Working the Bay

Fishing line and reel. Wooden reel with cotton line. This fishing line and wooden reel were presumably used by Benjamin Franklin Pendleton Nichols for handline fishing in Penobscot Bay in the 1900s. "B.F.P. Nichols 1928" is written on the reel. B.F.P. Nichols, 1883-1941, was the son of Searsport's Capt. Wilfred Virum Nichols.

This reel is designed so that it can be spun around the central pivot, letting line be wound in faster than a regular hand line.

A need for shipping in World War I revived the Maine schooner building industry. No schooners were finished before the war's end but they sailed into the 1930s. This provided the last opportunity for photographers to record large wooden shipbuilding.

Tourists aboard the passenger schooner Mercantile assist in raising the anchor by working the windlass. Passenger labor is always welcome in working the windjammer schooners.

Mercantile was launched as a small coasting schooner in 1916 by the Billings family on Deer Isle. After she fished for mackerel for a few years in the 1940s, she was bought by Captain Frank Swift who had started the passenger schooner business in Maine in 1936, sailing out of Camden.

Three-masted schooner Nettie Langdon, built in East Boston in 1875 and registered in Jacksonville, Florida in 1883 and the tug Sumner M. Small at Steamboat Wharf in Belfast. Tugboats made gettting in and out of ports much easier and even possible for larger sailing vessels.

Sailing with her father, Ruth Montgomery took this photo of their Portland registered bark Carrie Winslow unloading Maine lumber in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There are ports built into the side of the hull to allow lumber to be slid out. Often, ships came back with hides that were turned into leather for Maine's shoemaking industry.