The Schooner Hindu Sails Again

Photos courtesy Hindu Sailing Charters

Having completed a four-year restoration, 100-year-old Hindu was launched at Lyman-Morse in Thomaston. Following stability tests and final outfitting, Hindu’s hull was painted with Epifanes No. 19 black enamel, her original hull color.

It was June 10, 2020; the night was dark and foggy. Hindu, a vintage gaff schooner, was making 7 knots on Long Island Sound en route to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Co-owners Josh Rowan and Erin Desmond had just completed a successful charter season working from Hindu’s winter base in Key West, Florida, but now, things were about to get interesting. 

“We were in 150 feet of water in the middle of the shipping lanes off Port Jefferson, New York,” Desmond said. “It was my watch, three o’clock in the morning, and so dark there was nothing to see.”

Suddenly, the 31-ton schooner struck something, instantly losing headway. “It felt like we had run aground, even though I knew we were in the middle of the shipping channel,” Desmond recalled.

In the darkness, the crew made out an object sliding along the side of the schooner, bobbing up and down. They had collided with a partially submerged boat. “Had we hit the boat a few inches either side of the schooner’s stem, we certainly would have sunk very quickly,” Desmond said. 

As it was, Hindu hit the other boat dead on, doing considerable damage to the schooner’s stem, hood ends, and forefoot. But because the bow had recently been rebuilt, what might have been catastrophic damage was minimized. Fortunately, the ship’s pumps kept up with the inflow of seawater, and the crew made their way into Provincetown without further mishap. 

The Coast Guard later confirmed that the boat they had struck on Long Island Sound was an attempted insurance-fraud scam. Holes had been drilled in the 30-foot powerboat and it was then set adrift. Unfortunately, air trapped in the fuel and water tanks kept the ill-fated boat from sinking entirely. 

“Tropical Storm Fay was coming up the coast behind us,” Desmond recalled, “and someone was trying to get insurance money for a storm loss.”

“We feel very lucky to be Hindu’s stewards,” Desmond said. The 79-foot boat—a half-scale version of a 19th century Grand Banks fishing schooner—was designed by William Hand Jr., and built by Hodgdon Brothers in Boothbay, Maine, in 1925. 

At 95 years of age, Hindu was due for a refit prior to the accident. “We had already planned to address aging planks, keel timbers, and the deck in the fall,” Desmond said, noting the accident damage topped off an already aggressive refit to-do list. “So we made the decision to immediately move Hindu to Maine to undergo the repairs and refit.

“Maine was where Hindu had been built. And we knew that Maine was home to a thriving community of talented shipwrights and access to traditional boatbuilding materials. After looking at a whole bunch of boatyards, we brought Hindu to Maine which turned out to be a particularly good decision,” Desmond explained.

The extensive refit couldn’t begin until Rowan and Desmond built a timber-frame shop large enough to accommodate the project.

The couple bought some property in Thomaston—the site of what had once been the Maine State Prison Probation Office—and erected a timber-frame workshop. The team’s initial plan called for a one-year refit schedule. But, as is wont to happen with wooden ship repairs, the refit ended up spanning four years and thousands of hours of professional and volunteer labor. Desmond described the $800,000 odyssey as “a wild adventure.”

Mike Rogers and Simon Larsen were the primary master shipwrights on the Hindu project. “Simon was there at the beginning, and he stayed through the launch—that’s the kind of loyalty that makes a project of this scope possible,” Desmond said. 

The first challenge for Larsen was locating Hindu’s original line drawings. Many of William Hand’s early line drawings had been destroyed during the infamous hurricane of 1938 and the resulting tidal surge. Larsen was able to start the project when he obtained one of the few surviving line drawings of Hindu from the Hart Nautical Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the repository for the bulk of Hand’s surviving records.

From this drawing, Larsen was able to scale the line drawings to full size to guide in her reconstruction. “Hindu had lost her original sheer and was severely hogged when we brought her up to Maine,” Desmond said. Many of the required repairs were the result of natural aging from a lifetime at sea. Others were the result of substandard repairs made over the years. “For example,” Desmond said, “Some of Hindu’s deck frames had been repaired with 4-inch timbers, rather than the required 6-inch timbers. These underbuilt scantlings were the primary reason the deck had flattened out and leaked so badly.”

When Hindu was finally re-launched at Lyman-Morse on June 15, 2024, she was 100 years old—and yet she barely leaked a drop, taking in a little water at the horn timber. Desmond explained, “All of the planking was tight as a drum. In fact, after she’d been floated, Josh joked ‘does anyone have a syringe, because that’s all the pump we’ll need!’” 

Following the launch, Hindu was prepared for Coast Guard stability tests. “We installed the masts, the ceiling down below, the tanks, the head, and anything that weighs much,” said Desmond. After successfully completing the stability tests, Hindu was pulled out of the water and moved into Building 7 at Lyman-Morse to have her deck vacuum sealed and the bullet list of remaining refit tasks completed. Hindu was expected be launched and ready for sea by the end of November, at which point, Desmond and Rowan plan to set sail for Key West, arriving in time for the 2025 charter season. 

✮

Gaff-rigged schooner Hindu 

Type: Gaff-rigged schooner
LOA: 79'
Beam: 15' 9"
Draft: 8' 2"
Displ.: 31 tons
Original Name: Princess Pat
Year Launched: 1925

Designer: 
William H. Hand Jr.

Builder:
Hodgdon Brothers
East Boothbay, Maine

Relaunch:
Lyman-Morse Boatbuilding
Thomaston, ME
207-354-6904
lymanmorse.com

Operated by:
Hindu Sailing Charters
sailschoonerhindu.com
hinducharters@gmail.com
508-542-2996

Ted Hugger lives in Damariscotta, Maine, with his wife, their cardigan Welsh Corgi, and their 55-year old wooden trawler.

Of Historical Ties and Community Efforts

Hindu has led a varied and adventurous life, experiencing a succession of 14 owners and even weathering a bank repossession. Launched as Princess Pat in 1925, she was re-christened Je Ne Sais Pas in 1929, Saipas in 1929, Anna Lee Ames in 1935, and finally Hindu in 1938.

Under its present name, the schooner entered the spice trades, sailing between Boston and India for several years. With World War II raging, the Coast Guard requisitioned Hindu for coastal watch duty. She was refit with a 50-caliber, deck-mounted machine gun, depth charges and sonar, and served as a U-Boat hunter.

In 1946, at the conclusion of the war, Hindu was employed for daysail charters, tuna fishing, and whale-watching tours out to Stellwagen Bank. The years having taken their toll, Hindu was left languishing on the hard. In 2011, Josh Rowan and his father, Bill Rowan, bought Hindu and after an extensive refit, returned her to Provincetown in 2013 to resume the charter trade.

Hindu is nothing if not a community effort. Erin Desmond estimated more than 130 people who had each played a role in Hindu’s resurrection traveled to Thomaston for the launch and party in June. She explained that she developed a menu to reflect the diversity of Hindu’s life-long service with food themed from different periods of the schooner’s history. For the Great Gatsby era and Hindu’s 1925 launch, the party featured deviled eggs and ham with Dutchess potatoes. She selected corn dogs and M&Ms representing World War II to honor Hindu’s military years. Oysters from Provincetown represented her long history in Massachusetts; lobster rolls honored Hindu’s being launched and re-built in Maine; key-lime pie bites stood for Key West, her winter cruising grounds since 1946; and finally spicy dips from India commemorated her service in the spice trades.

Today, Rowan and Desmond operate a summer charter business out of Provincetown, offering day sails, sunset sails, and private charters aboard Hindu and her sister-ship, Bloodhound, a replica of a 70-foot, 1874 William Fife II cutter. In the winter, Hindu, offers charters and day sails in Key West while Argo Navis, a 75-foot catamaran, operates year-round out of Key West.