Wendameen, a historic schooner, lies berthed at the Maine State Pier on Commercial Street in Portland, Maine. She was the first two-masted auxiliary rigged schooner designed by the noted naval architect John G. Alden in 1912, and she wears that pedigree proudly. Now owned and operated by the Portland Schooner Company, Wendameen sails with Bagheera on public tours of Casco Bay, and was recognized with a listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.
She’s a wooden two-masted auxiliary schooner, 67 feet long with a 51-foot deck and a 17-foot beam, set up with a gaff-headed schooner rig. Below decks you’ll find staterooms trimmed in mahogany, and she’s rated to carry 41 passengers. Alden designed Wendameen in 1912 for businessman Chester Bliss, and she was built at the Adams Shipyard in East Boothbay, Maine as his twenty-first recreational fisherman design—one of the oldest of those designs to survive.
In 1915 Bliss sold her to Erwin C. Uihlein, who sailed her for about 20 years on the Great Lakes, and in 1933 she was purchased by yacht dealer Gerald W. Ford. Notice the varnish and rigging, then follow her lines out to Casco Bay and the pier.