(CASTINE, Maine) — After some Castine residents complained that the Maine Maritime Academy’s training ship was torturing them with noise and vibrations while tied up at the town dock, the ship has sailed to a different community, the Bangor Daily News reported.
T/S State of Maine arrived at the Sprague Energy Terminal at Mack Point in Searsport on Friday, where graduating seniors will complete their month-long dockside “cruise.” The move happened after the Castine select board met virtually on July 6 to hear complaints from residents. It voted 2-1 to give the school 30 days to comply with a noise ordinance. If it could not, the school faced fines of $100 per day.
“We love the academy,” resident Merissa Rogers told the board. “We’re not trying to prevent these kids from graduating. We’re just trying to have a productive discussion to try and make it so we’re not being tortured 24/7.”
Normally, students, faculty and staff already would have boarded State of Maine to sail away on a training cruise. But the coronavirus pandemic put a halt to that plan.
In late May, the academy was approved by the U.S. Coast Guard to conduct a different kind of cruise altogether — this one with students, faculty and ship’s crew aboard the training ship, which would remain tied up at the dock in Castine.
But even before the cruise officially began, the community was bothered by noise from the ship, which was running diesel generators and periodically ran its main engines. Castine Town Manager Shawn Blodgett said on Monday that there had been four nighttime violations of the town’s noise ordinance.
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