ABOARD STATE OF MAINE — The coffee’s never hot on the 4-to-8 watch.  

That’s the worst part. 

It’s 4:02 a.m. and the Training Ship State of Maine, a hulking vessel still glistening white with shipyard paint, is cutting through the Atlantic somewhere between Nova Scotia and Rockland, at a formidable 18 knots. 

Land appears. 

Or is it clouds?

The stern watchman, 19-year-old cadet Drake Cooper from Savannah, Georgia, isn’t sure. 

The eastern skyline glows, a bed of embers stoked by a light breeze. To the west, an ever-paler ashy blue. 

Cadets Ryan Becker, left, and Drake Cooper stand watch at the stern of the State of Maine before sunrise on July 11.

Ryan Becker drags on a cigarette. 

The two teenagers stand on the helicopter pad at the very end of the boat, three stories above the surface, as the roiled waters, gnarled and disfigured by the ship’s 20-foot propeller, disappear behind them. 

Becker, a 19-year-old from Arnold, Maryland, will tell you this shift is probably the worst of the three pairs of watch rotations.

It robs you of early morning rest and then demands your attention again from 4-8 p.m., as the day fades from afternoon to evening. Becker prefers balls to four — midnight to 4 a.m. 

The coffee’s warmer, for one. 

And you get midrats, ship-side slang for midnight rations. It’s an extra meal, and often the best.

The ship’s officers, mostly seasoned mariners, disagree. The 4-to-8 sees the sun’s rise and set, with a meal break in each shift, and preserves a near-normal sleep schedule. In the industry, it’s typically reserved for the most senior officer.

Kollin Jones checks settings in the port side exterior bridge control on the State of Maine. Juniors training to be deck officers assume control of the bridge on the training ship while under the supervision of a licensed deck officer.

While the sun prepares for its own wakening, Becker has already begun rounds.  

TS State of Maine is the third in a class of training ships, formally known as National Security Multi-Mission Vessels, built for the nation’s state maritime academies. They signify a renewed investment in the U.S. shipping industry, which for several decades has declined by most measures, including the number of mariners qualified to operate the National Reserve Defense Fleet, as well as the share of global trade on American flagged vessels.

The Maine Maritime Academy’s new ship was christened at the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in Pennsylvania, where it was built, in March and departed Portland on its inaugural summer cruise May 9.

The 525-foot vessel is a floating college and can sleep 600 students, called cadets.

During the school year, it lies moored at the school’s pier in Castine, a Midcoast town on Penobscot Bay, where cadets watch over it and treat it as an extension of the campus.

In the summers, rising sophomores and seniors go on a 10-week cruise where they accrue necessary sea days and experience navigating, steering, mooring and fixing a ship of this size. When they graduate, they’re eligible to test for an unlimited tonnage U.S. Coast Guard license that enables them to work on any size vessel, including cargo ships, oil tankers and drilling rigs.

Becker was one of nearly 500 cadets on the State of Maine’s maiden summer cruise. Half were from Texas A&M Maritime Academy, which is awaiting its own identical vessel.

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On Day 69 — July 11 — Becker was on the fire and security watch shift.

Air conditioner filters on the Empire State, the first of the NSMV class, caught fire once, Becker says — an example of the kind of thing he’s supposed to look out for.

Still, the watch leaves plenty of time for thinking. 

It might be kind of soft, Becker says, suddenly bashful, but he sometimes spends the time writing poetry for his girlfriend in a pocket-size spiral notebook that all watchstanders are supposed to carry.

It’s been 70-something days since he’s seen her. He isn’t sure exactly. He knows he’ll see her in 13.

“I’m not thinking about the last time I saw her, I’m thinking about the next time,” Becker says.

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National Security Multi-Mission Vessels are sort of like $330 million federally owned sport cars — they’re flashy, loaded with features and twitchy to drive.

From an educational perspective, “this thing is a game-changer,” said MMA President Craig Johnson, a 1991 alumnus of the school.

It couldn’t come soon enough.

Cadets on board the State of Maine watch as Patriot State, the second National Security Multi-Mission Vessel operated by the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, heads into Boston Harbor on July 9.

The seven maritime academies that train nearly all future merchant mariners have for years relied on aging hand-me-down ships. MMA’s last training vessel was launched in 1989.

The Maritime Administration, a federal agency under the Department of Transportation, opted in 2019 to fund the first of the new training vessels in the hopes that the fleet would help redress the nation’s 1,800-sailor deficit. Congressional funding for four more ships soon followed.

The federal agency owns the ships and covers the cost of their maintenance and a large portion of their fuel. The academies use them with one caveat: If given five days’ notice, the ships can be pressed into government service and used to respond to humanitarian crises. In 2005, three training ships, including the previous State of Maine, were deployed to Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina.

Connor McDonald of Michigan, a rising senior at Texas A&M Maritime Academy, eyes a distant fishing vessel from the bridge of the Maine Maritime Academy’s new training vessel, the State of Maine.

The ships have dual bridges — one a standard command center, the other a fully functional duplicate used primarily for training. Their four diesel generators are split into two identical engine rooms, also for training purposes.

It has not been entirely smooth sailing for these new vessels.

The State of Maine has a helicopter landing deck that can’t be certified for use because hardware was welded in the way; a folding ramp used to drive vehicles into a cargo hold was lashed in place by the end of the voyage awaiting a warranty claim; the hydraulic arms used to deploy and secure lifeboats were a reinvention of the wheel, one cadet said, and they occasionally malfunctioned during tests.

Although the summer cruise often crosses the Atlantic, this year’s itinerary stayed close to North America — “we didn’t trust the ship yet,” the captain said.

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Matthew McCormick, a Texas cadet from Florida, didn’t want to spend his life sitting at a desk.

“I wanted to do something, like, engaging,” the 19-year-old said.

He’d first considered joining the military, but his mom talked him out of it. Now, he’s thinking about working aboard cargo ships, or maybe tug boats.

Leaving Galveston in May, McCormick stood his first watch as the ship got tossed by heavy seas and battered by heavy rain. He got so seasick that he failed to spot a passing ship.

“This is the mariner experience right here,” McCormick thought to himself.

Leaders of these academies, where the number of graduates has generally fallen compared to 2019, are eager for more students.

Cadets are drawn in by the allure of high wages, a flexible schedule and the peculiar, immersive lifestyle.

Their regiment mirrors the command structure of the ship’s crew — although there are several students to perform the job of any one crew member. Deck-side cadets steer and navigate, always under the watchful of eye of an actual licensed mariner; Engine-side cadets ensure the ship’s motors run smoothly under the supervision of a licensed engineer.

Freshmen, or fourth class cadets, cycle through watches on both the deck and engine room. After their sophomore year, they spend a summer working as a cadet in the industry, and then return to training vessel the following summer.

Senior Deck Watch Officer Dan Page fist bumps with MMA cadet Julianna DeMarco at the end of her second-to-last bridge watch.

Their capabilities start to show as they take on more leadership roles.

After dinner one evening, as the sun started to dip, Senior Deck Watch Officer Dan Page and a few cadets stood watch in the ship’s bridge. They’re squinting out on the open horizon, into the fog. 

A tall cadet approaches and asks permission to adjust the ship’s course by five degrees. A light touch of the 10-inch wheel will send over 19,000 metric tons of steel careening in one direction or another.

Page shrugs him off. 

“This is when the upperclassmen have it,” he said. “I just look out the windows and make sure they don’t run into anything.”

The cadet watch officer gives the order to the underclassmen at the helm, who spins and then straightens the wheel, setting course at 256 degrees. 

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Cadets and faculty stand on the helipad deck of the State of Maine during a 7:15 a.m. muster on July 10 as the ship motors through a dense fog off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Rolling swells teeter the boat on the morning of July 10 as several hundred cadets muster on the helicopter deck, hands clasped behind them.

It’s 7:15 a.m. and the smell of engine oil, diesel exhaust and salt wafts off the stern and into the fog.

Bethany Ives, the 21-year-old cadet master, stands on the “H” in the center of landing pad with a microphone. She is the student counterpart to Gordon MacArthur, the beloved and jovial captain, known casually as “Mac.”

“Good morning, everyone — and howdy,” she says.

By the end of the cruise, the relationship between Texas and Maine cadets has worn thin in spots.

The paramilitary routine is a daily reminder that to study aboard the State of Maine is to have one’s college experience governed by the rules of a seafaring vessel.

Texas A&M cadet Ashlyn Rieder adjusts a radar console from the ship’s training bridge.

Nonetheless, students have their sophomoric moments.

Look no further than the training bridge.

There, one cadet is hunched over a chart, plotting waypoints along the ship’s course. Others mess with the radar or communication systems. There’s a debate going on as a training officer tries to figure out who marked the vessel’s status as “Man Overboard.”

On the primary bridge, a floor above, cadets keep a hawkish eye to the horizon and are sparse with words.

“We did a 90-degree turn? Holy cannoli,” says one young midshipman on the training bridge, his back pressed to the windows, as he is suddenly alerted to the ship’s new trajectory.

There are typically 10 cadets on watch in each of the ship’s two engine rooms, where pairs of 16-cylinder diesel generators power 6,600-volt electric motors.

This sparks a debate over where in the Boston’s north end has the best cannoli: Mike’s Pastry, the cadet insists; Bova’s, another playfully retorts.

Seven floors below them in the engine rooms — the pulsing heart of the ship — it’s too loud to hear much over the necessary ear protection. Engine room two is jungle-humid, a viny maze of pipes and wires and valves and catwalks. Cadets are posted all around the 16-cylinder diesel generators to keep track of things like fuels levels, exhaust temperature and oil flow.

Leaders of maritime academies will impress upon you that this type of experience is valuable not only at sea, but for a diverse array of shoreside engineering jobs.

“Here, if your engine breaks down, you can’t walk away and go home and try and fix it tomorrow,” said Johnson, the MMA president. “The sense of urgency for these folks is (that) their lives depend on it, and the lives of their shipmates.”

He offers a rosy financial proposition.

About 60% of students at MMA are enrolled in an unlimited license program, which, upon passing a test, certifies them to work as third assistant engineers or third mates. An in-state cadet graduates with between $60,000 and $90,000 in debt, Johnson estimates, and enters the workforce making about $120,000 annually — more than 1 ½ times Maine’s median household income.

The academies are starting to see enrollment tick upward. Johnson has clocked matriculation growth at 5% to 10% in the last few years.

Cadet Julianna DeMarco of Philadelphia sights another vessel with a compass from the ship’s bridge.

“Students now want connection and they want hands-on,” said Allan Post, the excitable deputy superintendent of the Texas maritime academy. He’s bullish on growing attendance at the academy, and now has a boat that can accommodate 600 cadets to do so.

With an overripe job market, career counseling at MMA looks a little different.

“We’re coaching them on if you turn an opportunity down, how to leave a good impression,” Johnson said.

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Training Ship State of Maine, the brand new training vessel for the Maine Maritime Academy, passes Portland Head Light on May 9 bound for Galveston, Texas.

There’s a lithium battery fire at 3:47 p.m. in one of the ship’s workshops. At once, corridors are crawling as everybody shuffles to a muster station, a lifejacket and immersion suit in tow. 

On the bridge, a small army of cadet officers pore over the ship’s rolls as the master relays incoming reports from each of the numbered muster stations.

This, as everyone knew from the start, is a drill. 

“Oh-five missing from four,” Mac calls out.

It’s been 11 minutes and the students sift through a short list of people who haven’t checked in. Some are in the medical bay; others are at the bridge; a few are on fire and security duty. Just one of 585 people on board is not where he should be. 

“Cole Ouellette, check in with muster station seven or call one zero zero one,” Mac says over the intercom, the first of three increasingly urgent calls.

Jordan McIntyre uses a sextant at dusk to pinpoint the latitude and longitude of the ship as it moves through the Gulf of Maine on July 9. Use of the instrument is required knowledge for cadets in the unlimited tonnage license programs at Maine Maritime Academy.

The phone rings and Ives, the cadet master, answers. She’s dispatched someone to muster station seven.

They do not have Cole Ouellette. 

Mac’s eyes widen. (Does he know what’s going on, I wondered? Did he plan this? )

“OK. Now what?” Mac, the ship’s master, asks Ives.

The fire is out, but the bridge still has a problem: The ship is a 10-story maze of corridors and nooks with steep companionways leading, never mind the miles of ocean slipping away behind the stern.

Mac dispatches searchers and makes what is now a third call over the PA. He’s louder this time, and stern. 

At six minutes past four, the phone rings.

Ouellette, 19, a first-year cadet from New Gloucester, arrives having carried his life jacket and immersion suit seven flights of stairs to the bridge.

Captain Gordon “Mac” MacArthur, the State of Maine’s beloved captain, on the bridge leaving Boston Harbor for the final leg of the 2026 summer cruise.

Ouellette’s Adam’s apple dives down his throat and bobs back up. He was asleep in his berth with two ear buds in, he explains.

Only one earbud at a time, Mac chastises, for this exact reason. 

He sends Ouellette away. Later, Ouellette is in a corridor, trying to laugh off the incident with his friends the way a kid sent to the principal’s office might.

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At anchor in Searsport, the last night before returning to Castine, speakers blare mostly classic rock, and three corn hole games are underway in constant rotation. A barber freshens up Michael Rollins’ crew cut as others catch mackerel with which they bait their striper rods.

Mac has two favorite days of cruise: the first and the last. The ship is full and buzzing.

In the evenings, students sunbathe on the upper decks. At anchor in Searsport, the last night before returning to Castine, speakers blare mostly classic rock, and three cornhole games are underway. A barber freshens up cadets’ crew cuts as others catch mackerel and use it to bait their striper rods. 

The State of Maine is almost home, and familiar boats carrying friends, students and alumni circle the ship at anchor.

The next day, Mac and most of the top officers tested ship’s fast rescue boat. He turned command of the speedboat over to Brooke Foran, 23, to practice. An hour later, when they launched it again out of caution to grab several people from a lifeboat with a malfunctioning crane arm, Foran ran the boat.

“That’s what we’re doing here,” he said, beaming from the bridge in his dress uniform as the State of Maine made haste for its home port.

As TS State of Maine approached the Castine pier, Isaac Renshaw-Sirimoglu, 21, stood at the helm.

Kai Etheridge of Mississippi shows a friend on video chat a mackerel he caught off the stern while anchored off Searsport. Etheridge had never seen one before.

He had asked for that final watch.

Renshaw-Sirimoglu was at at ease fielding a litany of commands from a harbor pilot and captain as they maneuvered the tugboat-laden vessel into a 180-degree turn and gently up alongside the concrete pier.

“I was kind of just going through the motions,” he said.

After, Renshaw-Sirimoglu donned a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. He was home for a few weeks of summer break, and it was time to go find his mom.

Watchstander Brody Farmer, 19, of Farmington, walks along the stern of the State of Maine as the ship cuts across the Gulf of Maine.