Imet Capt. Bob Douglas one January morning in 1985, when-like an uncounted number of other young people bitten by the schooner bug-I came to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, looking for a job aboard his SHENANDOAH. Capt. Douglas was by that point already a legend to the likes of me, born as I had been a full year after his vessel rolled down the ways at the Gamage Shipyard in South Bristol, Maine.An extreme clipper schooner based on a 19th-century revenue cutter design, SHENANDOAH was from a family of sailing ships built with speed as their primary weapon: loftily rigged and lightly armed, they were reliant mostly on the skill of their crews to keep them out of trouble. They were breathtakingly beautiful, absurdly fast, and not forgiving of their operators. At the time his new ship was launched, Douglas had little experience with such vessels-few people did, by 1964-but he'd flown jet fighters in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a mate in the Maine Windjammer fleet, a hybridization of skills that I suppose served as well as any could have.
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