Well, we're in Rockland, Maine, today, but we're not going to be here very long.

Tomorrow morning, we're going to cast off and set out to sea with some very nice people on a really cool ship and cruise the islands off the coast of Maine.

And I do hope you'll come along.

Welcome the windows to the wild.

I'm Willem Lange.

The coast of Maine is unique.

It's wild, unpredictable, rugged and pretty lively, too.

I spent years here working with outward Bound.

Today, I'm back.

And I'm awfully glad you're coming along with us because we're about to board the schooner American Eagle.

American Eagle rests in Harbor at Rockland, Maine.

But once her sails are set, she awakens comes to life and begins her journey through Penobscot Bay.

We'll explore the coast and some of those bays and islands.

So we're coming out into the East Bay here.

Yep.

And we're looking at right across right across the bay.

Yeah.

And then up up here is Deer Isle.

If the man at the wheel looks a little happy, he ought to.

He's the ship's new owner, Captain Tyler King, a former mate and crew member.

You'’’re new to this command.

Fairly new.

New is a relative term.

Yeah, I've been.

I've been up in the fleet of schooners here for the last almost ten years now.

This is my first year as the captain of the American Eagle.

Yes.

Beauty.

Yeah, It's great.

We've got a great ship.

Oh, we like her.

We love her.

Little slower on the fronts.

We'll be on American Eagle for six days.

There are ten other passengers and seven crew members.

Captain King will guide the 76 foot two masted schooner along Maine's rugged coastline.

Occasionally, we'll drop the anchor, row ashore and do some exploring.

And then we're going to go and visit a science and research institute out on Hurricane Island and go and visit and see what they see, what they're up to, and look at all the wonderful things that they do out there.

Now, before we get too far along a bit about the schooner, she's a big old fishing schooner, so she takes a little while to come through the breeze.

A little different from the little coasters coastal schooners do.

But when she was running the schooner, she didn't have a main.

She, the American Eagle, was built in a very interesting time period.

She was built right in between the, you know, the dying age of sail and the rise of powered vessels.

And so she's if you if you compare her with other schooners that were built, you know, ten years before they were they were they were wider.

They were, you know, sometimes a little longer.

And they had they had all of these different characteristics and a lot of different hull characteristics that were different and a little more a tune.

So they sailed really well.

But the eagle is interesting because she was built with an engine she didn't originally have a lot of sails because the sails were there to more to stabilize the vessel and help it along with the breeze was in the right direction than anything else.

At that time.

The crew of American Eagle spent summers hunting for swordfish.

Once winter rolled in, they changed course.

She would go out and she would head farther north for the haddock fishery.

And the unique thing about about the haddock fishery is and the swordfish fishery at that time is they were fresh fish industries.

So she didn't carry salt.

She carried ice in her holes.

So that meant she had to be really fast because she'd have to leave so really quickly.

So the ice didn't melt, get everything, get, you know, fish as much as she can before the ice melted and then get home with all the fish before the ice melted.

So it really kind of made her hull form really, really adapted to go in really, really nicely in a good sea.

Launched as Andrew and Rosalie in 1930.

The schooner was renamed American Eagle in 1941.

During the war.

In the early part of the war, she was renamed American Eagle because the U-boats were decimating the fishing grounds off of Canada.

And the US wasn't part of the war at that point, and they needed American names.

So to keep the Germans away.

And so she got the new name American Eagle to keep her safe from from U-boat attacks.

She fished for 50, 53 years.

Oh, and then after the end of that long career, she was pretty tired.

Yeah.

And that's when Captain John Water from Gloucester and then brought her up to Rockland and did all the amazing work that you see here.

Captain John is retired Captain John Foss.

I met him the first evening during dinner ashore.

Captain Foss sailed the Maine coast for 70 some years before turning the wheel of American Eagle over to Tyler.

John, you've been at this sailing business over a year or two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All your life so far?

Yeah, so far.

That was the punch line was the so part.

I wanted to beat you to it.

Okay.

Yeah, you're right.

You started out small boats and then bigger boats.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then I got my first as a summer job.

I started in 1969 on a boat, and I was in the Coast Guard after college for a few years because it was nice to be able to select your service and then having them picked one out for you.

Yeah.

So I was on ocean going cutters and the Coast Guard for three or four years.

So I'd saved up enough money after that to buy the first schooner.

And she was only 103 when I got her.

So she was suitable for restoration.

All right, everyone, This is how it's going to work.

You're going to get a plate from Mr. Asher.

You're going to get some paper towels from Courtney.

You're going to get some butter and crackers and lemon wedges from Valentine on the table here somewhere.

Lobster?

Yes, that is a plate.

Thank you.

Well, we'’’re on a little island called Hell's Half Acre.

We have rain coming tomorrow, so we're having our lobster bake this evening on the shore.

And it's just a beautiful setup.

(Singing) Then blow high winds hi ho, a rose and I will go.

I'll stay No more on the England shore.

So let them use.

Tyler has a mariner's history.

He grew up in the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where being on the water is a birthright.

Wooden boats and sailing have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

My dad is a wooden boat builder and I grew up in a little wooden boat yard down in Gloucester on the Squam River, and my mom grew up cruising and sailing as a as a kid with her family through the Great Lakes, down the hall, down the East Coast and all over the place.

And we did a lot of sailing when I was little.

When I was really little, we used to have a 62 foot island schooner that was built in 1922 and Thomaston.

And so that was the first boat I really sailed on.

And when I was I got a little older, I wanted to I wanted to sail the big schooners that I always heard about, that we didn't see very much of.

So Tyler headed north for the summer and found work on wind jammers that lasted through high school and never really stopped.

It really is a wonderful thing and it's really cool to have have have a working lifestyle for these big old schooners because there's, you know, the industrial world in some ways left them behind.

But this carrying people and doing what we do up here is kind of the last thing that you can do in a with a, you know, commercially with a big sailing vessel.

And it's just it's wonderful.

And it's so I mean, look at it like we're doing it's so cool.

This is actually closer to a naval carriage and on a when you have a cannon on a ship, the hull would be about like here.

Been working for American Eagle for about five years now.

Yup.

Doing sailing during the summer season and in the off season I do.

Well, I used to do a lot of the winter maintenance, but this past year I was working for Penobscot Marine Museum and their chart collection.

So yeah, but generally make my living in and around boats and islands.

There has been archeology done in the fort to sort of trace out what buildings were here.

Sam Collins is the ship's resident historian.

Sail along Maine's coast.

And there's lots of history to discover.

I'’’m fascinated with everything from how the ice Age shaped the geology of this area to create Penobscot Bay itself all the way through the early colonial explorations and how they interacted with native peoples to how the communities in and around the Bay have managed to face changes in technology and changes in fisheries and how the entire economic systems have changed around it, you know, it'’’s fascinating for me to see.

The first 10,000 years, I know.

Sam's enthusiasm for the maritime history began early.

(Singing) We could catch our fish in shore.

Times were hard, and gear was rough.

I grew up outside Boston and my dad loved sailboats.

And so any time there was a tall ships event in Boston, he would drag me in and I would be delighted to see all this.

Exactly.

Little, little kid that's just trying to see can I go aloft.

And and so I ended up like I was I went to school for maritime history because I've always been just interested in how the in the ocean as a place where cultures connect.

I specifically studied Atlantic history because the idea of the oceans as the center and all of these nations are around it and the ocean is the crossroads where the cultures come into contact.

So that's always fascinated me.

Now we are near Castine right?

Correct.

Yes, just around the corner, actually.

That's the oldest settlement.

It is.

There was there was the there was a very early French trading post around Castine that sort of served as a hub for settlement in the area and then turned into a hotbed for conflict.

As the French tried to push their territory south, the English tried to push their territory north, and the native peoples pointed out they were here already.

So Castine becomes a hotbed at that point.

So there's a lot going on there, including in the 19th century when the town had sort of a period of mixed economic fortunes combined with some very beautiful houses, but then their descendants sort of kept them as they were.

There wasn't a lot of urban renewal like you see in a lot of other waterfront towns.

So we're really lucky that Castine has some of the untouched buildings of that that representing the maritime trades of the mid 19th century in the 1950s and sixties, they tried to do a better, more efficient building, but Castine rallied and said they didn't want to lose their historical post office.

Castine also has the elm trees.

It's because it is such a remote place.

It did not get the Dutch elm disease that wiped out so many of the other elms.

So it's one of the few places left.

You can still see big elm canopies.

Yeah.

I want you to picture a completely different landscape.

The Gulf of Maine and Penobscot Bay.

As we know it today is a recent invention in the last 10 to 20,000 years.

The Wabanaki are the people who are still represented in this area today, there are four, four or five distinct communities who make up the Wabanaki And before that we were talking we were talking last night about the red paint people or the Paleo Indians.

But yeah, you have a native population here representing back about 2 to 3000 years or so around these islands.

They're using these islands for fishing camps and hunting swordfish.

2000 years ago.

While some of Maine's coastal history sits idle, other chapters don't.

There's an environmental legacy that reaches back to the age of unregulated industry.

The cost to the land and sea are still being calculated.

Waste from mills, tanneries and municipalities flowed into Maine's rivers and coastal waters.

With time that threat ebbed.

New concerns such as climate change and warming waters have emerged.

The big paper mills upstream up in Bangor and Ellsworth, were a big issue while still are a big issue, honestly, but they were they really came to attention in the 20th century when people started realizing how much chemicals they were putting out into the river.

In fact, a lot of a lot of Belfast Bay is still closed for dredging because there's concerns of heavy metal contamination in the silt from from the upstream factory work.

Wind jamming itself is a really fascinating way to see Penobscot Bay because once we leave the dock, our our environmental impact is pretty minimal.

Like we only turn on the engine as needed if if we really need to make it to somewhere and the wind is totally against us.

But for the most part, we're operating entirely on green energy.

And it's so by going around on an on a windjammer, you're moving also a lot more in tune with the Bay itself because we're quiet.

If you're going to see Maine, this is the way to do it.

John's connected to the land as much as he is to the sea.

The Maine island trail alliance, a nonprofit that protects the wild islands of coastal Maine, recognized him for conservation work.

The Maine Island Trail.

I mean, when they started, it was it was it was sort of a target for environmental groups to throw pies at them, saying you're going to publicize the use of these these secret things that we've been holding back from you.

And, you know, and then the kayaks came along and it just turned into a wonderful way for people to take care of the things they used.

This place is pretty clean.

Yeah.

I mean, just because you don't have to put in you don't have to put in picnic tables and restrooms.

No, no, no.

You know, this is this is you know, it's not the forest primeval, but it's a good recovery from the industrial nightmare that this whole area was in 1900 when all these islands were clearcut.

Any island of any potential was being quarried.

It was a it was a difficult, if not horrible in a workplace environment, you know, and suddenly you leave them alone and they recover like this.

They're beautiful.

(Singing) And so what we're going to do is we're going to keep our feet firmly planted on the deck and we're going to haul hand over hand to look at the sail most of the way up just keep on the line.

And then when things get nice and heavy, our two line leaders are going to set a nice cadence and we're going to go 2 six haul or 2 six heave and we're going to get the sail all the way up.

And then you're going to hear hold.

And that means stop going.

Keep your feet firmly planted on the deck and you're going to just hang on to it and don't let any go.

Mike, this is your fifth cruise on the American Eagle?

You must like it.

I love it.

I'm in love with the boat itself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Maine coastline speaks to me.

My ancestors were here.

Oh, really?

yeah.

They're happy.

Yeah, I feel that.

I feel the spirit of it here.

So I have to keep coming back.

Even though I live in Washington State.

Yeah.

Wind jamming tradition goes back to the 1930s around here, when because there was a there was a glut of sort of dying old schooners that could no longer bring home paying cargoes.

And so you start seeing a captain named Frank Swift in Camden decides that maybe people would sign up to come out and just see the bay on these schooners.

Our first sail on the schooner was in 2007.

We'd sold our 30 foot sailboat and my husband said, Let's sell the boat and sail other people's boats.

So in the summer of 2007, he booked us on the American Eagle.

I got on board, I went down to the cabin.

I said, You've got to be kidding.

I can't even get my head in the sink.

How will I wash my hair every day.

We went to bed that night.

I barely slept awake.

There were so many different kinds of noises.

Oh, and the next morning I got up and I said one down, seven to go.

And my husband said, Do you want to go home?

I'll have John drop us at the next port and we'll rent a car and we'll go home.

That was, I believe, Monday.

And on Wednesday I was looking at the calendar for the next year saying, When can we come back?

And we did many, many trips on the Eagle.

Well, this is kind of a participatory cruising.

I mean, you could be part of the part of the crew if you want to be.

Yes.

That's the reason we come here is the main reason is that it's not a princess cruise or a Carnival cruise, whereas a floating city on the water.

A senior cabin.

No, it's not.

Yeah, but, you know, I like it that way because I can play pirate.

I can imagine what it was like a hundred years ago.

Yeah, 200 years ago.

Sailing and.

Yeah, I just love it, you know?

That's why I come here and we can help as much as we want or as little as we want.

(Singing) Courtney King, spent 21 years working on Wind jammers.

Her parents own one.

This is her first year as a crew member on American Eagle.

It's a little more fun working for other captains, and it's also fun working on different boats because, you know, every single one of these so different that, you know, I have never sailed on Eagle before this last week.

And and it's like it's just so fun learning the ins and out of every other boat and yeah there's just all so unique and different in their own way.

A chapter of my history sits just off the bow.

Hurricane Island from 1965 to 1968.

I helped kids and adults expand their personal limits through Outward Bound.

Outward Bound has roots that reach back to 1941.

It began as a single school in Aberdovey, Wales.

At that time, its mission was, quote, to foster physical fitness, enterprise, tenacity and passion among British youth.

Today it'’’s for everyone.

12 years and older, its first American sea based program was created in 1964 right here on Hurricane Island.

(Music) Its kind of a bittersweet thing to be back here, you know, after all these years, I can't do what I used to do anymore, obviously.

But it's just nice to be here.

The island hasn't changed that much except for the new people here.

Things are looking pretty good.

The ocean looks the same, glad for that and well, it's just takes me back a long time, you know?

To see all this.

Visited my old cabin a few minutes ago.

Still standing and now we're about to take off in the schooner again to a cove where we'll spend the night.

Then tomorrow we'll go ashore in Rockland.

But this was a great chance to come back and see the scenes of my childhood, as it were.

Well, I'm sure my kids childhood, they spent three long summers here when they were about five, seven years old.

And I daresay they'll never forget it.

I sure won't.

A love for Sailing carried Tyler from his childhood home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to coastal Maine.

Now he carries us along this beautiful coastline.

It's a little boy in me, I think the little boy who can come back out and just be a little boy again and pretend.

(Singing) More like a pirate, you know?

Yeah.

Arrr.

(Singing) I want to be able to keep and preserve what we do.

You know, I want to be able to keep having this old boat have a good life.

And, you know, and I think we're we're well on our way to doing that.

A six day trip along the Maine coast ends back in Rockland.

I had a lot of fun, met new friends, and have a refreshed appreciation for the Mariners life.

But now it's time to say goodbye.

I hope to see you again on Windows to the Wild.

Support for the production of Windows to the Wild is provided by the Alice J. Reen Charitable Trust, Bailey Charitable Foundation.

And viewers like you.

Make a gift to the wild and support the William Lange Endowment Fund established by a friend of New Hampshire PBS.

To learn how you can keep environmental nature and outdoor programing possible for years to come, call our development team at 6038684467.

Thank you.

And if I could find a purveyor of some of those, I shall buy a little bit of brandy we can't do that.

We can't do that.

Okay.

We'’’ll probably go ashore a little while because Sam is going to show us some historic.