The Jacob Pike

Fishermen’s Voice photo

The Jacob Pike hauled out at the Northend Shipyard in Rockland for a little maintenance and a paint job. The venerable herring carrier, an Albert Condon design, was built by Newbert & Wallace in 1949 and she has had a few owners in recent decades. Birch Harbor lobster dealer Dana Rice hauled herring from trawlers offshore in the Jacob Pike in the 90s and early oughts. Then Taylor Allen owned her for a while before giving the Jacob Pike to the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport. The museum developed a project plan for the vessel, but the funding never followed. Today the Jacob Pike is owned by Jamie Steeves whose company J&J Lobster sails the Pike as a dry well lobster smack to their float at North Haven.

One unmistakable conclusion seeing this 67-year-old wood vessel on the ways at John Foss’s Northend Shipyard is that she was very well built and given some care over the decades. She remains in exceptionally good condition. The original skipper, Sherm Lord, packed salt between the timbers and planks and bored down into the tops of timbers packing the holes with salt. This helped preserve the planks and timbers, but the vessel had to have started out right in many ways to be as straight as she is today.

The Northend yard maintains the windjammer fleet that sails out of Rockland. The yard was established in the early 1970s to do just that when schooners were re-emerging in the tourism industry on the Rockland waterfront.

The skills and tools, many of them hand tools, are as scarce today as are large wooden vessels, which a few generations ago lined the wharfs of the Maine coast and dotted the horizon carrying just about everything involving commercial and domestic life. A century ago the Maine coast was known around the world as the home of thousands of highly skilled wooden ship builders. Today these wooden ships demand the same mastery of special skills, but the scarcity of those who have them has made maintenance the single largest expense in operating these vessels.

The Jacob Pike’s sister ship, the Pauline, is owned by Harlan Billings in Stonington and another, the Glen Gerry, is at the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard.