|Cathy Gregory|
I cruised around Sabbathday Lake last night with my friend on her pontoon boat. We were both fortunate to spend our childhood summers on the lake. Reconnecting with her in the summer is always a magical time.
My early memories of boats on the lake are of rowboats and canoes paddling by. Occasionally a motor boat pulling water skiers or just taking a leisurely drive around the lake was spotted. The Dunlaps’ Chris-Craft is legendary.
On windy days in my teen years, sailboats whizzed by. Bob Hawkes taught many people on our lake how to sail over the years. Mr. Hawkes could park his Hobie Cat at the end of our dock on a windy day easier than I can park a car in the Hannaford’s parking lot. Some years Sunfish and Sailfish sailboats traversed the lake, but Hobie Cats were the King of the Lake!
If you said “kayak” when I was young I would have told you that my history teacher told me the Inuits used them in Alaska. I had never seen one. Look at Sabbathday now; kayaks are ubiquitous. The internet says that paddleboards have been around for centuries. But I saw my first person “walking on water “on Sabbathday only in the past few years.
While Google tells me that pontoon boats were invented in 1952, it took much longer for them to reach Sabbathday here in Maine. Google says pontoon boats are popular for “their versatility, stability, and plush features.” My friend and I are just fans of stepping right off the dock onto the boat.
After floating in the lake in tubes and eating Sam’s Italian Sandwiches in memory of Sam Bennett who summered in Black Cove when we were kids, we took our cruise around the lake. I flipped over a paper plate, and our husbands helped us as I made hash marks tallying the number of pontoon boats on Sabbathday Lake.
Due to the challenges of counting a few moving pontoons on the lake, we could be off by plus or minus two in either direction. But our final tally was 40.
Ed.’s note: We’ve corrected the caption to give Sharon Scannell proper credit for her wonderful photo!
