The tips of my tamaracks are starting to turn green, the coltsfoot is in bloom, and a phoebe is singing in the brook bed below the kitchen. The sun is out, and if the thermometer goes up another five degrees, I’ll fire up old Helga (my 27-year-old silver BMW roadster) and let her out of the barn for her first run of 2025. In spite of the strong snow shower of last week, it’s probably safe to say that spring appears to be here.

Because of my long love affair with small boats, expressed these days mainly by clicks on social media sites, I get a lot of photos and videos of happy, expectant boat owners about to launch for the summer. They speak of days of scraping, sanding, caulking and painting; the results gleam in the sun as the moment approaches. It’s enough, these days, to join them vicariously, and just remember the delight I once felt at the first lift of a boat — any boat — to the motion of its native medium.

Right in the middle of these reflections, here came another video, of a much larger boat sliding back into the Atlantic Ocean at Rockland, Maine. The excursion schooner American Eagle, after a winter “on the hard” being brought up to snuff for the summer season of cruising, is again in her natural element. Her masts are stepped; her maroon bottom paint, dark against her white hull, peeks just above the surface of her placid berth beside the wharf near the north end of town.

It’s not possible to expect reasonably a scenic environment beside a harbor, and so it is in Rockland. But once across the rough blacktop and up a hill, there sits a world-class clam shack. Claws, I think it’s called, and on summer evenings there’s a line of perhaps 20 people waiting to order at the window, where the cashier (usually an eastern European student here for the holiday) runs your payment and hands you a number placard for your table. You sit at a picnic table. Eating lobsters or clams, the restaurant’s website declares, is nothing you do in a suit and tie. Afterward, the aroma of frying seafood follows you back down to the ship. A quick brush-’em-up in the tiny sink in the cabin, and a deep, sea-cushioned sleep.

My friend Bea and I have been on two cruises on the Eagle, and the prospect of a third is never far from our minds. We’ve been lucky to get the same cabin both times, a double in the after saloon with two other doubles, the crew’s bunks, and a head. Our cabin is about the size of a refrigerator — only one of us at a time can put on their shoes — and features a low-hanging overhead beam that in an incautious moment can put you down for the count. But it’s snug, which is what you want on a cool, foggy morning off the coast of Maine.

The American Eagle, originally Andrew and Rosalie, after the original captain’s children, started life as a schooner out of Gloucester. Her name was changed during the early days of World War II, before Germany declared war on the United States, to show U-boats that she was not Canadian, and thus fair game. The engine was a nod to the need to get fish to market as fast as possible without loading up with ice. After some years as a dragger, she underwent a three-year conversion to a passenger windjammer, as they’re called on the coast.

We show up in Rockland (not an inconsiderable drive from Montpelier) the night before our departure. The captain gives his logistics and safety lecture, and then it’s off to the clam shack. Coffee is ready next morning whenever we wake up. After breakfast, the engine pulls us out of our slip. The sails go up, with our help, and we cruise quietly out of harbor, past the famous Rockland breakwater and light, and out into Penobscot Bay.

It’s a nostalgic experience for me. Over half a century ago I spent several summers rowing and sailing around the bay with students in open 30-foot pulling boats. Old familiar names of islands — Calderwood, Butter, North Haven, Eagle — slide by as the schooner picks up speed in whatever wind is blowing. On sunny days everyone lounges on deck, chatting, painting watercolors or just loving the silence and the ripple of the ship’s bow wave. In foul weather, they retreat to the warm galley forward for coffee and sweet rolls or huddle under the dodger amidships. I generally descend to my cabin with a book or magazine and let the patter of the rain on the deck just above my face lull me into a happy stupor. I remember Huck Finn’s comment about life on the water: “It’s lovely to live on a raft.”

We spend one fair-weather evening going ashore on an island for a lobster bake, ferrying in from the ship in the seine boat, our amateur six-oar performance earning us the title of the Spastic Cockroach. We anchor for the night in coves picked by the captain to shelter us from the wind. The rest of the time, the spruce-crowned islands float by, one after another, like a dream.

You can see what’s happening here: I’m talking myself into another trip.