Mission Alliance

A couple’s love brought historic schooners back to the Chesapeake Bay.

The evening finds captain Laura Lohse nosing her 75-ton, 105-foot sailboat, the schooner Alliance, out of Yorktown’s Riverwalk Landing Pier into the York River current. 

Cotton candy clouds drift on a soft breeze as the ship’s two deckhands gather the 30 or so passengers around one of the ship’s three 63-foot masts. They point to a series of ropes and pulleys, explaining the mechanics of hoisting sails. Next comes a demonstration of useful knots. When the talk is over, the more adventurous guests take turns heaving the canvas into position. Others help secure lines. 

It takes about 20 minutes to get Alliance’s five sails into place. The schooner picks up speed, clipping toward the Chesapeake Bay. Passengers catch their breath and gaze at the billowing canvas in admiration. 

“There’s a reason Popeye had those muscles,” Lohse, 59, calls out from behind the helm, winning a laugh.    

Getting the big boat going takes time, skill, and considerable elbow grease. That’s because the Alliance was built to replicate the historic 18th- and 19th-century schooners that helped make the Chesapeake Bay one of the world’s most important shipping centers. The vessel’s mission is educational, so mechanization is limited to a backup diesel engine, winches for anchors, and a maritime GPS system. 

“This isn’t your run-of-the-mill sailing tour,” says York County tourism director, Kristi Olsen-Hayes. Her office was instrumental in forging the groundbreaking partnership with Lohse and her late husband, Greg, that brought the Alliance to Yorktown in 2005. 

A $46 sunset sail on Alliance lasts a couple of hours and lets even the most inexperienced guests try their hand at historic sailing techniques. Meanwhile, Lohse and company use landmarks to tell the story of the region’s maritime history. They also point out ecological habitats and wildlife like dolphins, oyster beds, and migrating birds. 

And once the boat gets cruising? Patrons can soak up coastal views while sipping local craft beer and wine. 

The Lohses “played a pivotal role in saving a culture that was on the brink of vanishing from the region,” says Olsen-Hayes. 

When the couple bought and restored their first historic tall ship in the early 1990s, barely any were operating in the region—and none were offering tours or sailing experiences to the public. Over time, the Lohses’ infectious passion and advocacy for the elegant old boats helped convince museums and private owners to follow in their footsteps. 

“Greg and Laura have enabled generations of visitors to experience a vitally important part of our maritime heritage,” says Olsen-Hayes. Moreover, they’ve ensured “that experience will be preserved for the future.”  

“Where I Felt Happiest”

Schooner Alliance

For Laura Lohse the road to becoming one of Virginia’s most prominent tall ship enthusiasts began in Chicago, sailing on Lake Michigan in her parents’ sloop.

“Some of my earliest memories are of being on the water,” she says, recalling the incredible sense of freedom it brought. “That’s where I felt happiest. I loved everything about it.” 

Lohse’s interest intensified with age. She attended sailing camps at yacht clubs as an elementary schooler and raced dinghies competitively as a teen. Visits with her grandparents in Fort Lauderdale centered around increasingly ambitious sailing trips: Coastal day cruises morphed into overnight jaunts through the Florida Keys and weeklong excursions in the Bahamas. 

After high school, Lohse enrolled in a small Wisconsin college on Lake Superior known for Great Lakes-related environmental science programming. It was there she discovered tall ships. 

A partner program with the Sea Education Association (SEA) allowed students to spend a semester conducting oceanographic research on a schooner based out of Massachusetts, the SSV Westward, a literal floating classroom. 

“I thought, boy, that sounds interesting,” says Lohse. “Sign me up!”

The experience proved life-changing. She and a crew of around 30 spent about four months blue water sailing more than 2,000 miles in open ocean—in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. Along the way, Lohse learned skills like sail handling, steering, celestial navigation, vessel and engine maintenance, and more. 

But the biggest takeaway was the community. 

“I fell in love with the people,” says Lohse. There was no yacht club luxury or party vibe. Everyone was down-to-earth. They loved being on the water, spending weeks on end at sea—and shared a deep reverence for the sailing traditions of yesteryear. 

“I had smaller sailboats down, but this was a different animal,” says Lohse. 

A Colonial Innovation

Smaller boats react quickly and can be managed with one or two crewmen. But tall ships can weigh upward of 100 tons, so maneuvers like turning—“coming about” in sailors’ parlance—take much longer. The captain has to give orders well in advance and it sometimes takes a dozen people to carry them out. 

“The basic physics are the same, but the rigging is so complicated, and the boat is so big, it takes some time to adjust,” says Lohse. But once things clicked? “I fell head over heels for it. Working on the tall ship eclipsed everything I’d done before.” 

Schooner Alliance

Her admiration grew as she learned about the history of schooners. 

The design was an innovation born in Colonial America. Huge ships rigged with square sails excelled at catching trade winds to cross the Atlantic—but fared poorly in more volatile coastal waterways. To solve the problem, ship makers in Massachusetts built the first true schooners around 1713. The comparatively smaller boats featured design tweaks like shallower hulls and triangular fore and aft sails. Their enhanced maneuverability, speed, and ability to navigate shallow waters brought a boom in coastal trade—and quickly made them the continent’s most important shipping vessels. 

Schooners came to number in the thousands and dominated coastal commerce until the late 19th century when mechanization began to phase them out. They continued to be used as training vessels for elite Navy sailors, and remained popular with wealthy racing enthusiasts for a few decades. But after World War II, they began to fade into obscurity. 

By the 1980s, only a few hundred registered schooners remained in the U.S. And many of those weren’t seaworthy. This fact bothered Lohse.

A Shared Passion for Tall Ships

“For me, these boats were a way of life; they represented the epitome of skilled sailing,” she says. “I was in awe of them. I wanted to be a part of that tradition and see it live on.” 

The dream carried her to Florida after college, where she worked in a shipyard doing maintenance on a SEA tall ship in 1987. It was there she met future-husband, Greg, then a ship’s carpenter and engineer for SEA. 

The two bonded over their shared passion for historic tall ships and became friends. They fell in love a few years later while crewing on a brigantine sailing from Spain to the Caribbean.  

“We started talking about buying a big boat like that someday and doing educational tours, festivals, races, the whole nine yards,” says Lohse. “But the idea seemed so far-fetched, all we could do was laugh.”

Still, leading journeys with SEA and similar organizations was a close second. The couple married in 1989 and hired on as a team for voyages that carried them from Maine, to the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Europe, and back again. The year they married, they bought and restored an old 34-foot pocket schooner, Delight, and parked it in Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. 

Schooner Alliance

With easy access to the Atlantic, the Cape Charles Harbor was an important intercoastal stopover. Between trips, the Lohses lived there on the Delight. They bought a house in 1993 and planned to launch a day-cruise business. But the idea took a while to come to fruition: The couple spent much of the next six years crewing on tall ships in the Pacific Ocean, leading sailing expeditions from places like Hawaii, to the Marshall Islands, the Cooks, Tahiti, San Francisco, Panama, and more. 

Finally, ready to try something different, the Lohses sold Delight and parlayed the money—and most of their savings—into a rundown 65-foot schooner called Serenity. They spent a few months restoring the boat in a North Carolina shipyard then started running day cruises out of Cape Charles and Urbanna between SEA trips. 

“We saw this as a way to experiment with a new direction without going all-in,” says Lohse. The boat wasn’t big enough to hold more than a couple dozen commercial passengers at a time, so profits were slim. But it turned out giving tours was a lot of fun. 

“We were able to introduce people to sailing that probably wouldn’t have tried it otherwise,” says Lohse. She and Greg loved watching their faces light up as they helped. “That’s when we started thinking of ways to make it a viable full-time gig.”  

The answer came in 2005 through a chance encounter. The Lohses were attending a Great Lakes tall ship festival on Serenity and ran into reps from Yorktown’s tall ship committee. 

“They were handing out pamphlets and encouraging tall ships to visit,” says Lohse. She and Greg pitched the town on a permanent seasonal business as soon as they got home—and officials bit. 

“The problem was, we needed a bigger boat to make it work,” says Lohse. 

The couple quickly threw themselves into research and discovered the Alliance. It was sitting in a Maine shipyard falling into disrepair. They pulled together every penny they had, took out loans, made an offer, and the owner eventually accepted. 

The Lohses traveled to Maine and, after a week of fitting out, set sail for Yorktown, where they made further repairs.

“Without Sailing, This Country Wouldn’t Exist”

Nowadays, the Alliance is a fixture of the Yorktown waterscape and a potent symbol of the Chesapeake Bay’s maritime heritage. Its name is an ode to the French-American alliance, which was pivotal to American independence. Alliance also alludes to the personal alliance between Greg and Laura. 

Visitors pause on the Riverwalk pier to snap selfies before the regal schooner. On the water, sloops, speedboats, charter fishing vessels—you name it—pull alongside to admire the ship. Passengers wave, take photos, shout questions.

“These boats have a special kind of magic,” says Greg’s son, Erik Lohse, who helped launch the Nauticus Foundation’s educational sailing program, and captains its 122-foot Virginia schooner. Seeing a tall ship on the water is like witnessing a vision from another time. Sailing on one “lets you physically experience history. You realize that, without sailing, this country wouldn’t exist.”

Erik says Greg and Laura’s die-hard passion—and constant visibility—played a vital role in not only bringing tall ships back to the Chesapeake Bay but building a community around them. 

The couple was instrumental in either founding or helping to ensure the success of events like the Cape Charles Tall Ships Festival, Norfolk Harborfest, Norfolk OpSail, Cape Charles Cup, and more. They offered input around construction for the $5 million Virginia schooner in the early 2000s. They provided advice and mentoring for countless sailors who expressed interest in historical sailboats—dozens of whom, including Erik, are now tall ship captains. The list goes on. 

Greg’s unexpected passing in 2021 after a brief battle with cancer has led Erik and Laura to reflect on that legacy. 

“My husband would go out of his way to share his knowledge and love of sailing with anyone who wanted to learn,” says Laura. He’d go above and beyond to support anything “he thought would raise awareness around tall ships and get more people on the water.”

Laura and Erik say they intend to honor that spirit by doing everything in their power to ensure it lives on. SailYorktown.com 

This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue.