The View from the Helm

DIGGING OUT 80-YEAR OLD FASTENINGS

I’ve enjoyed my retirement, really I have. Sure I miss the process, the challenges, my genius employees and the beautiful yachts we created, but I love the small boats most of all, the ones that attracted me  to a life of sailing. So when I phoned my brother from the midst of a winter holiday in New Zealand and he hit me with, “we’ve got this Herreshoff 12 ½ up at the boatyard and we can’t find ANYONE with your skills to restore it”, well…

The boatyard is on Cranberry Island, reachable only by a small wooden boat from Mount Desert Island, and this is the middle of winter. The commute itself is, can be, downright dangerous in an easterly wind. We leave at 6:00 in the morning and when we get to the island climb into a rusty old truck, an “island truck” that deteriorated beyond any hope of passing inspection twenty years ago, and spew a plume of blue oil-smoke another mile to the yard. This is a “real Maine” boatyard that forgot to leave the 19th century. There is no bathroom- all of the employees are male and find a spot out in back of one of the sheds for this necessity. But if you can find them beneath a century’s worth of too-good-to-discard chunks of hardwood, shelves of every color paint ever chosen by boatowners long departed, and modern batts of fiberglass cloth and epoxy resins– the bins full of ancient tools left behind by craftsmen sadly no longer available at any price in our benighted land are balm to a restless artisan like me who appreciates the  heft in his hand of a tool that was not made in China to look good in a blister-pack.

Next week I will be in Rome studying Carravagios and Da Vincis. What a life!

My Talk in London

Here I am giving my talk at the Cruising Association in London. It went well judging by the fact that everyone was still awake after 70 minutes, and there were a few good laughs (most at my own expense). For the first time in nearly 40 years I divulged the identity of the lovely young lady who was the inspiration for my first design, the Frances 26. That’s her peeking at you, Frances Cairncross, now a world-famous economist and the rector (president) of Exeter College at Oxford. She was a wonderful dancer and turned me from a pathologically selfish 22-year old into a functioning human being.

A FRANCES 26 at Warsash

I’ll be giving an illustrated talk about my yacht designs on 9 January at 7pm at the Cruising Association House, Limehouse Basin, in London. You are cordially invited to attend.

Here’s Harriet Rose. The first time I ever got to sail a CAROL, something like thirty years after I first designed her. Everyone had told me that she sailed great, and my first impression was, they were right. We didn’t have much wind, though, and we had the engine ticking over to show a little wake, so I’ll just have to find my way to Chichester, England again next year to try her out in a bit more breeze. The interior is tiny but it really does work, albeit with the seat cushions closer to the floor that they would be on a larger boat. Once the depression gets going you could do worse in your unemployment than buy a set of plans for this wonderful minimalist cruiser and say to hell with it all, build a CAROL for yourself, and spend your time cruising.

A 24 ft. CAROL, named JUNO LUCINA

My twin Art and I just returned from England where we attended the Southampton Boat Show. Compared to a stateside show, it was absolutely ebullient. The show was much larger than the last time I attended a few years ago, and absolutely chockablock with customers, who seem to be an endangered species over here.

On Sunday we got to go to Chichester Harbour and sail an example of my CAROL design—the first one I had ever sailed. She’s a scaled-down and reshaped version of FRANCES, the 26 footer that gave me my start as a designer. The boats are built using cold moulded wood construction, and there are actually two of them in Chichester Harbour Marina. JUNO LUCINA is interesting because the owner fitted a little house where the companionway hatch would normally be. It totally transforms the admittedly miniscule interior.

The owners of the two boats invited us back next year for a race between the two, with me at the helm of one and my brother the other. The boats appear to sail amazingly well and I can’t wait for next year’s match race!

Dinner on the Krka River

         I got to thinking about one prediction I made in the conclusion to my recent book: “Surely in the near future some lad far cleverer with a computer than I ever was will write a computer program that will enable twenty or so would-be yachtsmen to share one very beautiful yacht as if it were solely their own.” 

        I watched the slow demise of my highly successful yacht design studio as the once too numerous to manage customers vanished over the horizon.  I had put it down to the lingering effects of 9/11, but perhaps I lost sight of a far more positive reason- the advent of chartering. Why would one own a yacht, with all of the maintenance expenses involved not to mention the depreciation- when one can  so easily and more cheaply charter. The happy group in the above photo, plus John the photographer, have chartered together for decades. We have enjoyed larger yachts than any of us could afford to own, have seen cruising grounds from Tahiti to Croatia, and have, at the end of one week in a climate far more amenable than the frozen wasteland of winter in Maine, simply handed back the keys at the end and told the charter company to fix anything that broke.

        Another prediction: The day will come when the rapidly rising cost of liquid energy and its attendant impact upon airfares will combine with one or more terrorist attacks upon this highly vulnerable mode of human transport to put an end to civilian air travel. And that will be the end of chartering.  Until that happens, though, this happy group will be posting photos like this one on this blog from some of the loveliest cruising grounds on God’s blue ocean.