Here you see GRAYLING gliding into Great Cove on a gray day last week. She usually returns here in the summer; Brooklin was where she was reborn as a gleaming yacht. Prior to that, GRAYLING had led a very tough, dirty life and had been abandoned.
GRAYLING was built in 1915 in East Booth Bay, Maine, as a “double-ender,” which means both her bow and stern are pointed. For five grueling years, she towed seine longboats that netted mackerel and herring and transferred the slithering fish into her hold.
When canned sardines became popular, she was sold to a commercial fishing operation up on Maine’s northeast coast and was demoted to the tedious, non-fishing job of sardine carrier. She’d take loads of writhing sardines from smaller fishing boats at sea and truck them back to a cannery. Back and forth; back and forth.
Then the sardine industry in Maine went bust and GRAYLING languished in the 1980s. By the 1990’s, her deteriorating remains were for sale. The simple version of a complicated story is that she caught the eye of Brooklin’s Maynard Bray, a maritime engineer and marine historian. He and Brooklin boatbuilder and designer Doug Hylan thought that she would make a great yacht for someone who wanted a unique vessel with plenty of character.
They eventually helped find a buyer who would have her lovingly restored and appropriately modified at Hylan’s boatyard in Brooklin. She was relaunched in 1997 as the svelte motorized ketch that you see here, a marine Cinderella.
GRAYLING is almost 65 feet long overall, with only a 12 ½ -foot beam (widest part). She reportedly can sleep up to 11 people in her restored crew forecastle (“fo’c sle”) area. She eventually was resold and now homeports in Noank, Connecticut, at the mouth of the Mystic River.
By the way, as you may know, a grayling is a fascinating, long and slim fish that’s found in cold, freshwater. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on August 22, 2026.)