Shipbuilding

Broad axe used in Searsport shipyards for forty years by Peter Ward of Searsport. Ward worked for shipwright John Carver from 1850 until Carver's yard was closed. Broad axes were used in shipbuilding and framing timber frame buildings to hew large timbers square and otherwise remove large amounts of wood.

The schooner George W. Wells was the first six-masted schooner built. Here we see a deck view looking toward the bow and Mount Battie in the background.

A barkentine has three or more masts with all but the foremost mast fore-and-aft rigged. The fore mast is square-rigged. The diagram is from the Nova Scotia Musuem Info poster, Sailing Ship Rigs.

Painted in 1996 by marine historian, boatbuilder and artist Paul Stubing, this well-researched watercolor shows a Friendship sloop, commonly called a sloop-boat by most fishermen, off the shore of Eagle Island in the Penobscot Bay about 1898. A lobsterman is hauling a trap from a peapod just behind the sloop-boat. There is a mackerel schooner riding to the wind with her mainsail up in the background, loading herring from a dory that took it from a herring weir. Paul Stubing described the painting:

Double-sheave block with a rope becket and hook, used aboard ship. The becket is the part that goes around the block and allows it to be attached to the object on which force is being exerted. When a becket has a hook spliced into it, the block and tackle can be moved or shifted. If it needs to be semi-permanently fastened, the hook is hooked into the sail or other object and a mousing or lashing is made from the point of the hook back to the body.

The Mill River Race is a North Haven dinghy favorite. Starting in the Fox Islands Thorofare between North Haven and Vinalhaven, the course runs first through open coves then into an intricate network of ledges and islands in the narrow Mill River to a turning mark at a bridge at its head, then a different route to return. It can only be sailed at high water as most of the course is over tidal flats.

Painting, "Shipyard," by Carroll Thayer Berry, possibly based on the artist's work at Bath Iron Works during World War II, although the vessel being built is a merchant ship, not the warships that were built at Bath.

16-foot dory, built in 1936 by Malcolm Brewer of Camden. She has the straight sides of a schooner-carried fishing dory, but is smaller and lighter. She was hardly used. The buyer took her to Noank, Connecticut and used her for decoration.

Hilda and Helen was a 40-foot fishing vessel, built by Padebco Boats of Round Pond, Maine. Set up as a small dragger, one of her size was designed for inshore banks rather than off shore banks like Georges Bank. In 1967, there was still an inshore dragging industry; now there is not.