Traditional Sailing & Seamanship Aboard PETREL

If you are looking for a fun week of adventure sailing that will hone and expand your seamanship, judgment, and skills onboard a traditional Maine open sail-and-oar vessel, this is your course. This course is for those who have some previous sailing experience, whether it comes from a seamanship program or personal involvement with boats. Students will work together as a team to sail in the waters around the WoodenBoat School. Each morning we will begin by making a plan of the day based on wind, weather and tide. We will sail for the whole day, anchoring at a beautiful island for lunch, and returning to WBS for dinner and a restful night sleep on land at the end of the day. A sailor aspires to the mastery of many subjects, but the essence of this course is sea sense: the ability to tune in to a boat, the weather, and the crew, and apply good judgment so that all work together. Subjects include sail theory, hull and rig balance, helmsmanship, piloting in clear weather and fog, approaching and leaving floats and moorings, anchoring, knots and rigging, man-overboard strategy, and reefing. Students should be prepared to sail/row daily in all types of weather, and have enough physical agility to be able to maneuver themselves around in the boat and easily transition from boat to shore. There is nothing like sailing in a vessel designed for the area you are sailing in!

 “For simplicity and economy, security and beauty, the New England double-enders have possibly never been equaled. They were designed (usually by whittling half models), built, sailed, rowed and fished, redesigned and built again by a resourceful breed who through that process became magnificently educated in living in harmony with nature. These ordinary watercraft were and remain a response to the search for sensible scale, speed, performance, cost, pleasure and pride.”

– The Crotch Island Pinky, Lance Lee & Christopher Hall, 1975

“In the present-day search for small sailing craft, low cost and easily maintained, the once numerous types of small working-boats formerly employed in the longshore fisheries should be considered… Each (design) has been developed to work in its home waters and weather conditions and to meet the physical requirements of its employment… The highest achievement in design, construction, and fitting is to obtain efficient operation and retain simplicity; this is being forgotten in the construction of many boats today.”

– American Small Sailing Craft, Howard I. Chapelle, 1951.

The Crotch Island Pinky is a 26’ double-ended open boat with a “cat-ketch” rig and internal ballast. The type was developed in Casco Bay in the 1880s and built in Yarmouth, Freeport, and Harpswell, as well as on Crotch (now Cliff) Island, just a few miles east of Portland. These boats were the pick-up trucks of their day, used for fishing and freight during the late 19th and early 20th century. Fast and powerful, their “easily driven hulls” and ample sail area made for safe, efficient work and travel among the rocky shores of Maine and beyond. PETREL is a traditional lapstrake hull––Maine cedar on oak––built in 1979, and she was originally used for sea programs at the Chewonki Foundation, a nonprofit school & camp in Wiscasset, ME. PETREL now sails with Rituals of the Sea, a local educational nonprofit in Brooksville, ME that encourages maritime craft traditions and provides access to experience in open wooden boats. We made a short film about sailing PETREL during this course last Summer, you can watch the trailer on our Mastering Skills webpage here.