The 1973 schooner Harvey Gamage, one of the last built by its namesake, the shipyard’s long-time owner-operator, returned to its birthplace, Gamage Shipyard, May 29.
The Boothbay Harbor-based Ocean Classroom Foundation, a “non-profit educational organization with a mission to build the next generation of ocean stewards through education under sail,” bought the 125-foot schooner in 1996.
Alix Thorne, of Camden, is the organization’s founder and the president of its Board of Directors.
“This year, this was really special to come back to where [the Harvey Gamage] was built,” Thorne said. “I don’t think she’s been here since we owned her.”
At the time of Ocean Classroom’s founding, Thorne’s two teenage sons were “looking for sailing programs” aboard a vessel like the Harvey Gamage, but “there weren’t any,” she said.
Thorne started the foundation, which currently owns three schooners. Students from junior high through college attend fully accredited educational programs aboard the vessels, learning practical sailing skills and studying applied mathematics, marine biology, navigation and oceanography alongside traditional subjects like art, history and literature.
The students also participate in leadership training, service opportunities and cultural immersion.
The 15 students at the helm of the Harvey Gamage Sunday were making the final stop of a 17-week, 5000-mile journey stretching from the island of Trinidad and the Caribbean archipelago up the Eastern seaboard to South Bristol.
After docking the schooner in front of a large crowd of family, friends and curious locals, the graduation ceremony began. The 2011 class includes one Lincoln County resident, Emily Wallace of Alna.
For more information about the Ocean Classroom Foundation, visit www.oceanclassroom.org.
In 1924, Harvey Gamage bought the property from his cousin, Elliot Gamage, continuing nearly a century of intermittent Gamage ownership of the property. The next 52 years saw the Harvey F. Gamage Bristol Yacht Building Company and Harvey Gamage Shipbuilders build “more than 288 sailboats, powerboats, draggers, scallopers and windjammers.”
Andrews divides Gamage’s prolific building career into four periods, beginning, from 1925 to 1940, with the construction of 132 sloops, schooner yachts, powerboats and small fishing boats.
During World War II, the shipyard was dedicated full-time to the construction of “wooden military vessels,” such as minesweepers and ship’s tenders.
“The third period began in 1944 when the business turned to building rugged, able and profitable wooden fishing boats,” Andrews wrote. Gamage continued to dabble in yachts, powerboats and lobster boats, but most of the boats – draggers, seiners, scallopers and trawlers – “made up the backbone of the Gloucester and New Bedford, Massachusetts fishing fleets.”
Finally, in 1959-1960, the company, by request, built “the first schooner designed specifically for the windjammer passenger trade,” the Mary Day. Until his death in 1976, Gamage focused on “draggers, research vessels” (including the Antarctica R/V Hero), “yachts and large, graceful schooners,” including the Harvey Gamage.
The Cowan Realty Group owns the present-day site, no longer home to a shipbuilding enterprise, although a marina operates under the Gamage Shipyard name.
