‘He Hadn’t Lost His Mind. He’d Lost His Moon!’

Navigation at Its Most Atavistic. Not Totally Eclipsed by Electronics, Not Yet

Genevieve Jacobs Jul 9   ∙   Guest post

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Besides being a regular Loose Cannon contributor, the author is a longtime professor of Psychology and Communications. She landed in Vermont in 1987 after a decade of voyaging under sail. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir tentatively entitled “Jenny: A Night Sea Journey.”

How did we get our bearings, back in the day? Back in the night, back in the dark ages before the Internet. Before there was “an app for that?”

You kept your star charts, your local tides, your moon phases, your dawns and dusks in your mind. You tracked stuff half in your head, half in your hands, half in your heart, half up your ass, and half in pages of your notebook or in scribbled margins of reference books.

Maybe you’re a prawn trawlerman who needs to get up and down the channels and out to the fishing grounds, mind the tides or maybe you’re a woman who needs to track your cycles. If you’re moving through unfamiliar places you are extra observant.

When you sail out of a harbor, you take a good look back to study the way you came in at different distances, just in case you ever need to sail back in. You might hold up your thumb to make a sight by a landmark where there’s a crook in a shoal underneath. Turn here, when the treeline appears as separate dots.

One evening, not long after the first satellite circled the earth, not long after the first black-box satnavs graced the bridges of well-equipped boats, around the time of the Challenger explosion—which rocked our worlds, and which I personally heard recounted over a scratchy radio—we were anchored on the Ningi Creek south of the Great Barrier Reef.

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Our prawn trawling friend came aboard in the dusk to swap yarns and discuss boats and generally shoot the breeze and eat up the supper I’d made. They were nattering on, not particularly interesting to me yet sort of comforting to hear their voices rambling and wrestling in a pleasantly low volume, low key, slightly competitive, brotherly kinda way. Same old stuff.

This one piece of gear, some brand of equipment, a few fond insults exchanged in camaraderie; a particularly fond and well worn argument about preferences when it comes to this or that maneuver or bit of tackle, or a type of engine, a detail of machinery, feat of mastery, stupid mistakes, a new enthusiasm, an old disappointment, a critique of some product seen in an ad…The conversation rambles along in a kind of chummy intimacy on shiny rails like a cheerful little choo choo.

Horns toot and brakes squeal and crossing signals dinga-dinga-ding and harmlessly power on by, and that’s a trusting friendship, amongst men. They go somewhere, do something, together. Silences and one upping, punctuated by contests. Men talking on a boat is something you appreciate like a river, but mind the rocks. Stay alongside, on the riverbank. Don’t get in the way.

I’m bored stiff, as I’ve been pretty much solid for…years. On end.

I quietly gather up the supper stuff and I go up on deck to wash dishes in the bucket of salt water and a dab of lemon Joy and just drag on a roll-me-own when I’m done, gazing at the Southern Cross and all the stars laid out above me, some dimmed by the orb of a fully pregnant, perfectly round moon, a vast spider’s web of lights, cast across an upturned bowl of ancient mysteries and long sent messages I only now receive.

I think about the glimmering promises of actual ideas in life. The embers still glowing from things I’ve been reading, but nobody wants to talk about. It’s okay. I’m fine with it. I suppose “fat dumb and happy” lives right next door to contentment and what the other sibling called satisfaction. I guess it boils down to lowering your expectations, basically. I mean, what do you want? The moon?

Our buddy is a third generation prawn trawler, son of a son of a son of shrimpers. You know the breed.

They crank up the diesels at 3 a.m. and chug out down the channels no matter what the weather to the scent of bitter burnt coffee grounds and oily fumes of exhaust and their own body odors, while they busy the works on decks and getting all the clanking tackle ready to drag nets for the many-legged little morsels of food out of the sea, along with the occasional hideous monster of the deep that may have sharp teeth or strange poison, weird antennae or various sharpnesses, google eyes or razor fins—they drag this hidden aquatic life up in their hapless nets and never know WTF is coming up in any given catch, figuring they just gotta throw it back, if they don’t die first, and hence these particular guys are not, on the whole, that impressionable.

Everything is just either dinner or a dollar or a good story to share a million times.

But he’s recently deserted the boats, his life, his heritage, to get with the times, modernize, be sensible. To work in a paper factory and “get benefits.” Doing typical normal life quite well, thank you very much. Hasn’t even glanced at an almanac in ages.

He comes up the hatch at length and at long last, a welcomed guest, welcome to go back home already. I start to get up to fetch the painter and ferry him ashore when I hear a supernatural gasp. His eyes are riveted on an empty quadrant of the night sky. He’s frozen half in and half out, crouching like a stone statue of some Neolithic hunter overwhelmed by a tusked mammoth and no weapons at hand.

Stroke? Heart attack? UFO sighting? Stuck Chicken bone? Heimlich? Ghostbusters? Traumatic flashback?! What is happening? Is there something I need to do?

“Moon!” he croaks.

My god. He hasn’t lost his mind. He’s lost his moon!

His mother, he’s lost, catapulted back, the moon who is always there—changing and waxing and waning and traveling the whole world, and sometimes beclouded or squalled from view. But he had a sky map in his fisherman head of where exactly at any moment on any night he would see her, the moon.

This eclipse, it snuck up on him.

I’ve heard that the last thing sailors cry out when they are drowning at sea is “mother!” Oh, mother! In every language: Mom, mama, momma, mother.

The moon, his mother. She who did suddenly disappear, one time. It was after his dad “beat her out of the house with nothing but the clothes on her back”—a story I’d already heard boasted enough times to know that the man had wronged her

And that neither he nor the sons, now grown men, would ever stop missing her.

Famed Maine Schooner Goes Down in New York City, Just Like Any Other Derelict Vessel

Restaurant Chain Bought ‘Victory Chimes’ in 2023

Peter Swanson Jul 7

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The most overused word in the English language at this moment in history is iconic. Almost everything is iconic nowadays, it would seem. Nonetheless, those overworked three syllables are the best possible descriptor for Victory Chimes, the three-masted schooner from Maine that a waterfront restaurant chain in New York City left to sink.

Yeah, the boat on the tails side of the Maine quarter¹ sank over the weekend. She and Pilot, another old-timey wooden boat which also sank, were being stored at anchor by the Crew restaurant company. The sinking happened during or after a squall that was much publicized because it had hit the Tall Ships in New York for the 250th celebration while at anchor.

Victory Chimes was built in 1900 as a cargo ship to work Chesapeake Bay. The 128-footer was originally named the Edward & Maude. She had no engine and relied on a pushboat for close-quarters maneuvering, a “yawl boat.”

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For the most part of 50 years, beginning in 1954, Victory Chimes carried passengers for hire on multi-day tours of Midcoast Maine, staging from Rockland.² With capacity for up to 10 crew and 40 passengers, thousands of visitors sailed aboard her over the decades, handling lines and eating chili and chowder out of big pots.

There was great sadness at news of the sinking, and bitterness too.

Captains Kip Files and Paul DeGaeta bought the boat in 1990 and operated as a passenger vessel until 2018. Here’s what DeGaeta said this week after hearing the news:

After seeing Victory Chimes in July 2025, I predicted she’d sink this winter. The tough old girl lasted longer than I thought.

I didn’t see signs of even the most minimal maintenance being done. She was pumping water at an incredible rate, which makes me wonder if anyone was even noticing and how much she was insured for.

Things worked out very differently than Kip and I had hoped for in passing her along to future caretakers. She had 118 good years followed by a steady decline that only accelerated.

Heartbreaking. But you’d have to show me a three-masted or larger American sailing vessel that represented the American spirit any better than Victory Chimes: Her legacy was earning a steady living under working sail longer than any of the larger American traditional sailing vessels—she never had a penny of foundation or 501(c)(3) money. Victory Chimes supported herself, until she couldn’t anymore.

The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum could have had her but decided on a bascule bridge instead. Kip worked for years trying to get her to Mystic. We watched historic builds of copycat vessels raise millions, while the Chimes could have been had for a fraction of that cost.

And now, maybe those elitist frauds at WoodenBoat magazine will do an article in relation to the Tall Ships parade. They never paid any attention to Victory Chimes during (another owner’s) efforts to save her in 1987, aside from a snide remark about the name change, nor during our 28 years as her caretakers. Instead, they portrayed the new owners as heroic figures, gallantly riding in to rescue her as a restaurant. In reality, they did nothing more than allow her to sit unattended and give up the ghost.

How freaking ironic—she participated in Operation Sail during the Bicentennial in 1976, then ends up on the bottom as a host of traditional sailing vessels from countries that truly care about them parade by for 250 years. You’ll never convince me that vessels lack a soul; that was her final message as an American National Historic Landmark and representing Maine on the State Quarter. She didn’t want to be a restaurant; she was meant to run free before the wind.

In May 2023, New York City restauranteurs Miles and Alex Pincus bought Victory Chimes at auction in May 2023 for $75,900. Under the corporate name Crew, the brothers operate several waterfront or harbor-themed restaurants, a few of which are old boats. Pilot, which sunk a day or so before Chimes, had been taken out of service as a floating eatery not too long ago.

“We’ve admired Victory Chimes for quite some time. When she went up for auction, we felt a responsibility to step in and ensure her preservation. We don’t have a plan yet other than to get her into safe harbor,” the Pincus brothers said in a May 2023 statement.

Brad Vogel, who covers maritime happenings in Brooklyn, said the vessel sank sometime between Friday night and Sunday. Using his screen name BoweryBird, Vogel had some harsh words for the vessel’s caretakers at Crew:

bowerybird

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Brad Vogel on Instagram: “  And now Victory Chimes has sunk! T…

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In a July 6 statement, Crew company Vice President Marisa Chiarello said in part:

In response to both incidents, our team called in maritime salvage experts to make a plan to safely raise the vessels, determine the cause of the sinking, and assess any damage to the hulls. We remain hopeful they can be salvaged and restored. Since Crew was founded in 2014, we have been committed to restoring historic vessels for future generations and sharing the spirit of maritime adventure.