The giant peace sign emblazoned on a red sail isn’t the only thing that’s unusual about the Golden Rule, a 38-foot wooden sailboat visiting Maine this week.

Crewed and led by an anti-war group called Veterans for Peace, the boat docked at DiMillo’s Wharf in Portland on Saturday. On Wednesday, the Golden Rule heads to Bath. Both are ports of call along a three-month tour the vessel is making, stretching from New Haven, Connecticut, to Chicago, to promote international nuclear disarmament.

While the Golden Rule is a two-masted sailboat known as a ketch, it is perhaps best described as a “peace boat” – one of several that plied the ocean during the Cold War and later inspired other sea-borne groups such as Greenpeace.

In 1958, the Golden Rule was sailed by members of the Committee for Non-Violent Action in an attempt to stop the U.S. military’s testing of nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean. Though the boat was stopped in Hawaii, and never completed the voyage to the Marshall Islands, it inspired another to complete the mission that year.

Veterans for Peace, which was founded in Maine, discovered the boat decades later and restored it for five years beginning in 2010. Helen Jaccard and her husband, Gerry Condon, who together now lead the Golden Rule project, became involved with it early in 2015. They set sail from Humboldt Bay in Northern California that June and haven’t looked back since.

“Our goal is to educate as many people as possible about the plain danger of nuclear war and the importance of pushing for the abolition of all nuclear weapons,” Condon said.

The boat is manned by a four-person crew that rotates throughout the journey. The current captain is Debby Weeks, who joined the crew in New London, Connecticut, and will lead the boat through its visit to Bath and then a voyage to New York in time for Independence Day. She works as a chemistry teacher at Hawaii Community College.

“This has been a good chunk of time that I’m very happy to give to this boat because I really believe in the mission. I’m hoping that more and more educational settings and younger people will get this message,” Weeks said.

Since coming to Portland, the Golden Rule has hosted events with local members of Veterans for Peace and the Wabanaki Confederacy. Portland is home to the first chapter of Veterans for Peace in the country, and the chapter founder and president, Doug Rawlings, spoke to the crew at a banquet on Monday.

“I see this boat as the most effective manifestation of our basic principle, which is to abolish war. When we started the group, one of our five building blocks was to get rid of nuclear weapons, and here it is,” Rawlings said. “This boat does an amazing job wherever they go of bringing people into the conversation.”

On Tuesday, the crew took the boat to South Portland, hosting visitors there and telling the ship’s story.

On Thursday, the group plans to join protesters at Bath Iron Works, which manufactures guided missile destroyers for the Navy. The group will disembark, conduct a walking vigil to the BIW yard, and then participate in a sail-by near the Bath waterfront with other local vessels.

“The goal is to interact with as many people as possible – both directly and through the media – to bring awareness about the United Nations treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons and other back-from-the-brink measures to stop the possibility of nuclear war, as well as to influence people to take action to divest their own money, their pension funds and city money from weapons manufacturers,” Jaccard said.

“So, it’s primarily an educational mission with an activation component to it.”

After departing Bath on Friday, the Golden Rule heads south to New York. Then the boat will spend the rest of the summer in the Great Lakes. In total, the Golden Rule’s “Great Loop” tour will comprise stops at more than three dozen ports.

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