Tales from the attic: Learning sailboat racing

 Sam Smith - My sailboat racing days pretty much came to an end in the late 1950s. I had risen to varsity status at Harvard, but - unable to find a male crew for a race at Lake Medford - I had asked a Radcliffe friend to sail with me. The problem was that I won the race and the guy who came in second filed a complaint with the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association, which held a formal hearing and conclude that I had won improperly. 

But it had been a long time getting to this point.  In high school I had found a role model in Harry Parker, a genial man with a hearty laugh who ran the boatyard in South Freeport, Maine, and had a workboat called the Can Do, the motto of the Navy Seabees. Harry Parker was a survivor of Pearl Harbor and a former PT boat skipper. He was still in the reserves, and was considered one of the best sailors in the state. Once, while commanding a destroyer escort on a reserve cruise, Harry had brought the vessel into South Freeport harbor, the largest ship ever to squeeze through the tiny gap guarded by Pound of Tea Island. Along with others, Harry founded the Harraseeket Yacht Club. The HYC met in the loft of a decrepit wharf building and long had the distinction of having the lowest dues of any yacht club in America: 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for juniors - a fact dryly recorded in the national guide to yacht clubs along with more expensive institutions such as those in New York and Bermuda.

Since it was nearly impossible to find two boats of the same class in the harbor, the early races were handicapped, a practice that led to endless heated controversy and eventually to Harry convincing the club's members to buy from his yard the first in a succession of same-class boats. The initial class was little more than a sailing dory with no decking, and thus abundantly prone to capsizing. The next was a poorly performing fiberglass day-sailer, the Explorer, which while perfectly safe, was not up to beating out of the narrow entrance of the harbor against a four-knot current.

Further, ours was the slowest in the fleet. I took the day sailer out of the barn and fixed it up, discovering in the process why it had been so slow. A hairline crack had started letting water slip between its two hulls which retained about a hundred gallons.

After renovating the vessel, I called up the United Services Automobile Association to insure it.  USAA's headquarters were in Houston, Texas, where boating is a bit different than in Maine. Upon hearing of the vessel's age the agent said it would have to be inspected by a marine surveyor. I pointed out that it was made of fiberglass and only 16 feet long and after discussing it with her manager she relented. Then she asked me whether I locked the boat when I wasn't using it. I explained that the boat was moored in the water and that it was difficult to lock a boat to an anchor. Then I said, "And I also want to insure my dinghy." "Your what?" came the shocked reply. George O'Day eventually bought the Explorer company, improved the design and created one of the more successful day sail everboats built, the O'Day Sailer.

Harry and the club eventually moved to Lightnings, which despite their flat-bottomed pounding in the bay chop, kept local sailors content for a number of years. Despite being of one class, however, there were, in fact, considerable differences in the boats, as was demonstrated regularly as we attempted to move ours -- the oldest and with a double-planked bottom -- against a fleet that included lighter wood vessels and, eventually, fiberglass ones. No one seemed to mind that much, and the season would end with a skipper's race in which everyone got to sail everyone else's boat. This event tended to confirm that the best boats also were owned by best sailors.

There came a day, however, when everything changed. Gardner Brown had towed his fiberglass Lightning with new Racelite fittings down from Taylor Pond, won the race, and immediately hauled the boat from the water. For those of us who took for granted that a boat would gain several hundred pounds of moisture over a season, it was a astounding sight. After that, racing became much more serious.

I proved only a moderate racer, but a good sailor and happy to be that. Even the Dauntless - the heavy 14-foot cat in which I spent countless hours trying to beat out of the harbor, nudging towards a possible vesper or slamming against waves that splashed easily into its broad cockpit - provided more than adequate satisfaction. Once, during a blowy interclub regatta, my friend Charlie Saltzman and I were still making our way around the course at 6:30 pm when the committee boat came out to make a deal: if we would accept a tow, they would give us third place in the race. All the other boats in our class but two had given up or capsized.

With the currents, tides, mudflats, ledges and unaccommodating winds, sailing in our part of Casco Bay was far more than a straight challenge of the sea. There were races when the whole fleet would anchor so as to not lose ground against an unfavorable current. Sometimes the fog was so thick that you didn't know where you were. Sometimes during these fogs someone would try kedging, throwing your anchor as far forward as possible and gaining ground as you pulled it back in until someone yelled, "Stop kedging!" Sometimes it was rough. Sometimes it was cold. And sometimes it was just wet.

Sometimes a thunderhead would build up to leeward over the course of a long afternoon. On such a day -- I think I was about fifteen at the time -- I was out with several friends who had never sailed before. The previous week I had successfully beached my boat on Moshier Island during a thunder squall, and so I eyed the peneding thunderhead with confidence, glibly telling my companions that we would be home easy before the storm.

I was wrong by about a hundred yards. We got the sails down and life jackets on just before it hit. For twenty minutes or so the wind blew at hurricane strength. As I was wondering whether we would capsize, get struck by lightning or smash on the rocks, a lobster boat appeared like a ghostly angel through the horizontal sheets of rain, threw us a line and held us into the wind. As quickly as the storm had arrived it was over. "Wind before the rain, you'll soon set sail again," I thought. The rain finally turned vertical again and I sat on the fantail by the tiller, chastened, awed, cold and wet. The sea, I learned irrevocably that day, had little tolerance for hubris.

During these years, Harry Parker set the sailing standard towards which I strove. So it was with alacrity that I accepted his invitation to crew in the New England men's sailing championships. Harry, Grubby Douglass and Gardner Brown -- the three best sailors I had ever known -- had won the Maine championship, but the New England races were in boats that required a four man crew.

We went to Nantucket and lost every race. Our competition included Ted Hood and George O'Day, the famous sail maker and the equally famous boat builder. Both would go on to be America's Cup champions. I measured the distance between Harry Parker and Ted Hood and George O'Day and then the distance between Harry Parker and me, added the two together and figured that it was too far to sail.