Captain Jim Sharp isn’t averse to risk. Instead he seems to thrive on it. He has bought old schooners and then brought them back to life as paying windjammers. He helped rescue the Arctic exploration schooner Bowdoin; he gave the schooner Adventure to her homeport of Gloucester.
Over the years, this feisty waterfront entrepreneur has bought tugboats and a Camden wharf. He once turned a steam tug into a restaurant. Now he has purchased the old Snow shipyard in Rockland’s South End and created a museum there. The yard built scores of sailing and other vessels in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the Snow mansion was most recently part of MBNA’s Rockland complex, until that huge credit card bank was acquired by Bank of America.
Years ago an old steam tug that Sharp had sold sank, and now he is hoping that his development, Sharp’s Point South, won’t meet a similar fate. He is proud of his new Sail, Power & Steam Museum, and glad to have a few tenants in other buildings that formerly housed the Outward Bound training and adventure programs.
But, “The day I signed the paper on this, the economy crashed. I’m so worried. There are empty storefronts all over town,” he said. The complex he bought for what he calls a bargain is bleeding him now, and he said he is practically giving away space just to fill it.
At 76, and with one leg deteriorating from the polio he suffered at age 4, Sharp is still going strong or as he puts it, “I flunked retirement.” Even as he says “worried” you sense that he really isn’t that anxious. Slim, alert and energetic, Sharp admits that, “I’ve been successful, I’ve been lucky. I’ve managed to do what I love to do, and now I’m spending my kids’ inheritance. Might as well.”
This is a man who took his third wife, Meg, and traveled thousands of miles on inland waterways with a 47-foot riverboat. “I’m too old to make any money,” he joked.
Already he has small boats, nautical instruments, ship models, tools and fishing gear on display, some of it from the Snow shipyard, some of it depicting the sail-powered lime trade that built the city of Rockland. Sharp’s Point also hosts a children’s museum, a restaurant, office space, docking space and Sharp’s 1914 flagship motor vessel, the Rekord.
It’s been 42 years since Sharp rescued the Bowdoin, a Boothbay Harbor-built vessel that was already being dismantled at Old Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut when he heard about it.
The big engine had been removed from the vessel and placed on a beach, where sand blew into it. The marine hardware had been removed from the schooner. But Sharp put it back together and, in 1969, managed to sail the Bowdoin to 95-year-old Admiral Donald MacMillan’s Provincetown home so the explorer could see her one more time. The hardy schooner was fogbound but it lifted just in time and there was the Admiral, ramrod straight. He sat on the dock beside his old schooner and told stories, Sharp said.
That sort of pluck is also a Sharp trait. Jim Sharp grew up west of Philadelphia, and at first followed his father, who died when Jim was 19, into the world of finance. After nine years of that, Sharp tried the charter business with the 44-foot yawl Malabar in the Bahamas.
In the 1960s he got a taste of Maine working with the tired old schooners, Mattie and Mercantile in Camden, and in 1964 he bought the Adventure “for a song,” restoring this 1926 beauty and sailing it until 1988. “I re-rigged her, gutted her. The Adventure is my first born,” he said. A nonprofit group in Gloucester is now again rebuilding this fast and graceful schooner, which fished under sail and later an engine until 1953, and apparently landed more fish than any other Grand Banks fishing schooner.
One of his more unusual experiences occurred in the 1970s when the vessel became the We’re Here for a film version of Rudyard Kipling’s Captain’s Courageous. Sharp was underwhelmed by the movie but continually impressed by his schooner’s performance.
In his 2007 autobiography, With Reckless Abandon, he writes about setting sail in Camden: “What a thrill to call out the gang of crew and passengers to turn to and heave on our halyards and hoist that vast mainsail. After a long, cold winter of hard work, the massive power of that mainsail in a fresh breeze of wind would feel like a religious experience…she would heel over, wetting a couple of strakes on the leeward side, and my gaze would roam up and down the enormous mainsail as it took shape with the press of a fresh morning breeze.”
“Sailing the Adventure,” he wrote, “was to me like sailing a living museum.”
For more information about the new museum, go to: www.sharpspointsouth.com