At age four, Molly Eddy walked to the beach watch an incoming hurricane. As the wind blew and walls of water were forced high onto the beach, the intensity of that storm, and the ocean’s response, spoke to her soul. Down to the sea she went, falling in love with it.

Today, Molly is 29.  She has taught seamanship college students, crossed oceans on yachts, and worked on the ferries of Penobscot Bay — the Margaret Chase Smith, Capt. Frank Thompson and Capt. Charles Philbrook. This summer and fall, she is dock master at Journey’s End in Rockland, managing the annual tide of yachts to the Maine coast. 

She has worked her way up from her 100-ton ocean master’s license, to a 500-ton mate’s ticket, and currently holds 1,600-ton ocean master’s license, as well as holding a bachelor’s degree in small vessel operations from Maine Maritime Academy, in Castine.

She could, if she chose to, work at the helm of cargo vessels and oil tankers. Not that she wants to, despite the lucrative income.

“I’m not interested in boring,” she says, succinctly.

On those jobs, moving cargo and oil through the high seas on three-month stints, work is managed from superstructures high above the water. The shipping lanes are linear, across vast open ocean, from one major port to another.

“You get paid because there’s a lot of risk and because you are really bored, away from your friends and family,” said Molly.

She and her husband, Brian Beggarly, have a two year-old son, Avery, and she decided early on not to miss out on his early years. Lifting his nodding body from the car seat, she trundled him inside her Camden home before returning to the picnic table to talk about how she intends to stay on the water, have a family and earn money. These are not light decisions to make when you are young and live in Maine, where working on the ocean is rarely accompanied by a liberal salary. It is a lifestyle choice, and Molly and Brian have settled on the edge of Penobscot Bay, doing what they love. She, on the water. He, in the kitchen.

They just bought the popular Boynton-McKay restaurant, in Camden, and Brian is running that enterprise. In the former apothecary, Molly helped renovate the kitchen and is gradually restoring the century-old bird’s eye maple cabinetry, which was built in 1893 by the Camden Shipbuilding Company. She likes the behind-the-scenes work at the restaurant, not having the temperament, she grins, to deal with multi-syllable lattes on a daily basis.

But the work on dock at Journey’s End, she likes. 

“I need to be working on the water,” she said. “The nice thing about Journey’s End is that I can be on the water and be at home at night. I get to drive small boats and use a lot of my skills, and for right now, it is the right job.”

Moreover, Molly is showing the world that women are able to follow their passion, and make a living. She credits her waterfront teachers at MMA — Dana Willis, Chris Grindle, and Mike Allison, to name a few — for instilling confidence in her abilities, just as she acknowledges Taylor Allen, owner of Rockport Marine, for encouraging her to be on the water, “to go do it.”

“And they support you,” she said.

The maritime industry in all its incarnations, remains male-dominated, from the yachting world to cargo transport to naval defense; yet; MMA offered her a reliable entry to refine her passion.

“I have some friends who have small kids, and when one found out I was a captain his jaw dropped,” she said. Others have young girls who wonder why Molly is not into makeup and hair.

“I want to take them out sailing and say, look, you can do this,” she said.” Women and men can do whatever it is that they want.”

She also learned this partially from her grandmother Mary Eddy, as well, who, at age 11, sailed her skiff up the Penobscot River from Winterport to Bangor.

You can see that Molly is captain material. She moves quietly and deliberately on the docks, and the sailors there hold high regard for her. She does not mince words and her texts are precise — no emotes, exclamation points, superfluous language. But this does not belie a warmth and determination when she talks. Her eyes light up when she describes being on the ocean, or about living in Maine, whether that be Sedgwick, South Thomaston or Camden.

“I love the people,” she said, eying her chickens that peck at the grass of her yard, near Megunticook Lake. ”Especially in the Midcoast I love the mix of ‘let’s go have a PBR and go four-wheeling’ and then the art and culture we have here.”

She’s comfortable sliding from one world to the other, from the yachting scene of ascots, sports coats and women in white pants (it’s still very much the waspish 1970s out there), to the docks where the lobstermen are unloading their lobster, ribbing each other about the day’s bug catch.

Molly went to Camden Hills Regional High School, and in 2004, she realized she had enough credits to graduate in January, instead of June. Her mother and grandmother urged her to get out of Dodge, bribing her with a sailing course. She agreed, heading to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean aboard the Spirit of Massachusetts. That came to an abrupt halt, however, after she sliced her foot open on some corrugated steel on the island Culebra. 

She returned to Camden: “in February, and spent the rest of winter figuring out what to do. In the fall, I sailed south with Bonnie and Earl McKenzie, on the Bonnie Lynn,” she said. 

Before long, she was across the Atlantic, and then back in the Caribbean. It wasn’t always easy, and she learned just how sexist the yachting world can be. So, she enrolled at Maine Maritime Academy to get the skills she needed to be taken seriously.

“The real gem of that program was the hands-on learning,” she said. “I was able to get out on the water and drive different kinds of boats, build a skiff, take apart an engine, and work on my navigation skills.”

Through it all, came the call of the ocean.

“I like the simplicity of being out at sea, and knowing exactly what I have control over and what I don’t have control over,” she said. “I know how to read wind and water really well, and I know I have no control over it. Life on land is more complicated.”

She intends to return someday soon to the water and continue teaching others the art of seamanship. It is an important discipline, one that is in jeopardy of being lost as fewer people move about on the water in boats.

Molly talks with other young mothers, her friends, about the difficulty of integrating their career passions with the realities of raising families, but she knows it can be done. There are few other women in the Midcoast who ship out and have children.

“I still haven’t figured how to ship out and have a family,” she admitted; but she plans to do it. And, she wants to continue to have chickens and big gardens. “I want to be able to grow as much as I can.”

In the Midcoast, there are farmers and sailors, and their dreams of fresh fruit and vegetables are not far apart. Molly will likely be carrying those green beans and lettuce on her boats, down to the sea, to the “call of the running tide.”

BOX 

A Wanderer's Song

by John Masefield 

A WIND'S in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels,

I am tired of brick and stone and rumbling wagon-wheels;

I hunger for the sea's edge, the limit of the land,

Where the wild old Atlantic is shouting on the sand.

Oh I'll be going, leaving the noises of the street,

To where a lifting foresail-foot is yanking at the sheet;

To a windy, tossing anchorage where yawls and ketches ride,

Oh I'l be going, going, until I meet the tide.

And first I'll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls,

The clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls,

The songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out,

And then the heart of me'll know I'm there or thereabout.

Oh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick,

For windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick;

And I'll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels,

For a wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels.