Boat Magic | Recipes from the J&E Riggin

The waters of Owls Head Bay are still and silent in the last hour before dawn. I hear a door latch quickly lifted and closed and look out my porthole to a blurry darkness. It’s 4:30, an uncommon hour for me but a typical start when you’re cooking for 24 guests and six crew members on a Maine windjammer. I can hear that my host, co-captain Anne Mahle, is already on her way to the galley to light the stove, so I splash water on my face and creep up the companionway and across the deck.¶Onshore, a rooster crows, and in the dull blue light I can make out the silhouette of Monroe Island, one of the largest undeveloped islands in midcoast Maine. Down in the galley, Anne—she goes by Annie—is humming quietly as she washes her hands and fills a pitcher of water. Just a few feet from where she stands, behind a curtain on the port side, a young apprentice named Jasper is sound asleep in his bunk. He won’t wake until 6:15, when Annie, marveling at the snoozing powers of teenage boys, will rouse him. But for now the morning is hers, a rare bit of solitude.

This is how the day begins aboard the J&E Riggin, with passengers asleep in their cabins and Annie getting her systems into gear. Only the lobstermen loading their bait bags over at the Owls Head Lobster Co. are up to share this watch. The Riggin—one of 13 windjammers that sail out of Rockland and Camden—is a 120-foot, two-masted schooner first built in 1927 as an oyster dredger for Charles Riggin, who named the boat after his sons, Jacob and Edward. Converted for passenger sail in 1977, it’s now a National Historic Landmark that takes passengers on three-to-seven-day sails from May to October. Annie and her husband and co-captain, Jon Finger, took custody in 1998, when she was pregnant with their first daughter, Chlöe. “A boat and a baby,” Annie says. “Go big or go home.”

The first task of the day: boil water for coffee, a 45-minute project when you’re cooking on a wood-burning stove. There’s no food processor here, no stand mixer, no microwave. The limited electrical supply on the boat comes from a rechargeable battery system, which powers navigation equipment, cabin lights, and ice chests. But this simplicity is very much by design, and the mild smoky scent that permeates the food is Annie’s special spice. “I never feel we have a summer of lack and then go back to luxury,” she says. “Not even a little bit.”

She puts a blue enamel kettle under the faucet and opens the tap, which lets water flow down from storage barrels up on the deck. She adds a few logs to the stove’s firebox, then lights some of yesterday’s leftover cardboard and puts it in. The Crawford stove—Annie calls her “Lucy”—is slow to catch today, even though there’s enough wind to create a strong draft. “I’ll be feeding this box all day,” she says. “To get water boiling in time, I’m really cranking it.”

The quiet is periodically broken by lobster boats tearing out of the harbor as they race to their traps, but it still allows a borderline introvert to recharge for the very social, close-quartered day ahead. “Right now, the phone’s not ringing. Everyone’s sleeping,” Annie says. “Once I get this moment, I can do anything.” Which is why Jasper gets to sleep in instead of her.

By 5:40, the water is boiling audibly. She’s now joined by Mark “Chives” Godfrey, the mess mate, who works the same job Annie had back in 1989 when, fresh out of college, she first met Jon aboard the Stephen Taber, another Rockland schooner. Annie and Chives roll through the day’s menu, take stock of the remaining supplies, and decide on a breakfast menu of frittatas, French toast, home fries, and pecan sticky buns. Chives starts chopping vegetables while Annie sifts flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt for the dough. Into the skillet go some onions and peppers, then mushrooms, eggs, and goat cheese. To control the cooktop’s temperature, which fluctuates with the fire, Annie rotates her skillets, moving them closer to or farther from hot spots. To prevent the sticky buns from burning in the oven, she tents them with foil. She didn’t learn any of these techniques working in restaurants, or at the Culinary Institute of America, where she studied baking, or on the Caribbean yachts she and Jon worked aboard before buying the Riggin. Operating this stove is a complex choreography, a relationship built on compromise over 20 years.

About a quarter of the produce served on the boat comes from the garden that Annie cultivates at her house in Rockland. Friends and neighbors help with the garden when she’s on the boat, and in fall and winter, she cans produce and makes jams. Whatever she can’t grow, she buys mostly from a farm that delivers right to the dock. It’s all part of Annie and Jon’s larger mission to run a carbon-neutral operation, to leave every island they visit untouched by their arrival, to source locally and live their lives by the wind and tide.

By 7:45 all the guests are up, circling the deck with mugs of coffee as they wait for the 8 a.m. breakfast bell. “I’m not even a breakfast eater,” marvels Tim Stilwell, a passenger from Bradenton, Florida.  “But when 8 rolls around, I’m eating. And I think I’m full, but then lunch rolls around and I can’t resist.”

Between meals, when the boat isn’t docked at a port or an island, guests talk, read, nap, and knit. They knit themselves together, too, sharing bottles of wine, washing each other’s dishes after meals (the only labor expected of them, though many pitch in with sail raising and anchor dropping). “It’s boat magic,” says Rhea Butler, a Mainer who has now cruised on the Riggin five times. “By the time you leave, you know each other so well.”

On our last night, after a meal of stuffed Cornish game hens, zucchini-eggplant gratin, and mini lime pies in jars, the crew washes the pots and pans, takes down the flags, and brings out kerosene lanterns. Daylight fades from yellow to orange to a soft purple-blue, and Jon and Annie announce that Music Night has begun. They take a seat above the companionway with their daughters, Chlöe and Ella, and when they launch into a string of chanteys, we all join in on the chorus. Then Chives brings out his guitar to accompany Chlöe and Ella on Hozier’s “Cherry Wine” in two-part harmony, and suddenly we have become the von Trapps of Penobscot Bay, or, rather, we’re in their care. The wind has died down and the air is warm again. Someone calls out, “Let’s have a contest of who doesn’t want to go home more!”

Later that night, I step out to take one last look at the bay and see a single lantern, the anchor light, gently swaying in the rigging. The water is so still, I can see the stars reflecting back at me. Captain Jon is walking the deck, doing a final check before retiring, and I ask, “Are those really stars? I’ve never seen the ocean so still.” “Yes,” he says, “but you might also be seeing this.” He pulls a long pole off the wall and waves it in the water; thousands of bioluminescent plankton light up in its wake. A phosphorescent sea, a magical place.

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The following recipes will give you a taste of life aboard the J&E Riggin. Several come from Anne Mahle’s books At Home at Sea and Sugar & Salt. To learn more about her family and their boat, go to mainewindjammer.com.

RECIPES:
Pecan Sticky Buns
Cornish Game Hens with Smoked Shrimp and Brandy Stuffing
Zucchini Gratin
Lime Pie Jars