Maine Sailing Partners

25 Years

In the second week of March in 1983, Maine Sailing Partners was born when we opened the doors of our first loft on Commercial Street in Portland (now a parking lot).    Today, we marked the 25th return of that occasion with a quiet celebration and a piece of carrot cake.

Still, we are proud to have made it through 25 long years.  We'll save the big celebration until we're in our new home.

Letter from Miami

Former Maine Sailing Partner Pete writes:

So, I am down here in Miami getting ready to sail the Mumm 30 Worlds with Barking Mad.  We were measuring our sails in today and our main and S2 didn't measure in.  So we went to the local UK loft with our coach, Coach Bill Shore (whom we were calling Dad in the West Marine to try and freak him out) and I got a chance to show off my sail making skillzzzzzzz.  Yep, stitch ripping, hand work, seizing, bolt ropes and the lot.  I wasn't able to get on a machine, only the loft owner did that.  There were three of us, Bill, myself and the tactician (who had never been in a loft before).  The loft owner only charged us for 2.5 people and unless Bill counted as 2, I am pretty sure I was not the 1/2 person.  Anyway, just thought I'd check in and let you guys know your patience on the floor didn't go TOTALLY wasted.  Oh yeah, and I'm engaged.  Other than that, not much is new.

 

Pete

First sails

The first two sails ever built by MSP back in 1983 (those were the days we went by the name 'Shore Sails Maine') were a cruising spinnaker for a Mason 43 and a mainsail for a New York 40.  But that same year we built a reacher for Mike Birch for a boat called 'Formule Tag'.  This boat has had quite a career under a bunch of different names.  We're sure our sail is long gone from her inventory, but she is currently racing around the world under the name Daedalus.

Pensacola Flashback

Every once in awhile a sail from the forgotten past comes into the loft . . . a kind of canvas time capsule.  Two suits of such sails found their way to the loft this winter.

In the sixth or seventh year of a distinguished college career, I lived in Pensacola, Florida, and worked for a local sailloft named Schurr Sails.   Seamstresses recruited from a Canon towel factory stitched the sails together.  A student from the local junior college cut the sails out.  Another person made bags; another cut out insignia and numbers; and I did handwork.    It was a good experience for a sailmaker "wannabe" but very different from the custom work we do here at MSP.

We also did the assembly work for the Smyth Team.  Tornado silver medalist Randy Smyth was designing sails out of his house in Mary Esther near Fort Walton Beach.  Mixed in with all the G-Cat and Corsair sails were several suits of Tornado sails.  It was exciting work to finish sails that were going to be used by Olympians and world champions.

It's striking how much cloth technology has improved in the ten years since I worked at Schurr Sails.  Back then, laminated sailcloth pretty much consisted of taffeta laminated to a layer of mylar as opposed to the film-scrim-film laminates we use today.  Today's fabrics are stronger and last longer than those older fabrics.  Judging from the pink and purple cloth in the F24 main above, you might even say that today's fabrics look better too.

Ancient History

MSP was started in March of 1983 on the third floor of an old wood framed building at 202 Commercial Street in Portland.  Steve Helms and I started the loft with the help of a $20,000 loan from my father.  The loft was dinghy and dirty, but we covered most of the the dirt by spray painting the whole place white with latex primer.  We insulated the place with metal building insulation, covered the floor with new chipboard, which we varnished, and even managed to construct a couple of pits for sewing machines. (Fortunately, the floor below us was vacant - the ground floor was occupied by Harris Oil, a now defunct heating oil supplier owned by the same man who owned the building) 

The building was later torn down to make way for office and residential condos, but a referendum limited the waterfront zone to marine use, so the site remains a parking lot.  All that remains is the building number which graces one of the posts in our present loft at Lower Falls Landing in Yarmouth.