Remember the boating couple with a combined age surpassing 200 who called themselves the Ancient Mariners?
Herb Weiss will turn 107 on Oct. 2. His wife, Ruth, celebrated her 99th birthday in April. They’ve given up cruising, but not Maine.
After finally deeming themselves too old to continue their ocean journeys, the Weisses now are summer residents of Camden. They live on the first floor of a home that Ruth has been busily redecorating. Their son, John, resides on the second floor.
“I’m 50 years older” than most old folks, said Herb, chuckling in the background of a phone call between a reporter and his wife. Ruth said she’s planning a small morning party for Herb.
“We have our parties in the morning because we’re awake in the morning,” she quipped.
“We’re just getting older,” she mused, but both are in good health. They keep moving, going out for walks in downtown Camden.
They’ll head to Florida for the winter. Their 41-foot American Tug, Ancient Mariners II, is still for sale in Portland. It comes with their dinghy, Rhyme, an ode to Samuel Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Before heading up the coast, their first summer stop traditionally was at The Dolphin Marina & Restaurant in Harpswell.
Ruth and Herb had voyaged around the world in sailboats before buying trawlers. Ruth is a Harvard-educated pediatrician. Herb was 15 or 16 years old when he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During World War II, Herb was sent to England to install radar with a novel navigation system he and his team had developed at MIT for the Royal Air Force. Until then, he said, Great Britain had been losing the air war. He also was part of a team at MIT that helped develop the North American Aerospace Defense Command on the East Coast of the U.S.
