Here you see the small schooner Ladona sailing elegantly into Great Cove as the sun set Sunday evening. She was on a four-night cruise that featured live music, according to her schedule.
She moored overnight and awoke to a cold and windy morning with part sun. Her passengers disembarked and visited the WoodenBoat School campus.
As the wind increased, it started to rain . Ladona reefed and raised sails, weighed anchor, hoisted her jib sails while getting underway, and sailed north into Eggemoggin Reach.:
Ladona (usually pronounced here as “lah-DOE-nah”) is an 83-foot schooner out of Rockland, Maine. She was launched under that name as a racing yacht in 1922 in East Boothbay, Maine, and reportedly took first in her class in the 1933 Bermuda Cup. She still remains one of the fastest windjammers in the Maine fleet.
She reportedly was named after a Civil War gunship on which her original owner’s father had served, but research indicates that her name was misspelled – the Civil War vessel apparently was named Lodona. not Ladona.
Ladona, herself, performed Navy duty as a submarine coastal patrol vessel during World War II. After the War, she apparently trawled for fish out of Stonington, Connecticut, under the name Jane Doré. She was renovated in 1971 as a training vessel and named Nathaniel Bowditch, after the founder of modern sea navigation.
She kept that name when she moved to Maine in the 1980s and became a coastal passenger cruiser. In 2014-2015, she was extensively restored again, given luxury appointments, and rechristened with her original name, Ladona. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on June 26 and 27, 2022.)