“What is there about the plodding, nodding Friendship sloop, close-reaching so sturdily, so comfortably, against the summer sou-wester off the coast of her native Maine, that gives such a friendly tug to the heartstrings of the sailor?’’

Maybe it’s that “they don’t look like yachts and they don’t sail like yachts because they were originally fishing sloops, designed originally for wresting a living from the sea.’’

— Joseph E. Garland, in Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons