The 60-foot Balmy Days was built in 1932 and launched on the Kennebec River’s Swan Island.

Builder/owner/captain Charlie Wade immediately started the boat on a Boothbay Harbor-Monhegan run, which continued the boat’s whole career here.

Most of our Balmy views show the boat docked at Simpson’s, later Ned’s Garage/wharf, at the passenger boat landing on Wharf Street. 1930s looks included a long, low cabin forward with room for three rows of seats at the bow. A canopy in back sheltered the aft open cockpit. Later the aft cockpit and helm were protected with a cabin, and both aft and forward cabin tops had seats on them. The trips ran from late June to early September and normally took an hour and 45 minutes with the twin engines.

According to Wade’s son Charles “Chuck” Wade Jr., Wade was a hard, constant worker. In the summer he’d sleep aboard the Balmy as night watchman. If he came home after the Monhegan run, and later the Indian Island run, he’d hop right on a tractor at the Adams Pond Road house and keep working in the fields – still in his captain’s outfit.

Florida and winter work

In the 1930s and some 1940s winters, Wade took the boat to Florida. His wife, Jean Calhoun Wade, wrote a lighthearted log of a 1936 voyage to Honduras from Key West lasting from January to March and back to Maine in April. Brother Elmer Wade wrote up a 1938 Florida canal voyage, complete with Sidney and Madelyn Mudge of Boothbay and a cat that enjoyed sitting on the rail to watch the water. It was the third trip in search of winter business for the boat, which ended successfully.

Chuck Wade (born 1937) has Florida memories that include being harnessed to the mast as a toddler with just enough slack to get to the rail, and a washing machine lashed to the mast for him to splash around in. A circa 1990 article on the boat mentioned Wade tried treasure hunting for Spanish galleons; he found one near Key West, but loaded with granite. He did salvage and sell the stone, paying his expenses with the proceeds.

Because Wade only ran the boat seasonally, he needed to augment his income. He’d met Jean Wade on a Balmy expedition to New Brunswick to bring back Christmas trees. Wade also got work towing other vessels, such as coal barges up the Penobscot and the Kennebec, and he lobstered.

According to Chuck Wade, his father converted the Balmy to a tug for the winter by stripping out all the seating on deck and installing a custom towing bit in the aft cabin that was fastened down into the hull.

Another job was woodcutting. One summer around 1938, Bob Goodspeed of Trevett (born 1928) cut for Wade in Edgecomb. Bob Goodspeed, still a kid, sawed with a friend initially; when he was put on a two-man saw with one of the seasoned adult French-Canadian crew, he couldn’t keep up. The Canadian told Wade, “He’s riding the saw…” and that was the end of that.

War, woodcutting and Indian Island

In 1941, boats such as the Balmy Days and the Linekin were held as ferries by the armed forces and did not run their regular schedules. Nor did they again until July 1945. While under government control, the Balmy towed targets for the Navy in Massachusetts Bay and carried supplies to defense installations on coastal islands.

          In the late 1950s, Wade asked Goodspeed and Dick Tibbetts, Wade’s mate on the Balmy for many years, to take Wade’s big dump truck to the Kennebec River’s Swan Island and bring back a load of birch bolts (8-foot felled tree sections). The birch was near the old farmhouse site where the Balmy was built and the Wade family came from.

The idea was to drive across the river while it was iced over. Going over was fine, but coming back in the heavily-laden truck, the ice started rippling in waves out ahead of them. Goodspeed gunned the engine full speed ahead. “I’m opening the door and putting one foot on the running board. If she starts to go through, I’m jumping!” he said.

“Me too!” Tibbetts said.

They made it across the ice.

Goodspeed doesn’t know why Wade wanted the birch, which he delivered to Wade’s Boothbay house. But the timing, late 1950s, makes me think he might have wanted it to build his new lobster bake business on Indian (also Reed’s, also Ocean) Island at Little River.

People came for both the spectacular views and lobster bakes on board the Balmy or by car over a causeway Wade built with his Caterpiller. Carpenter Paul Abbott built the restaurant building.

In 1960 a lobster dinner with clams, corn, chips and coffee was $2.50. I remember how jammed that restaurant was for dinner when the tour boat Argo went aground off South Bristol’s Inner Heron Island in 1975.

Towing to the Mason Station

In 1967 Goodspeed started working as engineer for Eliot Winslow in the towboat/tug business. Eliot had the contract for towing tankers to the Mason Station with the Argo, but she wasn’t enough; four boats were needed.

Eliot would get on the tanker at the mouth of the Sheepscot, pilot it up the river as far as McCarty’s Flats off Westport and upper Barters Island, then anchor. When conditions were good, he’d call for Mace Carter’s towboat, Wade’s Balmy, and Sample’s Jane. The long towline would be picked up first by Carter, second by Wade and third by Jane. The Argo would be on the quarter, going alongside the tanker until it need a bow push.

The foreign tankers were old and unreliable. When the route was taken by Texaco with its big, well-maintained tankers, Goodspeed saw a Texaco crewman taking movies of, as he said, “the strange menagerie of towboats” and knew that was the beginning of the end of the five-boat parade to the Mason Station. Winslow had to get a big tug, which he did, the 70-year-old Alice.

Wade’s health started to fail around 1970; Earl Walker of Southport served as captain for one summer, then Wade came back but not for long. After 40 years in the tour boat and towing business, Wade retired in 1972, selling the Balmy to local tour boat Capt. Bob Fish. Fish continued running the boat to Monhegan. Wade, a well-beloved local figure both here and on Monhegan, died two years later.

In 1981 Bob Campbell, who’d worked for Fish as a young man, retired from electrical engineering, came back home, and bought the Balmy. Campbell was a natural captain with his long history of working on local passenger boats and being involved with the Power Squadron, teaching navigation and speaking at boating events.

In 1988 Campbell and his son Bill Campbell built the new Balmy Days II. A year later, Aug. 2, 1989, they sold the old Balmy to Boyd Guild who eventually took her to Castine as a tour boat.

This legendary boat, identified with the region for almost 60 years, is said to still be afloat under in Cos Cob, Conn., under the name Cayah Rumrunner.

A future article will cover her engine stories. I thank Diane Campbell Saunders of Balmy Days Cruises, Dave Tew, Bob Goodspeed and Chuck Wade for their help with these articles.