Naval historians tell us that four people died when 50 passengers on the steamer Castine were thrown into the sea on June 8, 1935, when the idling boat was smashed against a ledge by ocean swells. Legend has it that the accident, which signaled the end of the Penobscot River steamboat fleet, happened despite the heroic actions of Capt. Leighton Coombs and his engineer-brother Perry Coombs.

Passenger Roberta Best, 81, begs to differ.

Even after 66 years, the Rockland resident remembers clearly the details of the fatal boating accident. She and a 15-year-old friend were on the bow of the Castine when it struck a ledge off Vinalhaven. Best said the vessel was operating carelessly in heavy fog at top speed when it struck the ledge. Although the captain and engineer are remembered fondly and respectfully by boating historians, Best said the brothers’ reputation was that “they struck every rock in Penobscot River” at one time or another.

Best still has a life preserver from the Castine, a relic preserved for more than 66 years. “I don’t know why, really. They handed them out as the ship was sinking and I just kept it. I forgot about it for a time, actually,” said Best.

Best was one of about 75 members of the Limerock Valley Pomona Grange who chartered the 71-foot Belfast steamer for an annual outing to Vinalhaven for a lobster dinner. The Castine never made it.

The exact cause of the accident remains debatable.

To Best, the details remain crystal clear. Best, then 15, feared that the trip would never happen because of the “thick-a-fog” conditions that Saturday morning. She was familiar with the varied faces of Penobscot Bay since both her grandfathers were sea captains and she took her rowboat out in Rockport Harbor at every opportunity.

“My best friend, Helen Cripps, was in the Grange and she invited me along. I thought it would be fun, and I was afraid I was going to miss my first trip to Vinalhaven,” she said in an interview in her Masonic Street home.

The fully loaded steamer left Camden at about 9 a.m. and she and Cripps took a spot on the bow. “The fog was so thick, you couldn’t see anything but the lobster pots. They never sent a lookout or anyone to the bow. We were there alone. We were going fast, but I wasn’t afraid. I figured that the captain knew what he was doing,” she said.

Within the hour, the Vinalhaven ferry was blowing a horn several times to signal that the Castine was far off course. “We should have known then,” she said.

Under full power, the Castine struck Bay Ledges off Vinalhaven, an outcropping familiar to anyone on the water, Best said. “Helen and I fell onto the port side of the boat against some lines. We were safe there and never even got our feet wet. We just happened to be in the safest place on the boat. We were never really afraid,” she said.

About 50 of the 75 passengers were not so lucky and were thrown into the water after the Castine took on water and started listing badly to port. Panicked passengers clung to deck rails and cabin sides and a woman and a baby were among those thrown into the water, newspaper reports indicated.

As the Bangor Daily News reported in 1935, “the joy and laughter of the Grangers [were] turned to pandemonium with the crash. Life preservers and ropes were tossed to those overboard and others donned them while they grabbed the nearest part of the boat.”

It was then that a crew member gave Best and Cripps their life preservers. Before the two teen-agers knew it, the North Haven ferry, Coast Guard boats and area lobster boats appeared to pluck the passengers from the water and the decks of the sinking steamer. “We all were taken to Vinalhaven, and since the lobster dinner was ready and waiting, we all sat down and ate,” she said.

In an interview a few days after the accident, the captain blamed the passengers. “We could have kept her on an even keel if the passengers had remained in their places instead of all going to one side,” he told the NEWS.

Just a few months before the accident, Capt. Coombs bragged about the condition of his 46-year-old steamer. “She’s just like one of the family. We have a great deal to be thankful for – we have never lost a passenger and we have never had a wreck.”

An anonymous NEWS reporter described the Castine as, “No pitiful wreck out of the past; no troubled or plaintive marine ghost. Very, very far from it. She belongs to the past, surely. But she is also of the present. She is a stylish and self-respecting little lady and she has kept herself up-to-date. She is as trim, as staunch, as seaworthy and as hospitable as in those bright days when she was queen of the river fleet. She is still queen. But there are no longer any subjects.”

The white-hulled Castine was the last and the most successful of the once proud Penobscot fleet, “the last connection between the present whose cry is for more speed and more speed in every form of transportation and a more romantic and leisurely past, when Bangor people found countless hours of pleasure on the Penobscot’s broad bosom,” the NEWS reported.

When the Castine went down, it took with it the romance and glamour of the Penobscot steamer era. At its peak, 23 steamers plied the Penobscot River and Penobscot Bay. By 1935, the emergence of the airplane, the automobile and modern railroad trains rendered river traffic too old-fashioned, too slow. One by one, the fleet disappeared, rotted at piers or was axed into kindling for the boilers of the river mills.

The Coombs brothers watched the fleet disappear and struggled to keep the Castine working. “One by one, they saw their competitors disappear – swallowed up for the most part by business reverses. While the brothers live, one gallant little excursion craft will ply the waters of the Penobscot,” the NEWS reported just before the accident.

In his “Steamboat Lore of the Penobscot” (Courier Gazette Publishing) author John M. Richardson said the Castine was both the most colorful and the most successful of the Penobscot River steamers.

The steamer “outlived every one of her 23 contemporary excursion steamers, jogging along in her efficient, effortless manner, long after the bones of other boats of the ’80s and ’90s were bleached and forgotten on the sands.”

The Castine, of 69 gross tons and 71 feet long, was built in Brewer in 1889 at the Barbour Shipyard. Richardson said the Castine was “fortunate in being maintained A-1 during all of her busy life. As a matter of fact, the Coombs brothers, Perry and Leighton, made a fetish of having their boat immaculate, paint-perfect and sound of hull and machinery.”

Francis W. Hatch agreed. In Down East’s “Penobscot Bay Steamboat Album,” Hatch wrote, “She had the reputation as being the cleanest boat on the bay, for the Coombs boys were sticklers for tidiness, abhorring flaky paint, dull brass and peanut shells in the cabin. Even her lifeboats were said to be kept as smartly as the catboats for hire at Dennett’s Wharf in Castine.”

According to Richardson, the engine of the Castine was stopped at the time of the accident, and a swell forced the steamer into the ledge. He credited Capt. Roscoe Kent of the North Haven ferry for saving numerous lives with quick dispatch of lifeboats. “Had it not been for the proximity of the rescue steamer and the swift, intelligent action of the North Haven’s crew, loss of life would have been very great,” Richardson said.

Best remains unfazed by the accident and sticks to her version of events. Years later she took a steamboat ride on the Potomac River in Virginia for dinner and dancing. She still takes day trips around Penobscot Bay aboard her son’s lobster boat, Ern.

The 1935 NEWS report on the Castine accident concluded, “The lazy, romantic bay can be very cruel sometimes.” The Castine’s hull finally broke in two with the forward part ending up on Baker’s Island as a summer camp. The fading colors of the original hull can still be seen today, one of the last vestiges of the once proud Penobscot steamer fleet.

Except for Roberta Best’s life preserver.