SAIL ON, O BOWDOIN

Northward is the direction Maine’s official sailing vessel, the Bowdoin, should often be pointing its characteristic spoon bow, and that’s where it is scheduled to be headed once again, on June 1.

The historic schooner will set out on a month-long training cruise to Newfoundland, with a crew including 11 mostly green Maine Maritime Academy students doing the work and Andy Chase as skipper. He is a professor of marine transportation at the academy and a longtime advocate of returning the Bowdoin to full use as a training ship.

The voyage is part of a new pilot course designed as an introduction to maintenance and operation of large traditional sailing vessels. The students will learn to use the Bowdoin’s modern navigation devices including electronic charts, GPS (global positioning system), radar and sonar, an electronic sounding system. But those conveniences, while still available in any emergency, will often be covered up, in favor of hand-held sextants, a lead line for depth soundings, and a taffrail log to measure distance traveled in sailing by dead reckoning.

This summer’s cruise marks a possible first step toward a return to the arctic voyages that made the Bowdoin famous years ago. The boat was built in 1921 in the Hodgdon Brothers Shipyard in East Boothbay for Donald Baxter Macmillan, class of 1898 at Bowdoin College. He was an explorer, sailor, teacher philanthropist, researcher and lecturer who sailed the Bowdoin on more than 30 expeditions to the arctic.

As a training vessel at the academy, the Bowdoin sailed several times to the Arctic, including a Greenland voyage in 1991. But budget and economics threatened its future. To help finance its upkeep, the schooner began a system of paid charters to outside groups. The idea developed that it should pay its own way, a practical impossibility, and there was even a tentative plan at one point to downgrade the vessel to “a stationary exhibit at an undetermined location.”

Mr. Chase credits student enthusiasm for old-fashioned deep water sailing for saving the Bowdoin from becoming a wharfside tourist attraction. It now has been fitted with a new suit of sails and figures as the center of the new seamanship course.

On this cruise, it will maintain radio contact with the academy’s big State of Maine steamship and can be tracked on the academy’s Web site at www.mma.edu.

It still carries on its foremast the “ice barrel” crow’s nest, a lookout station for arctic ice. And its sturdy spoon bow with its steel framework remains ready to crush its way once more through ice. Let’s hope that it will once again return to those old haunts before long.