Editor’s Log
Wet snow fell as I drove north from Boston on Interstate 95 and crossed the New Hampshire line on my way to Thomaston, Maine. It was April 2, and I wondered briefly if Mother Nature had for some reason extended her April foolery by a day. I was headed, after all, to a boat-launch party, which surely should have heralded the arrival of spring. Right?
Maine winters are long, and it’s been my observation that the natives get mighty restless by the time mud season comes along. So I wasn’t all that surprised to come up the hill to find the parking lots at Lyman-morse already filled with pickups and cars, and more pulling in. The snow had ceased just north of Portland, and though the sun was peeking out between the clouds here on the Midcoast, it did little to ward off the cold, brisk breeze blowing down the St. George River.
No one seemed to pay it much heed though. At the foot of the hill, by the water, a crowd was gathering, and everyone’s attention was on the belle of the ball, the stunning white hull of the Stephens Waring-designed Anna, waiting patiently in the Travelift slings for her first sip of salt water.
At precisely 1400, the sloop’s owner, who’d prefer to have attention focused on the boat rather than himself, stepped front and center to say he’d waited 18 years for this moment and didn’t intend to stall things any longer. With that, his wife smartly cracked a bottle of Champagne on the bow, and onlookers — as well as the Travelift’s engine — roared with approval.
Anna is a 65-foot Spirit of Tradition-style sloop with lines to melt your heart. Above the water, her overhangs, curved cockpit coamings and varnished teak doghouse are spectacular-looking; below the boot stripe, a bulb fin keel and high-aspect rudder promise a stiff and spirited ride once the 100-foot triple-spreader Southern Spars carbon-fiber mast and furling boom are stepped and the rig is tuned.
Paul Waring, one half of the Stephens Waring design team, said Anna’s brief called for ease of sailhandling (hence a selftacking jib) and performance in a very traditional package, one that harks back to the Fife era of grand wooden masterpieces. Though it has accommodations for six below for overnight passages, the boat’s primary purpose is daysailing, with just occasional longer hops along the East Coast. Anna is cold-molded, her frame and planking built with Douglas fir and cedar. But while her bones and good looks may pay tribute to the days of wooden boats, the designers and builder took every advantage of composite engineering, CAD software and CNC precision cutting tools, said Drew Lyman, president of Lyman-morse. To compress production time into two years, while the hull was being framed, planked and laminated, two interior modules were built alongside on the shop floor. The portside unit included an aft crew cabin, guest cabin and guest head. The galley and master shower and head were built in the starboard one. The master cabin — including a lovely queen-size berth complete with carved head- and footboards — was fashioned in smaller modules, then all were installed before the teak deck was laid. Lyman said fabricators even used a 3D printer for the first time to mold four small pieces of the elaborate interior joinery — a hint of things to come for other new and refit projects at the company’s longtime facility in Thomaston and at its Wayfarer Marine yard just up the road in Camden.
Waring said that he and partner Robert Stephens began working with the owner on a much bigger yacht, an 80-something-foot cruiser, back in 2001. Over the ensuing years, his ideas changed, their concepts evolved and finally, about four years ago, they settled on plans for Anna. The yacht’s interior was designed by Martha Coolidge, of Rockland, Maine.
Construction began in 2016. To get the layout just right, Lyman-morse first built a full-scale mock-up of the boat, which let Coolidge and the owners walk through different layouts and fine-tune the details. The results are breathtaking, from the butterfly hatches overhead to the carved newel posts aside the two sets of steps down into the doghouse and cabin.
Once afloat, a crew of technicians clamored aboard. When all was ready, Lyman stood at the pulpitlike helm, fired up the Steyr diesel, and Anna backed straight as an arrow out of the slip and spun around broadside, as if strutting her stuff for all to see. A cannon fired a salute, and then she motored slowly to a dock just upriver.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the owner standing next to me, saying nothing, savoring the moment, and on a chilly Maine afternoon, no doubt imagining taking the helm as Anna skips along on a summer sea breeze.