PORTLAND – With the utmost confidence, Emily Moore could sail in the night from Rockland to Bucks Harbor without help from electronics or charts.

Her husband, Charles “Kip” Moore, remembers asking her, “How do you know where you’re going?” Her response: “I just know.”

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No matter where Emily Moore and her husband, Kip, tied up, they’d meet someone from Maine, he said. Family photo

“Sailing in the waters on a Maine night, it’s something I’d never do, and Emily just did it. I stopped asking after a while,” her husband said.

Mrs. Moore died March 22. She was 60.

From the time she was a baby, her parents took her and her siblings sailing. Her father’s zeal for the open water was passed on to her.

Mrs. Moore was a great, enthusiastic sailor, said her husband, who remembers trips they took through the Caribbean, in the Gulf of Thailand, and around Morocco and Greece.

“She just loved going sailing,” he said.

Growing up in Bucks Harbor on Penobscot Bay, she developed a love not only of the area and sailing, but also of such items as sea glass, beach stones and shells. She appreciated works of art, among other things.

Most recently, she became a grandmother to Shawn Hendrickson, who is now 5 months old.

“She was my everything,” said Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Abigail Woodman. “She was an amazing best friend, mom and wonderful grandmother. That was new. She and my son just cracked each other right up.”

With her many roles, including her jobs at Maine Savings Bank and as human resources director for the city of Portland; assistant and acting director of the Portland Museum of Art, and as director of admissions for the Waynflete School, Mrs. Moore had many connections.

Whenever they traveled, no matter where they tied up their boat, she always met someone from Maine, her husband said.

“She’d not only discover other people from Maine, she’d discover she and they both knew somebody,” he said. “I began to think everyone in Maine must sail.”

With a sense of humor, Mrs. Moore told stories of her adventures, more often than not including how things went wrong. Her husband said she would run her boat aground on occasion, usually distracted by something.

“She’d always tell stories about how it would happen. She’d say, ‘Well, there was this osprey, and then this eagle, and then another bird, and well, I wasn’t paying attention,’” he said.

In the late 1990s, Mrs. Moore finally took compliments about her writing skills to heart and enrolled in the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Within two years, she earned her master’s degree in fiction writing. Once a short-story writer, she decided to complete a novel, her husband said.

“She did work on it, on and off, for 13 or 14 years. I could either say it was never done, or finished many times over, but not quite good enough” to meet its author’s standards, he said.

Her self-criticism and drive for perfection made her continuously rework what she wrote. In her eyes, it never was quite good enough to send to a publisher, her husband said.

“She was always a writer and a very good one,” he said. “But what she didn’t learn was to realize how good her stuff was.”

Staff Writer Emma Bouthillette can be contacted at 791-6325 or at: ebouthillette@pressherald.com

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