MEET FRANCES

If you have not already, it might be time for you to meet Frances. Join us this summer, we are a master of sharing this space on the water.

We are available for hire through the middle of October and accommodate up to 38 guests, parties of 20-25 are just perfect for our open deck concept. Catering offerings from the lovely Lake + Co may be arranged, and open deck cooler bar option available as well. We are your summer backyard party. Please inquire for pricing.

Public ticketed day sailing, sunset sailing, and our dear music series are well underway. Frances is spacious, bring a picnic and friends along. Seeing our city from the water, especially sailing on a traditional vessel, is something we feel privileged to share.

My name’s Meg, I helped my friend and shipbuilder build Frances nearly 20 years ago. I have stayed with the vessel and currently captain her in the summer months in Maine. Frances is built in the spirit of tradition, her design influence from the turn of the 19th century. She is broad, she is stately, she is a nod to a time gone by. She is definitely worth the visit down.

Please send charter or public sailing inquiry to thefrancesproject@gmail.com It will be a pleasure to connect.

And please share. If you love the boat, if you love the project, this is the best way to support. Share with one or two people who you think might benefit from a bit of Atlantic Ocean in their summer. And thank you < 3

SPRING

The latest from our mailing list. Feel welcome to join and you’ll get notes.

Friends, we had warm weather, sun and much progress in the last weeks, now on to some raw wet spring days. I thought I might sit and write to you.

We make our way to Portland the first week of June, our decks open to day sails, charter, and wine sails June 9.

A handful of years ago we adopted an online calendar, posting our events just 2 weeks in advance of date. This model has stuck, and for those new to the boat I want to run you thru the paces of reserving a sail on FRANCES.

We host wine sailing events (an informative wine lecture series) on weekends, starting Friday afternoons in June. Without fail, on almost all weekends, we have 6 wine events for you to pick from. All available dates are currently online.

Select Thursdays through summer we host beer + oyster sails with our friend Andy, Feel Good Portland. Dates have been posted, tho tickets have not come available yet.

In house FRANCES outing include day sails, sunset sails, and our acoustic sail series. We will be working to put our music calendar together. Music nights, a handful this summer, will be hosted Wednesday and or Thursday evenings.

Last, but in so many ways the most dear, are our afternoon day sails and the evening sunsets. True to FRANCES these remain peaceful, intimate, and very picnic worthy. I will post available dates 2 weeks in advance and will send out little notes once added to our calendar.

In the mean time we get ready, we uprig, and we catch the cadence of summer with you somewhere peppered inbetween.

Seltzer season

SAGE

The first time I drove across the grande basin east of the San Juan Mountains it was nighttime. I knew this expanse of desert was vast, it’s just that I was not accustomed to the immense, flat, and barren being on land.

With the sunrise came coffee, and I started to say hello to this place. It was the dawn of 2020 and I was not on a boat, I was in a high alpine desert.

Corals and sea fans, free standing blooms of life amidst the white sea floor. Rooted like low bush in pale pink and white sands. All grain sized shell fragments and limestones. In the inner reefs, inside of the break, one can look across this oceanic desert swaying in the current.

Sitting in my truck bed with my trusty mug looking out over the vast expanses of beautiful low green sagebrush this barren rugged West Indian reef presented itself again. The two landscapes in their scale and starkness were so similar to my eye. I will always think of the ocean floor when I drive through south central Colorado.

2020 will be the year Frances slept and I spent less and less time on the water. I am aware of the privilege to step away and be able to step back.

The authenticity of traditional sail is perhaps the most important reason to keep this boat available to you. The hull skims across the water as the sails make their way toward the sky, the banjo picking in the stern. There is a pant of breath as crew members coil down all the line on deck. It is meant to be realized that we just did it all. And with the wind and the current we will go.

Come air yourself out this summer, come sailing. We’re doing it safely, and with a year away, we have a new energy and perspective to share.

Sage and coral

Coral and sage

A TRUTH

Wool socks and velcro tevas. There is salt in every corner of my cheap Casio watch. The airport terminal is busy and loud in a way that is beyond comprehension when you come from being on the ocean, far from land. It is not to say that out there it was not loud, or that it was not busy. It is the busy of ultimate wilderness.

I recall my first passage down the North Atlantic. When I need to calm myself I think of those vast vast swells from the east rolling over from Africa, the water looking like mercury in the moonlight. The wave height so tremendous, and the wave period so long and consistent, it looked as though the whole of Earth's heart was beating, and I could see it. Every bit of it was alive.

Home on the pier in the summertime, I find great pleasure in drinking lots of espresso in the morning and checking my wind apps, watching the sky. I enjoy being observant of these things. I am coming to understand that this is a fortunate way to be. Daily looking skyward for my information, less so into a tablet.

Sailing is most about observation of elements and timely response to them. It is a dance of balance and form. When the wind fills the sails on a port tack, head to wind, I am sailing to the luff of the topsail. It is in the light quiver of the belly of this sail that I know the other headsails forward of the mast and our mainsail are fully powered. As we reach the approaching shoreline I start to play through our tack in my head. Are we getting lifted, or are we getting headed? I feather Frances as close to the wind as possible with as little variation to the rudder as can be managed. With a neutral rudder and good hull speed I throw the helm to port, forcing the bow through the wind and start to spin the helm back as soon as I sense we have won the new tack.

I write all of this in response to a question I never know how to answer well. I get asked if I get bored of my work, if I get bored of the sailing. Usually the question surfaces on a light wind day. My answer, without question, is never. It is that we, none of us know, what is just around the corner. The nature of sailing is to be constantly adjusting so when change does come you are in a good position to receive it. It is a beautiful way to live, on this living breathing body of water beneath our hull.

A long answer to an easy truth.

OUT 35mm black & white, 2018

ROOTS

To understand why we sail is to understand where we came from.  

On a cold December day, with a storm that brought wind from the east, I drove my rusty old Saab up onto the Vinalhaven ferry.  Time would reveal that this would be the last vessel to run for a couple of days.  On island was where we would pace through the weather.  That day, driving up the coast, I had the excitement that can only be brought by anticipation of seeing a place for the first time.

The island is enchanting.  Summer, winter.  The friend I traveled with had grown up there.  We scraped the sea ice off the windshield and headlights when we reached the other side and made our way into the town for provisions.  On our way out to the point we stopped by his friend's boat shop, an older man who had spent a lifetime mastering the skill of building traditional Maine peapods.  

Out of the little gold car popped two messes of sandy blonde hair, a set of sea green eyes and a set of the darkest of brown eyes.  Phil Dyer had known Hasket since he was a child.  They were two of a kind, both boat builders.  Hasket introduced me as his new sailor friend, and we spent the next couple of hours admiring Phil's projects, his drawings, his beautiful hand tools he used for his craft.  

After the visit we carried on to the point to make dinner.  By the late hours of the evening the profile of a sailing hull had been drawn.  Hasket continued to work into the early hours of the morning as I slept.  Thick lead pencils and any sort of paper he could find.  A set of ships curves found in a drawer, straight strips of kindling used for battens.  This was the first time I was introduced to Frances.  The first mathematical form of her was born on this island.

It is truth that Hasket appreciated the look of the boat as young as the age of eight.  The earliest dated piece of her is a painting he did when he was just this age.  As a teenager, as a young man, he continued to draw her in sketchbooks, on scrap paper.  She was in his dreams.  He would position his life and his time in such a way that he would learn how to build her. 

That Frances has massive historic significance on the Portland waterfront is without question.  She is built in the spirit of working vessels that would have sailed out of Portland Harbor between 1790 and 1820.  Her design precedes the schooner, or any sort of pleasure yacht for that matter.  She is British inspired and her gaff cutter rig very impressive off the water.  She represents a time when there would have been a hundred vessels like her anchored in our protected harbor.  She is a very special piece of our landscape in this time.  This vessel may have been forgotten to Portland if it were not for this young boat builder and his connection to the past.

Hasket Derby Hildreth was named for his forefather Elias Hasket Derby of Salem, Massachusetts.  Elias Hasket was born in 1739.  The Derby family owned privateers, grand sleek gun carrying ships.  In times of war these vessels would overtake and seize foreign enemy trading ships and any other ship of war.  The Grand Turk, the Derby privateer, was most successful at this; between 1791 and 1792 she gained seventeen prizes before the Revolutionary War was over.  These privateers, including the 300 gross ton Grand Turk, were outfitted as sea going cargo vessels after the war.  The Grand Turk became the first New England vessel to trade directly with China.  The Derby's have salt for roots.

Hasket had a true connection with self that I will always admire.  He paid homage to his dreams.  This vessel is a reminder to us all to stay true to our own.

Dusk, before launch 2017

RIGGING FRANCES

I would have never guessed that I would have the good fortune to work in this space again.  The morning light through the old glass windowpanes, all these years and it still stops me in my tracks.  You would know it if you've been here.  A silent giant on our waterfront.

Inside the pale blue brick walls of the Portland Company I was once again no longer a visitor.  Before this beautiful building falls to the earth where it once rose, our crew was granted a short lease to build out a rigging shop and a wood working shop in the winter of 2017.  It is in this very space, just a couple doors down, that the hull of Frances was constructed. 

On a bright February morning we moved in and started to unpack.  Bandsaw, tablesaw, paints and epoxies.  We built a pedestal for our rigging vice, a sturdy working platform for splicing wire.  We had a couple workbenches, we built more.  It is here that we completed all of the wire splicing, service, and leathering of the upper portion of the standing rigging.  In these winter months a new topmast and bowsprit were also built.

To properly build wire rope standing rigging, first one has to have a good handle on overall length, namely the length that is assumed by putting an eye in the wire and by tapering in a splice.  Then one needs new wire stock, in our case spools and spools of 7X7 wire rope varying from 1/2 inch for lower rigging to 1/4 inch for rigging set aloft.  All galvanized wire for shrouds, and all stainless wire for stays running forward.  The head-rig was outfitted with all galvanized wire.  Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of feet of wire rope were ordered.  

Next we had to devise a process for the worming, parceling, and service of our new rigging.  Worming proved to not be necessary for the size wire we were using, the parceling was good enough to fill in the voids formed by the lay of the wire strands.  A wrapping of friction tape (parcel), an oiling with linseed oil, and a wrapping of tight service was first applied in a short run before the wire was wrapped around the thimble.  Similarly in the case of the large eye splices that set around the mainmast and hounds, parceling, service, and leathering were all completed before the splicing began.  After the splicing came the pounding to flatten the long taper, followed by the stainless steel wire service.  Over the wire service was the parcel and the tarred service.

This entire process was completed a second time for the lower parts of the rigging after the mast had been stepped.  By this time it was spring, and there was a bit more urgency as there could be very little error in splice length or the mast would need to come down.  The goal was to have symmetrical rigging with symmetrical turnbuckles set with generous room for adjustment as the wire would and will stretch over time.  

Completed in May of 2017, there was little to no error in what was built.  A new solid laminated spruce topmast, beautifully tapered, as well as a new solid laminated spruce bowsprit were added to Frances, and shipped in place before the final splicing came to be.  The arrangement of this work in its completion was truly one of the proudest moments this vessel has ever seen. 

Thank you Jeffrey, Rory, Sarah, Frances and Colby.  Always. 

It's a photo reel, enjoy.