Memories from Katrina van Dusen

Remembering Bronson….

Bronson came to my door in Freeport one summer day in 1988 to see if I wanted to go windsurfing on Back Cove in Portland (one of his serial hobbies, as Chaffee said.) He was working at Bath Iron Works and living in Brunswick and I was on maternity leave at home with baby Matthew. I told Bronson that there was no way I could go with him.

I marveled at how two people, who the year before could have been up to similar activities, were now living in very different worlds. I relished the idea that going windsurfing on Back Cove was really something that I might have been able to do, and that Bronson imagined me ready to join him. Meanwhile I was leaking breast milk, and just trying to manage to make a sandwich for my lunch, while juggling a cute little baby.

Earlier, around 1978, my parents were sailing the Slugger Ann over to Islesford to share the boat with the other side of my family. My dad had loaded the boat with Slugger’s mooring, a large mushroom.  I imagine my parents were reaching along off Bar Harbor, mainsail cleated, enjoying a picnic lunch, when a williwaw blew down from the mountains and swamped them before they could free the mainsheet. With the heavy anchor in the bow, the boat filled with water and started to sink. My parents climbed into the dinghy they were towing and were rescued by a nearby boat.

I was out West that summer, so this is all a story I heard, but I think my Dad commissioned the Orono and Sorrento boys, Jock, Bronson and David Wellman to see if they could find the Slugger, using a compass bearing for the location where she sank. They enlisted Charlie Crothers and the Synia to help out. Miraculously one September day, they found and tried to raise her. They couldn’t get her floating that first day, but they were able to move her over next to one of the Porcupine Islands and secure a line from her to a tree on the island. When they got back to continue the rescue operation several days later, she was gone.

A couple of months later Sturgis Haskins reported to my dad that a boat that looked a lot like Slugger Ann was in a fisherman’s yard in Bar Harbor. We scouted it out. It was Slugger and my dad had to buy her back.

I am probably missing pieces of this story and I can only imagine the conversations the crew of Sorrento boys had as they planned and executed this mission. Any of you can chime in with the rest of the story??? All these years later, the Slugger Ann carries on, and I am very appreciative that she was recovered from the deep.

Thinking way back, I remember how best friends, Howard Wellman and Bronson, when walking back and forth between each other’s houses, resorted to walking (bush whacking?) behind Junior’s house across the street to avoid the ever terrifying Loki, the Hull’s German shepherd.