After dinner, rather than sitting around watching some trash on TV, I took an evening cruise on a four-masted schooner. We went out of inner Bar Harbor under power but as soon as we hit Frenchman Bay, we set sail and cruised laps around the bay until sunset!! This boat is 130' long and displaces 150 tons - steel hull and steel masts. There are two main sails, one mizzen, one spanker and three of those little triangle shaped thingies up front. When everything is up, there's something like 4000 square feet of canvas. Pretty cool.

By my count, it was the Captain and only four mates - one for each sail. As the sails were manual - lift by manpower that is, that didn't appear to be enough crew to raise the sails. But when it came time to put the sails to work, they asked the passengers to help put the sails up. That looked too much like work to me so I just kinda stayed quiet. In fact, all sail boats look like too much work to me. Bringing the sails down was much easier - gravity did it.

Above - detail of the triangle shaped thingies up on the pointy end of the boat.
We're heeled over pretty good, eh?

Above - Looking up between the spanker and the second main while under sail.
 

Above - Ropes and stuff.

Above - Before we got underway. Detail of the spanker rigging and the steering wheel.

So after a successful "voyage," it was back to the RV for more sorting and packing. It was also time to clean all the cameras and lenses and pack for my trip tomorrow.

More Acadia Pictures

Technical Note: These pictures all start life as 9-10 Mbyte raw files in my camera. After processing, they are on the order of 30-35 Mbyte Tif files. What you see here are highly processed and compacted Jpg files, none larger than 50 Kbyte. As you might imagine, there is considerable loss of quality and detail. I could print any of the above from the 30 Mbyte file at 24 inches by 30 inches and have much sharper images than those above - -

Next Page 

Page 9