Here you see Angelique lowering sails as she enters Great Cove at dusk Wednesday (June 7). She was on a passenger cruise that included a tour of nearby Acadia National Park and the WoodenBoat School campus here.
She overnighted in the Cove and was caught sleeping there at dawn yesterday. The tide and wind swung her 180 degrees several times in the morning.
Angelique took down her protective tarp and discharged her passengers in several row-yourself trips to iThe WoodenBoat School, which is teaching classes in boatbuilding and other subjects now.
Out of Camden, Maine, Angelique is our most distinctive coastal cruiser. She was built to carry passengers in 1980 in Florida. She’s 130 feet long overall and the only Maine windjammer that is configured as a gaff-rigged topsail ketch. (Note that, unlike schooners, Angelique’s foremast is her main [tallest] mast, not her aft mast.)
After her passengers returned from their tour, she raised sails and turned to get a good South-Southwest breeze behind her.
Her “tanbark” reddish sails also are unique in the Maine windjammer fleet. In days of yore when sails were cotton, they were dipped in vats of tannic acid, tallow, and red ocher, which turned them reddish and protected against mildew.
Curiously, she was not named after some femme fatale, according to an online interview with her original captain, Mike Anderson. She was named after one of the hardwoods imported from French Guiana and Suriname that are used in boat and ship construction: “Angelique wood” (Dicornya quianensis). A significant irony here is that the vessel has a steel compartmentalized hull. Her design was inspired by early pilot sailboats and early large sailing yachts, according to Captain Anderson.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on June 7 and 8, 2023.)