Sailing a North Sea Pilot Schooner

by James E. Geil newman springs publishing , 2022

Review by Larry Hall, Boston Station, Buzzards Bay Post

Oneof the most celebrated schooner captains of the modern era, James Geil also is a natural storyteller. In Sailing a North Sea Pilot Schooner, he delivers page after thrilling page of ocean adventures, most of them with his Tabor Academy student crew. Recollections of idyllic passages are juxtaposed with those of challenging storms, but ultimately Geil’s memoir is about the value of shared learning and the development of leadership and mutual respect.

Geil was a faculty member in the nautical science department at Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts, for 35 years, captain of the Tabor Boy for 33 years, and creator of the school’s Orientation at Sea program. Sailing a North Sea Pilot Schooner combines stories from his time at sea with more than 100 photographs, technical drawings, and an introduction to celestial navigation.

Geil’s interest in boats was piqued at a young age. He first started steering his grandfather’s handmade wooden crab boat around 1960. Among his recollections is his family’s calamitous voyage delivering an old leaky yawl named Dorothy from the Florida Panhandle to Florida’s east coast in fall 1973. Geil writes of his early commercial fishing ventures in small secondhand craft and his encounters with higher education.

He found his calling mentoring high school sailors at Tabor Academy. He takes his readers aboard Tabor Boy as it sails to Maine, Bermuda, the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, the Panama Canal, and various ports in between. In Maine, Tabor Boy med-moors to a tree under a waterfall in Somes Sound on Mount Desert Island. In Bermuda, the Tabor Boy crew encounters colorful characters. In 2019, Tabor Boy sails to victory over the Spirit of Bermuda in the 2019 Marion to Bermuda Race. Most of Tabor Boy’s visits to Bermuda were stopovers on the way to the Virgin Islands, sometimes for crew changes and replenishment.

Charlotte Amalie and Red Hook in Saint Thomas were the bases of operation for activities that included sail training and exploration within Sir Francis Drake Channel and swimming and snorkeling to observe coral reef ecosystems. The program evolved into an educational scientific endeavor called the REEF Program (Research and Environmental Education Focus), sanctioned by the U.S. Park Service and the U.S. Geologic Survey. The student sailors documented the plight of the elkhorn coral within the Virgin Islands National Park waters off Saint John.

One of Geil’s favorite cruises was the 1993 transit of the Panama Canal, the first time the old steel ship floated in fresh water and ventured into the Pacific Ocean. On board Tabor Boy for the passage were the descendants of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Col. David Gaillard, who led the excavation of the Culebra Cut.

Geil recounts the history of the Dutch North Sea schooner class that includes Tabor Boy, originally deployed as Pilot Schooner No. 2 off the approaches to Amsterdam. He explains how reverting to the pilot schooner’s original sail configuration made Tabor Boy inherently more seaworthy than her much modified sister, which was lost in a storm in 1961. Tabor Boy is seen in early line drawings and photos from 1937 when she served as a training ship in Rotterdam.

You’ll want to put this book on the bookshelf of your cruising boat for crew reading on your next offshore passage. Crew members can open to any page and start reading, but I assure you they will have read every page by the time you make landfall.