At 8 a.m., the ship's bell sounds eight times, calling people to breakfast. Below, the scene resembles a Matisse still life. Yellow bowls filled with cantaloupe crescents and small pots of butter decorated with single catmint blossoms have been laid out amid vases of flowers on knotty pine tables. Plain white platters laden with rosy rashers of bacon and blueberry pancakes dusted with confectioner's sugar arrive in swift succession.
In the galley, the J. & E. Riggin's head cook, Anne Mahle, eyes the pancakes cooking on the griddle of an old wood-fired stove. As bubbles pop in the circles of batter, she neatly slides a spatula under each and flips it in one rapid, precise motion. The flapjacks cook until the other sides are golden brown.
Mahle slips pans of brown bread into the oven, adjusts the damper, and greets passengers.
''I would like to welcome you to the galley just as if you were guests in my home," she tells the dozen or so men and women sitting on stools and red-cushioned seats. She tells them to keep the same coffee mug during their six-day sail. ''You are in charge of it to wash, to have, and to hold, and to hang when you are not using it."
For more than a decade, Mahle has fed and seen to the comfort of guests and crew aboard windjammers plying the Maine coast. As a twentysomething fresh out of college, she got her start as a mess cook on the schooner Stephen Taber and continued sharpening her culinary skills on the three-masted Victory Chimes. Seven years ago, Mahle and her husband, Jon Finger, acquired the J. & E. Riggin and have worked ever since taking people ''gunkholing," or poking about among the islands and in the myriad inlets and coves of Maine's Penobscot Bay.
The J. & E. Riggin is among more than a dozen schooners in Maine's windjammer fleet. The tall ships take people for three- to six-day sails late May through mid-October. Passengers help furl the sails, take a turn at the wheel, and help with other functions on deck. The experience gives them a taste of what life was like aboard these ships a century ago.
