we talked them into milling out the lumber for the schooner. That was definitely a bit of a challenge. We did it live edge, so when it was on the cradle it would be kind of shape like a slice of watermelon. It did not make sawing any easier. The hackmatack knees really nobody knew how to saw out. We ended up standing the trunks with just the roots sticking up. We would kind of steady them on the carriage and then send them through with the root going through the saw. It did quite a job on the blades and sometimes your root would be bobbing back and forth because it wasn’t held all that well. It was a bit challenging. We had all of the wood delivered to the yard and then we had to plane it. We rounded up this old, I don’t know maybe a 36-inch thickness planer, a big cast iron thing and it had those big drum pulleys on the sides. We revitalized that and the first thing we did was break a blade. We actually found someone to weld it. It took a lot of torque to get it to start moving. We had a 5-hp electric motor that we carried back and forth between the bandsaw and the planer. In order to get the planer to start, the planer had two heads on it, and I would take a rope and wrap it around one of the heads and then Phil would be at the switch and he would say, go! and I would take and pull the rope and that was just enough to get the thing spinning and then the electric motor could kick in, otherwise it was just constantly blowing circuit breakers. Sending the planks through the planer was a hard, hard job because some of those planks were very rough. They would be like 1¾ inches on one end and 3 inches on the other so it took multiple passes of this green, thick, heavy plank stock to go through the joiner.”
Once the wood was milled, they started setting up the frames up on the keel. They started amidships and worked their way to the bow and stern. The keel was about 10-inches square and the frames were 3-inches across and tapered with the larger end being at the keel. She sported a giant centerboard (18 feet long by 4-inches wide), which was housed in the centerboard trunk on the side of the keel, and that was built in place since it was so massive. “The frames could not run all the way across because the centerboard had to be there,” explained Don, “so we did dovetails and slid them down into the bed logs. That is what held those frames in place. There was a lot of twist in the bow so we had to steam several of the planks going up. For a steam box, we welded several 55-gallon drums together and then put a bunch of water in them and lit them on fire and let the planks sit in there for a while. Even though it was a full-bodied boat she had a pretty fine entry.”
With the planking complete, they turned their attention to the deck beams and carlins for the hatches. St. Regis had a very good stand of pine trees and they were allowed to cut some down for the spars. Then with adzes and electric planers they shaped them.
“The concept was my shop and our driveway was maybe like 100 feet from the road,” said Don. “Then there was the Kansas Road and then my neighbor’s yard, who I don’t think really knew quite what they were getting into when they allowed us to go across their land. We built the boat on skids and then we took quarter inch by 10-inch steel plates and welded them end-to-end. Then had bolts going through it and steel bars at the forward end that ran the whole length of the boat. Then we put the cradle on top of that. You could not even do what we did today. We wanted to get the boat down to the marsh so come launch day we figured we could just pull it into the river. We had to do this when the ground was frozen so we moved it down onto the flats in the winter. We had two bulldozers; the D8 was tied onto the bars that went through the cradle and they managed to tug it down to the road. When we got to the road, the road had a little crown, it was not going to go over that without a lot of work. We ended up hooking the bulldozers in tandem and gave the juice to them and that pulled it across. Then it came time to get it down to the flats where it was going to get launched. We then realized that my neighbor’s yard was pretty level but had a lot of little rolling mounds. The next step was to put blades on the bulldozers and build a ramp across the whole field, leveling it out. The neighbors were good sports about it. When all was said and done, we got the boat down to the flats. In the spring we would finish off what things needed to be done and then we would launch it. It was getting close to launch day, so we built a platform from scrap live edge lumber that we had. Then we found that the steel skid rusted and adhered to that platform and the boat wouldn’t budge. We had people coming, had a band coming and people are congratulating us the night before. We got back there at the crack of dawn the next morning with a bunch of bottle jacks and a few big tubs of grease and just went around jacking the boat up a little bit with the planks down and get grease in between the sled and the pieces that went across and when we got that done, we ran the cable across the river, to the smaller bulldozer, which had a 90 ton winch on the back of it. He tied that bulldozer to a tree and gave it a tug and it moved. All right, we are in business. She went over on April 15.”
Then came another issue: getting her down the river. “Definitely the biggest problem,” continued Don. “The first problem was that the DOT said that the bridge has not been swung in 25 years and they were not doing it. Of course, we had to get that squared away before we started building the boat. They were dead set against doing that, but then the Narraguagus was still technically considered navigable waterway and because of that the US Coast Guard said, “That is still navigable, so you guys have got to make that bridge open.” They were not too happy about that. The abutments had moved so it was not going to move without a bunch of work. One of them said “When we get done with this, we are going to weld this thing shut.” I think that is pretty close to what they did. Then there was a huge controversy about if the boat would fit through the bridge. Of course, there was an old fisherman there and he had a boat that was like either 14 or 16 feet wide and when the bridge was operating he would go up there for a hurricane hole. Ours is 20 feet wide and he said it is a tight squeeze for me to get through with my boat, they will never get through in that boat. I think they thought that we measured from where the pivot is to the abutment and when the bridge swings half of the width of the bridge is still going to be hanging over the center piece there. I think they thought that we did not calculate that. We did not have much space, but we made it through.”
She then went to Milbridge where they finished the boat and set her spars. Steve did both the standing and running rigging and then sailed her over to Bar Harbor.
JANET MAY sailed for years out of Bar Harbor then Steve sold her and that is when her name changed. She had been purchased by a group out of New Haven, Connecticut who renamed her QUINNIPIACK. They used her to take children out to experience the ocean. When this group failed, Steve bought her back and renamed her BAILEY LOUISE TODD and put her back in the charter business at Bar Harbor.
This was an unfortunate end to a very interesting vessel with a great story. Even though she was well built there is no surviving a grounding on the sharp rocks of Bar Island and all that remained was splinters of this once great vessel.
