It has been a busy three weeks as the lobster boat race season is now in full swing with four races down and the Stonington races up next.
SARI ANN I [1998 40-foot John’s Bay Boat Co., South Bristol; 375-hp 3208 Caterpillar] is still high and dry at Front Street Shipyard in Belfast waiting for her engine to return. Jeff Hanley came up from John’s Bay Boat and removed the back of the house. Front Street Shipyard then set up a gantry and out came the engine, which I took to Troy Morey of Rockfleet Marine in Ellsworth. Within a couple of days, the diagnosis was in, two spun bearings, which damaged the crank and the heads where the pistons had hit them. Dennis of Dennis Welding & Marine Repair on Beals Island had a crank and some other needed parts, which I went and got. We needed a few other parts, and the rest of the issues could be solved at a machine shop. We did find some other issues not associated with the spun bearings. When the heads were examined by the machine shop, they discovered some minor cracks. I had another set of heads, and they were good to redo and use. There were a couple of issues with the injection pump system and that was redone. Now, Troy has the engine almost back together and I am hoping to have her back in the water for Stonington.
Last Saturday I headed to Thomaston Place Auction Galleries to bid on a couple of items. The first was a large book containing 744 8 x 10 photographs of sailing ships from the late 1800s or early 1900s. I believe this book was done on the West Coast, but it contained a large number of photographs of vessels built in the State of Maine. I also bid on a collection of binders containing photographs of freighters and tankers (487) from the West Coast. The last item I was bidding on were photographs of Capt. E. D. P. Nickels of Searsport and his family. His wife Emma had put together an album of the grounding and salvage of the ship MAY FLINT off San Francisco in May 1894, which was included in the lot.
After leaving the auction I headed down to the Friendship Museum. They have acquired a Friendship sloop and are hoping to rebuild it. Just looking her over quickly it was obvious that this was going to be a total rebuild. She had been up on the Great Lakes, which means she was in fresh water, but she had also fallen into disrepair. I did not get up on her or look inside, but was told that her deck was gone, meaning the water was running through her. That is never good in a wooden boat. Someone looked at her and thought they could rebuild her for $60,000. I am not sure you could buy all the wood needed for that price. She looked like a total rebuild and that means the cost would be in the hundreds of thousands. There is a saying, “If you want to kill a museum give them a boat.”
My real mission at the Museum was to see what they had on Friendship sloops. In the last issue I said that I had been working on a list of lobster boats built, mostly derived from the data I have collected when signing them up at the lobster boat races. When I had all that data in, I decided to enter the list of Friendship sloops in the Friendship Sloop Society’s newest yearbook (2026). Entering this list did not take long. I also had been given recently a collection of books, which contained a number of the older yearbooks all the way back to the first one in 1962. I combined them with what I had and began photographing the list and entering them in separately so I can combine each boat and see when changes occurred. I am up to into the 1970s, so just under 50 to go.
I was more than pleasantly surprised to see a good collection of photographs at the Museum, but what really excited me was a number of lists of the boats built by a number of the boatbuilders of Friendship. I was able to get a copy of these lists and will be inputting them into a computer and expand them if possible. These lists give you the name of the vessel, length and year built, but they even give the owner and hailing port. The builders include Wilbur Morse, Morse Boat Shop and W. A. & J. D. Morse. This makes me wonder how many other historical societies have lists of the boats built in their town.
