Fall 2024
By Brian R. McMahon
Adventure under sail. Photo by Cheryl Briscoe, SchoonerAdventure.org.
Hello, Mr Chips! Greg Bover was an ideal tour guide, since he knew Adventure inside and out. Photo by Brian R McMahon
On a recent car club excursion, members went aboard the vintage fishing schooner Adventure, lying dockside in Gloucester, Mass., before enjoying a harborside dinner at Decklyn’s Restaurant.
It was a brief walk to the schooner Adventure’s quai, where our guide was Greg Bover, ship’s carpenter (“Chips”), who is responsible for maintaining the watertight integrity of the hull. After extensive rebuilding and upgrading, Adventure was qualified in 2015 by the U.S. Coast Guard to carry passengers. It’s an arduous process for a vintage wooden sailing ship. The interior had to have a collision bulkhead added at the forepeak, and watertight compartmentation retrofitted. A thorough fire extinguishing system was installed, and Adventure’s original topmasts had to be stricken to increase the schooner’s stability.
He described Adventure as a 122-foot knockabout schooner, the last sail-powered fishing boat to sail from Gloucester, Mass. Adventure was launched in 1926 from the John F. James and Sons Shipyard in Essex, Mass. John F. McManus of Boston designed this schooner, which is a two-masted sailing ship with the second (mainmast) taller than the foremast.
The view from the bow of Adventure, looking south. Photo by Brian McMahon
“Knockabout” means that there’s no bowsprit, the spar that would extend forward of the bow. Without being able to fly a jib further forward on a bowsprit, a knockabout sacrifices some maneuverability but is safer for her crew. To walk on the netting under the bowsprit to furl a jib on a ship that’s bouncing violently in heavy weather was dangerous, as well as wet.
For 27 years, Adventure fished the Grand Banks for cod, haddock and halibut. She would leave Gloucester with the fish storage bins half full of ice and sail to Georges Bank, 170 miles to the northeast. At the end of this day-and-a-half pleasure cruise, Adventure’s fishing crew of 24 would get to work lowering the schooner’s 12 dories over the side and rowing out to set their miles of baited fish lines. These rowboats had a useful design feature: the heavier they became with fish, the less likely they were to capsize.
When fishing on the Grand Banks, the crew endured 20-hour work days, hauling in the fish, gutting them, tossing them down into the fish bins, and then covering each layer of the fish with ice.
Darrell Mook, Jeanette Chow, Cristina Burwell, Dr Linda Brown, Dr. Ivan and Dr. Véronique Kugener’s son, Timothy, and Bob Leaper are standing in the fish bin, where 80 tons of groundfish would be dumped from above. Photo by Brian R McMahon
The “No. 226070” on the side of the fish hatch is Adventure’s U.S. registration number.
The crew endured this knowing that the more fish they caught, the more money they would make. Instead of wages, they were paid shares in the profitability of the voyage. They also had to gauge how long to remain fishing before the catch would begin to rot and be worthless when they returned to Gloucester. In its 1926-1953 career, Adventure, under captains Jeff Thomas and Leo Hynes, was the most profitable fishing boat in the fleet, landing $4 million in haddock, halibut and cod at the Gloucester fish pier.
She’s now part of local history, and along with other vintage and recently built schooners, Adventure now takes tourists out for three hour and daylong tours around Cape Ann. Gloucester is the oldest (1623) seaport in America. Though there are many yachts homeported here, Gloucester remains primarily a harbor for commercial fishing boats. “The Perfect Storm,” a 2000 movie “based on a true story”, was filmed on location here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWkVvkfwdN4 and during the filming, I was providing some sail training for the local Coast Guard station at the next pier.
To perpetuate the city’s fishing port heritage, Gloucester hosts an annual Schooner Festival on Labor Day Weekend, with dozens of schooners from all over the Northeast participating in shoreside events, as well as a race a few miles offshore.
Participating in the 2022 race, here’s schooner Columbia under full sail: flying jib, outer jib, jib staysail, foresail, fore topsail, mainsail, main topsail. Photo by Brian R McMahon
After our Adventure tourism, we trouped inside Decklyn’s Restaurant to enjoy a fresh seafood dinner and had a new appreciation for the skill, daring and determination of our local fishing community.
Melissa Brown, Dr Linda Brown and Martha McMahon debate whether the haddock, scallops or salmon would be most delicious. Photo by Brian R. McMahon
Brian and Martha McMahon live in Burlington, Mass., 20 miles northwest of Boston. He fell in love with the ocean in 1972 while serving in the U.S. Navy on USS Fox, a destroyer based in San Diego, Calif. Back on the U.S. East Coast, Brian and Martha rented sailboats on Boston’s North Shore before purchasing their first sloop, Cyrano, a Bristol 19 Corinthian in 1976. Brian is a Life Member of Jubilee YC and a 47-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.
