This is the Coastal Schooner J&E Riggin reflecting the morning light in Great Cove on Sunday, June 13.
Although there was hardly a breeze, she weighed anchor and slowly sailed out of the Cove:
The Riggin is changing the way people think about sailors’ “yarns.” In fact, according to her schedule, she’s in the Cove on another of her popular “Maine Knitting Retreats” for the needling crowd – knit one, purl two, smell the air three …. Clever niche marketing.
She was built in 1927 as a Delaware Bay oyster dredger by Charles Riggin and named after his two sons, Jacob and Edward. She was rebuilt and rigged as a Maine coastal schooner passenger vessel in the 1970s and designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1991.
The Riggin is 120 feet long overall. In cruiser crowd vernacular, she’s a two-masted, “bald-headed,” “spoon-bowed” schooner. That is, the Riggin is bald because she doesn’t fly topsails and her bow bulges slightly outward between the water and the bowsprit and deck, like the convex back of a spoon. (A “cutter bow” angles sharply inward from the bowsprit back down to the water.)
Leighton Archive Image
(Brooklin, Maine)