The sky is frescoed with mare’s tails, pulverized clouds streaking their tops off into an imaginary stratosphere. Across the harbor, the boats stand motionless, but meaningfully, as in all great paintings. The sails of the great schooner dwarfing the other sailboats and dories as an old-time Gloucester tableau unfolds on the canvas. The rocks, the waves, the trees, the birds; they seem to come to life, but it is the great schooner that is at the center of the mind’s eye in the picture. Oh, what it must have been like …
Suddenly, a Fed Ex truck blasts across the sightline of this pristine vision, horn blaring at an impudent darting dog, jolting the scene out of any old-time reverie. It’s not a painting at all. It’s now, it’s live, it’s third millennium Gloucester.
The painting is recreated every day, most days three times, thanks to the living, moving sculpture that is the schooner Thomas E. Lannon. It’s a sight that we often take for granted as we roar through our dashing, digital lifestyles. The sight of old Gloucester on the move, lazily plying the Outer Harbor, ghosting through the fog on a September morning or charging past the breakwater with a bone in her teeth. It’s real life. One of the jewels of Cape Ann.
Some evenings, the Lannon lays-to off Niles Beach, a perfect addition to the old-time silhouette of the city. Some afternoons, she is reaching off the Western Shore, her flags and pennants trailing majestically astern, cocky, untouchable, defying time and tempo.
Her resolute captains, first Tom and now Heath Ellis, never far from the wheel, always with a twinkle in their eye and a clever, cryptic quip on their lip, seem to defy time itself. Both a helix of modern man, battling the modern financial forces that anchor them to the future while becoming the old intrepid rapscallion schooner captain from the past, squeezing the extra ounce of speed out of his headsails to beat the other fishing schooners back home to fetch the best price for his haul.
In fact, that is what has made Tom and Heath so successful: their dream and their reality.
Most of us wouldn’t have had the dream in the first place of recreating an Essex-built fishing schooner to augment the burgeoning tourist economy. Seemed like pie-in-the-sky. But Tom and his wife and business partner Kay, wily veterans of the Essex antique trade, knew where the line of fantasy and reality converged. “They had dream,” as they say in the movies. They shopped that dream from skeptical bank to skeptical bank until they found the loan officer that understood the potential of giving the incoming Gloucester tourist the chance to do what seemed natural: go to the nation’s premiere fishing port and take a ride on an old-time fishing schooner. Seems in retrospect like a pretty straight forward proposition.
Their promotion has been stellar to attract out-of-towner’s, but the Ellises also saw the potency of luring locals onto this ship of dreams. Parties, meetings, conferences, weddings, concerts, birthdays — any excuse to get out on the high and low seas and at a reasonable price. It all made sense. and every day, three times a day, Tom was a living ad for his product. All you had to do was look out in the harbor and there the schooner was. and what a sight it was and is. Part of the beauty of Gloucester Harbor is how much it changes every single day. Nay, every hour with the tide, the weather and the light. The look of the Lannon changes with it — from the haunting, hulking, ghosting primeval — to the brawny, muscular, undaunted, power-of-the-machine-against-the-sea look.
It is Living Sculpture. Living Art. It’s what the ‘60s people called a ”Happening” whenever she sails, whatever the weather. Doesn’t even matter if there’s no wind. You’re part of the painting, even if there’s no air. In fact, every time I’ve been on the Lannon, we’ve been drifting through the postcard that is a Gloucester Harbor sunset. The quiet of the sails, the light, the incredible fellowship that all feel when becalmed is quintessential Lannon.
My favorite image of her through the years is when Tom Ellis would gather all his boat buddies — Jack Alexander, Donnie Steele et al — often at the beginning of the year for a shakedown sail, but always at the end of autumn for a last-chance roaring ride on the back of the beast, the boat charging out of the harbor, literally hell bent on stretching every last chord, every last fiber out to its full performance limit — kind of a kill or be killed attitude. Spray shooting up over her bow, pounding through the chop, this living sculpture is no mere museum piece bent to the domestication of the tourist. After 27 years, it is afraid of neither man nor beast, not even of time itself — as if the Lannon could live forever.
The city of Gloucester owes Tom, Kay and Heath a lot. For the incredible dream of financing and building this magnificent machine; for creating a new category of Gloucester business by spawning a fleet of other day-trip schooners, Ardelle, Isabella and Adventure; but mostly for the inclination, imagination and skills to keep the Thomas E. Lannon plying the ways day after day inside the living sculpture that is our harbor. They give hope to the unmet possibilities of our dreams. She is a Cape Ann jewel.
Gloucester resident Gordon Baird is an actor and musician, co-founder of Musician Magazine and producer of “The Chicken Shack” community access TV show.