The View from the Helm

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!

PETUNIA AND CHUCK Jim Cleary photo

Here I am this past weekend sailing the world’s best boat… my 74-year-old Herreshoff 12 1/2. Nothing better in the world.

PETUNIA AND FRIEND Jim Cleary Photo

It’s summer in Maine, and when I’m not painting I’m sailing. Somebody once said, “if two sailboats are headed in the same direction, they are by definition racing”. So when Steve Bailey took Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth’s H12 out for some exercise, well….

PORT and STARBOARD

So you thought all I could paint was boats, huh? Thanks to the encouragement of my mentor Ron Frontin, I’m stretching my metaphorical legs into all sorts of new subject matter. If you think it’s easy to catch the way a silver bowl, devoid of its own color, reflects everything around it, think again.

Shown is the most ambitious painting I have ever attempted… THE NIGHT WE LOST THE RED-TOP. It’s a large (30” x 40”) oil painted from memory of one of the most unforgettable moments in my life. I celebrated my graduation from college by spending the summer of 1966 living aboard BURGOO, a 37-foot ocean racing yacht. We sailed her from Newport to Bermuda where we started the Transatlantic Ocean Race bound for Copenhagen. One evening 1000 miles from the nearest land the wind came on to blow and we made the fateful decision to reef the main and press on overnight under our largest spinnaker, expecting the wind would abate after dark. Instead it blew harder and somewhere around midnight we were hit by a blast that spun us into the wind and hove her down with the spreaders under water. In the pitch black we called “all hands” and spent a very uncomfortable hour slashing away up to our waists in the cold Atlantic to try to relieve the strain of a huge sail full of tons of water. By morning our beautiful nylon number one spinnaker was no more, but we were upright and once again on our way towards Europe.

You can view this and my other most recent paintings at Ocean View Grange in Martinsville, Maine between July 15 and July 17 from 10 to 6.

PETUNIA IS WAITING TO TAKE YOU SAILING

Here’s PETUNIA at 74. I really believe I can say her restoration is now complete. Over the winter I took the mast down to wood and removed all those years’ worth of blemishes. Then there was an ugly stain at the aft end of the boom that I thought I’d sand out. The more I sanded, the worse it looked, until finally I WENT THROUGH! It had rotted on the inside from moisture seeping in the sail track fastener holes. So that was repaired, and here she is shining like a new dime in Tenants Harbor. If you read this blog regularly, you’re a special person and entitled to invite yourself sailing!

The happily married couple

Mark Fitzgerald finally found the right woman!  Here are Mark and Ann Fitzgerald, married on June 11th at Lucia Beach overlooking Mussel Ridge Channel. It took a while, but I’ve never seen Mark so happy.

For those of you who don’t know, Mark was my right hand man at C.W. Paine Yacht Design for 22 wonderful years, and is the best boat designer on the planet. Send him a congratulatory note at mark@markfitzmarine.com

mY nESTER WITH THE MAST IN THE WRONG PLACE

Many of you will have seen in my book, photos of my Nester dinghy sailing.  I enjoyed her, but she  had two flaws- she twisted quite a lot, and she sailed with lee helm.  My own fault, of course- for convenience I put the mast too far forward. I built the forward side-to-side member at sheer height so as to have enough “engagement” of the bottom of the mast (about 11 inches)  to eliminate any stays. How could I have failed to see a better solution- one with the mast in the right place?

So I’m ripping that member out, removing the rowing thwart aft of it, and making a new rowing thwart, enough higher in the boat to result in exactly the same height of engagement, yet not too high, I hope, to still be able to row from that position. I’ll keep you abreast of progress in this blog.

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.

I just returned from chartering a Sunsail Beneteau 473 in Croatia.  Beyond learning that Croatia is wonderful and the sun shone every day and humanity should never have migrated away from the shores of the Meditteranean, Sunsail has installed in some of their boats a holding tanks system that actually WORKS! They call them “gravity tanks.” It is so simple to use that.. you actually use it, and as a consequence the water in their huge marinas is so clean you can swim in it. At the hull in an easy to access location (inside a locker near the shitter) is a throughull fitting that is huge- I have no idea what goes on inside this thing. On top of it is a big red handle. When the handle is shut, the shit goes into the holding tank when you pump the toilet. When the handle is turned 90 degrees, two thing happen… the contents of the toilet go directly out to the sea when you pump it. And, the contents of the holding tank drain by gravity out to the sea. It’s as simple as that. And on our boat with three toilets, there was never any smell anywhere. It is simple, there are far fewer hose-clamped connections than any other system I am familar with, and did I mention, it doesn’t smell!