Celebrating 25 years of success and growth, the Maritime Heritage Alliance is hosting an open house on August 25-26 and inviting the community to share in the festivities.
The event will offer deck tours of the schooner Madeline and the sloop Welcome as well as historical displays featuring re-enactors from around Michigan. A free sail will be available each evening to the first 20 visitors.
From humble beginnings by few hard-core wooden boat lovers to a fleet of ships, dedicated moorage and work space plus more than 500 members - approximately half active volunteers - the alliance has come a long way.
"It's very neat in our lifetime that something this cool would happen,” said Rich Brauer, president of the organization, referring to harbor space on M-22 in Elmwood at Traverse City Light & Power's coal dock.
Brauer was also praising the confluence of events that brought the Maritime Heritage Alliance, The Watershed Center, the Great Lakes Children's Museum and Traverse Area Community Sailing to share land on the other side of M-22. Under the umbrella of the Grand Traverse Bay Alliance, these organizations have remodeled or are still settling into buildings on the property. Michael and Rhea Dow of Charlevoix donated the seven acres of prime commercial real estate in Greilickville in 2006.
Rewind 25 years to 1982 and a handful of wooden boat enthusiasts who decided to build a Mackinaw boat, the Gracie L, never imagining that they were beginning a multidecade mission. Working in space across from the wolves' den at the former Clinch Park Zoo, volunteers crafted a copy of a boat that plied the Straits of Mackinac 150 years ago.
"Just three of us worked on it,” recalled Bob Cole, co-founder of the alliance. "We started it in early summer of 1983 and launched it in November.”
Next up was a reconstruction of the 92-foot, twin-masted schooner Madeline, which members started in 1985 and completed five years later thanks to 165 volunteers. Unable to find documentation of what the actual schooner looked like, Maritime Heritage Alliance members conjectured plans from a photo of a similar ship.
"It was put together from evidence that they could find of what boats would be like,” said Laura Quackenbush, a board member of the alliance, the organization's historian and administrator and crew trainer for the Madeline.
The Madeline sails the Great Lakes every season thanks to about 125 volunteer crew members who take rotating shifts of nine at a time.
The sloop Welcome, a replica of a Mackinaw vessel that sailed the Great Lakes during the Revolutionary War era, rounds out the larger vessels in the Maritime Heritage Alliance's roster. More than 140 volunteers logged 50,000 hours rebuilding the 1970s era ship, which had been built as part of the nation's bicentennial celebrations.
The Maritime Heritage Alliance's weekend-long open house will be held from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 25, and Sunday, August 26, at the West Bayshore Drive Harbor (the Traverse City Light & Power coal docks on M-22.) For more information, call Kelly Curtis at 946-2647.