Like most launchings, it started with a groan as gravity, and a pull from a tug, began to pull the steel vessel from the shed where she was born. Slowly at first, then a bit quicker, she slid down the greased ways until her stern dunked into the Damariscotta River.

As the bulk of the 154 foot-long craft left the Washburn & Doughty Shipyard and took her first gentle roll, she became alive. Christened Capt. Richard G. Spear, she became the latest to be crafted and launched from the shores of East Boothbay.

Your tax money paid $10.9 million to build the 465-ton ferry that will soon sail to Rockland, where she will carry up to 250 passengers and 23 vehicles to Vinalhaven.

The cove where she was launched has seen hundreds of vessels built on her shores. They were large and small, famous and not. They were fishermen, schooners, mighty tugs, sleek yachts, and ships of war.

A launching, like the one held on April 9, is an old and honored tradition, and celebration for the specialized craftsmen who built her.

Over the years, many of those crafts have changed. Some disappeared. No longer do yards feature dozens of cranky caulkers and careful coopers.

Today’s vessels are stuffed with computers that position and navigate the ocean, check and recheck the power plants and even make coffee for the crew. They require workers who understand and install these systems. The Capt. Spear was built with steel plates cut and welded together, using techniques and tools that long ago replaced the traditional shipbuilding materials like stout oak ribs and wooden strips caulked with oakum.

Our world is changing, too.

The W&D launching featured other changes in addition to welded steel and computers. The traditional speeches preceding the launching were not given by white-haired men wearing dark suits. The governor, Janet Mills, in a colorful spring outfit, wished the vessel fair winds and following seas. The shipyard’s boss, Katie Doughty Maddox, was a featured speaker. It was just a few generations ago that women were permitted to cast a vote and help choose our elected leaders.

If you couldn’t attend the event, reporters and ordinary folks videoed the launching using smartphones with more computing power than the computers that NASA used to take men to the moon.

Many at the event wore masks to ward off COVID-19 and its relatives, which together have killed more than a half million of our fellow citizens.

Thanks to the uncommon efforts of Big Pharma to craft and manufacture vaccines, we are beginning to get back to normal. But we may never get back to the old normal. If we do, much of the credit will go to the scientists who discovered some of the building blocks used to make us – us. These ivory tower scientists worked with the business and manufacturing types to put their scientific discoveries to work. And it took less than a year.

If you stopped at the Boothbay Harbor YMCA for a shot to protect you and your loved ones, the juice injected into your shoulder was based on discoveries uncovered by women.

Up the hill from the Washburn & Doughty shipyard is Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. There, docs, postdocs and others do basic research to help us understand what is going on in, and under, the waters that lap our shores.Their research may help us deal with the climate conditions posing a threat to our way of life. Deborah Bronk leads those efforts.

Lots of our friends and neighbors are senior citizens. They have watched our world, our nation, and our community change. Our harbors are no longer filled with large fishing trawlers. The massive schools of large cod have vanished. Today’s fishermen seek lobsters and brave the ocean’s uncertainty in hopes of earning enough to care for their loved ones and maintain their way of life.

But the fishing industry faces its own set of changes. Warming seas are shifting fish stocks. Concern for whales is pressuring lobstermen. On the shores of Europe and just south of us, giant windmills are sprouting from the sea to generate the electricity we need to maintain our way of life. Some fishermen see them as a threat and are pushing back.

I bet that the fishermen, just like the old-time East Boothbay shipbuilders, will eventually find ways to cope with and adjust to the world we see changing before our eyes.

It is what they always have done.