Tancook Whalers: Origins, Rediscovery and Revival [first edition]

Foreword: Isn't there a subtle psychic connection between islands and double-ended boats? I think perhaps there is. Boats that serve islands, all around the world, seem to be predominantly double-enders. Maybe it's something about the very environment of an island that suggests to an islander that his boat should be pointed at both ends. Maybe it's that a double-ender often gives a great sense of seaworthiness and that the islander knows that he may want to get ashore onto the main on any day of reasonable hard weather-and may need to on some day of unreasonable weather. At any rate, double-ended island boats make a fascinating study, and none more so than those of the coastal islands of New England and Nova Scotia. Far and away the prettiest of all these craft is the Tancook whaler, the schooner-rigged double-ender that served Tancook Islanders in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. These are fine, able vessels that well met all the watery needs of the Tancook Islanders; unlike some of their southern counterparts such as the seaworthy pinkies and Block Island boats, the Tancook whalers were fast, sailing much like a pre-World War II racing yacht, except for speed to windward. Such a refined type of traditional vessel deserves emulation, and, happily, through the years since the last Tancook whaler worked under sail, a number of fine copies of them, as well as some sensible, modified versions, have been built and sailed. It is good to perpetuate such nicely-developed craft, for their working life was a mere half-century. Nor were there more than something like fifty Tancook whalers sailing at any one time. I count myself extremely lucky to have been able to spend a fair bit of time sailing in the Vernon Langille, the excellent Tancook-whaler replica built by the Apprenticeshop of the Maine Maritime Museum, and to have been the proud owner of a fine little twenty-five-foot Tancook-whaler replica.