Alison Langley
Although Noah Barnes grew up in his family’s Maine windjammer business sailing the schooner STEPHEN TABER, as a young adult he pursued a different career path in New York City. Twenty-three years ago, however, he returned to Maine and to the TABER, whose business has continued to flourish under his command.
[By] the time Ken and Ellen Barnes were ready to retire in the early 2000s, their son, Noah, was living in New York City and working for a public-relations firm that represents tech companies. “I’d been running away from my fate,” Noah told me last summer on a Saturday break between trips in his 68′ LOD schooner, STEPHEN TABER.
Alison Langley
Noah Barnes.
Noah was raised, along with three sisters, in the orbit of the TABER. Launched in 1871, the schooner was built to haul cargo such as wood and bricks up and down the Eastern Seaboard. As the oldest documented sailing vessel in continuous service in the United States (save for a handful of seasons dedicated to restoration) the TABER is a saucy vessel named for a New York–based lawyer who may or may not have been saucy himself. She has been worked and reworked over the years, and settled into the full-time role of passenger vessel in the early 1940s.