Ambergris’ STORY
While Captain Patrick Reilly isn’t a Maine native (He moved to Maine when he was 3 years old!) he grew up on Mount Desert Island and has been sailing since he was a kid. His summers were spent working on local schooners and by the time he was 18 years old he had earned his U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license. After graduating MDI high school he went to sea, sailing thousands of ocean miles working as a yacht captain and delivering yachts around the world. In between yachting gigs he had many adventures aboard a series of his own boats. In his 20’s he bought a 23 foot engine-less gaff rigged cutter named Grace which he single handed from Maine to the Caribbean and then across the Atlantic to Ireland and on to Iceland and Norway.
His next boat was a 54 foot steel cutter which he did charters between Maine, Central America and the Caribbean. After a while Patrick started thinking about what his ideal boat would be and finally decided to build it himself. He went looking for a bare hull which he could fit out to suit his needs. That’s when he found the Ambergris in 2016.
She was in Florida where she had been lying for the past 10 years as an an unfinished project. Her steel construction was sound and with a lot of work Patrick saw that she would be a fine sea boat.
Patrick and his partner Erin (who owns and operates Acadia Speech Therapy) motored the Ambergris over to the Bahamas for the rest of the winter where they scraped off the barnacles from her bottom and built a jury rig to sail her back to Maine. Patrick went back to work as a private yacht captain while they spent the next 6 years building the Ambergris. After much hard work the Ambergris started doing sailing charters in the summer of 2021.
After finishing our summer season in Maine the Ambergris sails to the Caribbean for the winter, where we do our annual yard period to keep the Ambergris shipshape. We’re also building the cabins, and once we finish we’ll start doing longer charters in the tropics.
We’ve designed the Ambergris’ interior to double as a cargo hold. On our last trip to the Caribbean we hauled a load of green coffee beans from the Dominican Republic. Cargo under sail is a long held dream of ours, and we believe in shipping ethically sourced goods in an environmentally sustainable way.