By Connie Sage Conner – Photography by Robert F. Bukaty
In a perfect early summer morning with barely a ripple in the water and a bluebird sky overhead, Herb Weiss deftly backed Ancient Mariners, his 39-foot American Tug, dockside at the Dolphin Marina in Harpswell, Maine.
Earlier, the boat had left DiMillo’s Marina in Portland, skirting between islands in Casco Bay. Herb was at the helm and his wife, Ruth, stood next to him monitoring the course with an iPad. That’s not such a big deal for most boaters. But Herb will be 105 on October 4; Ruth is 97. They not only boat alone, they bought an even bigger boat over the summer.
Ruth, barefoot and tanned, tossed lines to dockhands who eagerly waited to welcome the couple. The Weisses, both grinning, were excited to be back at one of their favorite summer spots. After years of cruising along the coast of Maine, they’re local celebrities. “We get to see old friends everywhere,” said Ruth. “Actually, that’s a significant part of cruising for me.”
A photographer snapped photos as the couple lowered the dinghy from the stern.
“Everywhere we go they bow down to us,” teased Herb, a master of jokes and one-liners.
“Did you hear about the woman who walked down a ramp at low tide and complained about how steep it was?” he quipped to onlookers. “She walked back up at high tide and said, ‘I’m so glad you fixed it!’”
The dockhands chuckled (or groaned). “I’ll be back in the morning with blueberry muffins and coffee,” shouted marina hand Tyler Nadeau, as he and other crew members headed back to work. For the Weisses, it was time for lunch and a nap.
How does a couple, whose combined age is over 200 years, keep on boating? “We plan everything carefully and we just do it,” said Ruth. In earlier years, they hiked and climbed mountains. “You’re huffing and puffing the last few yards. It’s the same thing with boating.”
“We never stayed at docks when we were younger,” she continued. “We’d pick up a mooring or drop the hook. We were being frugal, maybe too frugal. We started going to docks when we bought the powerboat. That’s when Herb was 95.”
Their favorite places to cruise these days are Portland and Harpswell in Casco Bay, and Rockland, Camden, and Belfast in Penobscot Bay. “Marinas put us near the ramp so Herb doesn’t have to walk on shaky docks,” Ruth said. “If we need an emergency medical technician, it’s faster if you’re on the mainland. We haven’t needed one, but it was a concession to our kids who were worried about us.”
How It All Began
Growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Herb liked gadgetry. As a teenager, he became a ham radio operator and built a primitive television set at the same time NBC was trying to get its first signal on the air. His shop teacher was so impressed by Herb’s genius that he contacted MIT, which invited Herb to attend the college.
Herb got into sailing after enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. “The most important thing I did (at MIT) was learn to sail,” he said, with a smile. He earned a degree in electrical engineering in 1940 and eventually gained a résumé as long as his arm, the envy of anyone in the field of radar and national defense systems. Ruth graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1951.
He spent the bulk of his career developing radar when there was none in the United States. He joined the Radiation Lab at MIT, which was established to support the war effort during World War II, designing radars for ships and aircraft. In 1942, Herb went to England and installed radar in planes with a novel navigation system that he and a team had designed for the Royal Air Force. He later spent three years at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, laboratory improving instruments for the A-bomb. After seeing the need for a continental defense network against the Soviet missile threat, he returned to MIT to build it. If not for Herb, there also likely would be no MIT Haystack Observatory, a pioneering radio science and research facility.
The Call of the Sea
It doesn’t matter how many birthdays pile up, cruising is in the Weisses’ blood. They started seriously boating in the 1970s when they went in on a 37-foot wooden Chesapeake Bay, an Ericson look-alike racing boat that “leaked top and bottom.” They eventually sold it and purchased a Tartan 37. Then came Windpower, a 42-foot Hallberg-Rassy ketch, followed by the first Ancient Mariners.
Over the last half-century, they’ve sailed or motored at least 40,000 miles in Western European waters and the Mediterranean as far as Turkey, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Israel. (Turkey was their favorite.) They’ve crossed the Atlantic and visited ports in Canada, New England, cruised the Intracoastal Waterway, and ventured down to Bermuda, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and as far as Central and South America.
The couple’s minds remain razor sharp. On most days at 5 p.m., Ruth and Herb fill glasses with wine from a box. He is short and bald and there’s always a smile on his moon-shaped face and a twinkle in his eye. When he wants to tune out the world, he said he takes out his hearing aids. She is short, slender, and limber, with short-cropped hair, tortoise-rimmed glasses, and hearing aids. When not in the galley or bridge, you might find her on her knees cleaning the boat.
Ruth makes it clear Herb is the more accomplished sailor. “I am good at many things,” she said, “planning, organizing, cooking, medical care, navigating — including celestial. The most technical thing I ever did was get my ham radio license. But the only boat I have ever taken out alone is a dinghy.”
“For long trips offshore, often with no other boats around, another level of competence is needed,” she continued. “Changes in weather and sea conditions, or a sudden malfunction, require someone who can think quickly and come up with a solution. On a boat, there’s always a time when there’s a crisis. I shriek. Herb smiles and says, ‘It’s a challenge.’ We can be in the middle of the Atlantic with all hell breaking loose and Herb is in there fixing everything.”
Casting Off
When their youngest son was a toddler, the Weisses chartered a 30-foot wooden sloop and sailed from Boston to Nantucket. In 1972, they bought a Tartan 37, named Talaria, for weekend cruising. “Since Talaria was very tender, when the wind was 12 knots, we reefed the main. We dropped our own mooring in Marion (Massachusetts) and for the first time ventured to Maine,” said Ruth. Six years later, they took Talaria to the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean.
In 1982, just shy of Herb’s 65th birthday, they flew to Sweden and bought Windpower. “For the next five years we were full-time cruisers in Western Europe and the Caribbean,” she said. “In those days the cruising community was small and friendly. Marinas were few, except in France. Cruising guides, especially in English, were almost nonexistent. We would see a breakwater, assume it was a harbor, tie up at the town dock with the locals, and become part of the community for as long as we liked.”
One of their few harrowing boating experiences was in the spring of 1978. Ruth was at the helm of Talaria heading to the Bahamas from the Turks and Caicos in a 20-knot easterly. “I tacked and the fitting broke at the top of the mast. The sails and rigging were in the water,” Ruth recalled. “I did the wrong thing and started the engine and the lines got tangled in the propeller.” Herb dropped three anchors, because they were a few hundred yards upwind of a rocky coast with 10-foot seas. With no sails or functioning engine, Herb put out a distress call. Using the ham radio, he eventually was able to reach an amateur ham radio operator in Montana who contacted the Miami Coast Guard. The Coast Guard responded via patched radio messages that the closest available help was in Florida or Puerto Rico, hundreds of miles away. In ham radio relays back to the Coast Guard, Herb said a fellow sailor they had met several weeks earlier in Turks and Caicos was a scuba diver and had a plane, and if the Coast Guard could track him down, he might be able to dive off Talaria to untangle the lines. “He clearly was a drug lord,” added Ruth.
The Coast Guard found the man that night in a bar. He flew out the next day and landed on a dirt road on nearby Acklins Island where he found a minister with a small boat who took him out to Talaria. But the man couldn’t dive under the boat because the seas were too rough. “Your only choice is to jump into the water and we’ll pick you up, but then your boat is gone,” he said. Ruth replied that they could not leave the boat because it wasn’t insured. Herb then took a new approach, running the engine, lines still wrapped around the prop, forward and back. The tactic worked, and they followed the pilot and preacher to a safe cove where, “we opened a bottle of scotch,” said Ruth.
The Ancient Mariners
When Herb was 85, he and Ruth began sailing only in the summers. A decade later they bought the first Ancient Mariners. “Cruising on a powerboat isn’t too thrilling,” said Ruth, “but the many friends we’ve made along the way still make it a wonderful life.”
Ancient Mariners and its dinghy, Rime, are a nod to English poet Samuel Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Friends delivered their newest boat, a 2006 American Tug 395, from Virginia to Maine over the summer of 2022. The Weisses christened her Ancient Mariners II, for “two old boaters.”
Herb said he really wanted a new boat but was told that would take three years and he “didn’t want to wait that long.”
The bigger boat is like a luxury yacht, with two large staterooms, two full-sized bathrooms with showers, and teak handrails for each of the four sets of stairs, all cushioned with thick carpet. The pilothouse has been outfitted with new electronics and the Stidd captain’s chair, installed by the previous owner, has soft, ivory-colored leather.
It’s taken some time for the couple to get used to Ancient Mariners II, but “now it’s home,” said Ruth. Herb steers the boat and Ruth charts their course. Both have given up their driver’s licenses but operating the boat is less of a problem because there’s plenty of room in the ocean and the bays.
One morning, a friend drove Ruth to Walmart in Brunswick, Maine. She dashed from one end of the store to the other, stocking up on toilet paper, a casserole dish, and fresh and packaged food. Herb was waiting at the stern of the boat as Ruth handed him heavy bags.
They’ve been blessed with good health—Herb has a pacemaker and Ruth recently had cornea transplants—and will continue boating as long as they can. “I’m 104 and Ruth is 97,” said Herb. “You add the two together and that’s a pretty old crew.”