30th Annual Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race!

Every year for the past 30, schooners from all over the east coast have gathered in Baltimore in mid-October for the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race.  In this modern age of high-tech hydrofoils this is the one chance for these graceful old vessels from out of the past to join in a fair competition.

But it's really not so much about competition as collaboration.  There's nothing else like a brisk reach down Chesapeake Bay in the company of other schooners -- forty to fifty of them!-- stretching as far as the eye can see. It's like going back in time about a century and a half.

I wasn't going to go this year.  After all, since I no longer work a winter charter season in Florida, my whole livelihood depends on the brief summer season here in Ocracoke.  And while October is nowhere as busy as July, there are still plenty of folks here eager to sail in the cooler shoulder season.

But my son Emmet is hellbent on going.  For moths now he's been bugging me about it.  He's attempting to defeat my lost income argument by suggesting we open the trip to paying guests. It just might work.  So I'm writing this post in case any of you faithful few who have been reading these sporadic entries over the years (or someone you know) might be interested in joining us for part or all of the adventure.

We need to be in Baltimore by noon on Wednesday, October 16 which probably means departing from Ocracoke on October 10. Depending on weather and whether we decide to sail nonstop overnight from Norfolk to Baltimore, it should take about five days to get there via the Chesapeake and Albemarle canal (a.k.a Virginia Cut).

After various pre-race festivities, the race begins at noon on Thursday, commences through the night and ends up sometime Friday morning in Norfolk. The pig and oyster roast and awards ceremony takes place on Saturday and we begin the return trip after the all-hands breakfast on Sunday morning.

If possible we'll plan to return via the more scenic Dismal Swamp Canal with a stop in Elizabeth City. We should be back in Ocracoke by the 24th.  You can learn more about the race by clicking here. 

This aint exactly our first rodeo.  Emmet and I did the race along with three close friends in 2010 on our present schooner and in 2008 with the same crew on the old Windfall (we were 3rd in our class!).

A few years before that I crewed in the race aboard the 70' Schooner Leopard.
 
We can accommodate two passengers for a total of four of us on board.  There's a private stateroom forward with V berths (for a couple) and two quarter berths in the main cabin aft.  We haven't worked out the details as far as costs but as charters generally go it won't be very expensive.  Anyone interested should send me an email:  robtemple@embarqmail.com.

HAUL-OUT TIME!

All vessels kept in salt water will, over time, accumulate barnacles, algae and other marine growth.  Generally, this growth can be slowed but not eliminated by the application of "anti-fouling" bottom paints, most of which contain varying percentages of cuprous oxide.

I took my schooner to a boat yard in Washington about fifty miles west of here two years ago to haul her and paint the bottom.  The guy who owned the yard, although he allowed me to do my own painting, required that I buy the paint from him.  Of course the only brand he had in stock was the most expensive available anywhere but he assured me it would last at least three years.

"Are you kidding?" I said, "I keep this boat in Ocracoke where I'll be lucky if the paint lasts three months!"

"No, really," he said, "You'll see."

I did see.  Three months later I donned a mask and went over the side for a look below the waterline.  Sure enough, the barnacles were just as thick as before I'd hauled her.  I would have called the guy to complain but I'd heard he sold the yard shortly after launching me and retired to Florida.  With all the profit from my paint purchase he probably bought a luxury condo!

Last summer, instead of taking her to a boat yard, I hired a local scuba diver to scrape the bottom and that pretty much got me through the season.  By the time of the Christmas boat parade my propeller was so encrusted that I could hardly make three knots but it was okay.  It was a parade after all and not a race. A few weeks ago when the water had warmed to the point of making hypothermia less inevitable, I broke out the mask and wetsuit and cleaned the prop and as much of the hull as I could before freezing.

With sailing season fast approaching, I hadn't decided what to do about the barnacles when, last Sunday, deep into my bi-annual tool shed cleanup, I disinterred a five-gallon can with about a gallon of anti-fouling paint in it. It put me in mind of another boat yard, also about 50 miles away with no rules about bottom paint (or much else for that matter!) and I decided to give them a call.

After trying all day Monday to reach the yard by telephone (they're generally too busy to chat with potential customers), I decided to drive down and talk with them face to face.  On the 7:30 a.m. Cedar Island ferry I met up with my old buddy Capt. Carl who happens to be the one who put me onto this yard several years ago.  When I told him what I was up to he agreed that was the way to do it and further suggested that showing up at lunch time with a box of doughnuts for the yard gang could only help my case.

The doughnuts did the trick and it was soon agreed that if I arrived too late on Thursday to be hauled out, they'd get to me first thing Friday morning.  I rounded up my long-time sailing buddy Bill who, although five years older than me, always seems to be up for one of my ill-planned boat rides.

Bill and I pulled out of Silver Lake at six on Thursday morning.  A fair breeze took across the sound under full sail and we reached the yard shortly after five p.m. -- too late to haul out but we tied up in the slip and enjoyed a delicious dinner of grilled lamb chops.

You might have noticed my reluctance to identify these boat yards and I suppose it is a little selfish of me not to help advertise these places.  But over my decades of messing about in boats I've seen far too many of my favorite marine facilities taken over by folks with deep pockets and big plans. It's rare and wonderful to happen in to a place like this where, after hours, boat owners and yard hands sit around on paint buckets and swap lies.

True to his word, the yard owner hauled us out first thing Friday morning and Bill and I worked like much younger men for most of the day, prepping and painting the boat.  When they launched us at six p.m., we were hoping to make it to an anchorage in the couple of hours' daylight that remained.  I had a charter booked for Saturday evening and didn't want to disappoint.

As it turned out darkness overtook us before we got through the Core Creek Canal so, after adjusting to the challenges of night-time chart plotting we opted just to keep on truckin'! After what was probably the lumpiest night crossing I've ever had on the Pamlico Sound we pulled into Silver Lake at 5:15 Saturday morning and dragged our tired carcasses home.  A couple of hours later my charter party called to say they thought it was too cloudy to sail that evening so they canceled!

I was happy enough with a night off.  On Sunday morning I got a call from a gentleman who wanted to take his family sailing on very short notice.  We had a delightful two-hour sail with a charming eight-year-old named Savannah mostly at the helm.  She held a course just like a seasoned old tar!

Life is good!

JIMMY BUFFETT'S GRILL

Well the old Spring Cleaning bug just got ahold of my bride of 23 years and, girding her loins, she plunged into the attic in a wild de-cluttering frenzy.  My job was to huddle by the small attic door and haul away the numerous Rubbermaid tubs full of long discarded children's clothes, toys and miscellany as she passed them out. Some containers were destined to return to the attic in a more orderly system after a thorough cleaning but most were consigned directly to the dump.

Years of experience have taught me that it's always best to resist the temptation to travel down memory lane, digging through the "dump" pile examining the detritus of the decades and waxing sentimental.  Just keep the lids on and take it straight out.  I was managing this quite admirably when she suddenly shoved out a stainless steel marine barbecue grill and said, "And FINALLY we can get THIS damn thing out of our lives!  You've never once used it as long as I've known you."

"What?!" I cried, "Are you crazy?  That grill belonged to Jimmy Buffett!"

It's true.  It's also true that it has never been fired up since sometime before the end of my second marriage way back in the early 90s.  But there's a story there and I'm loath to let it go.

Back in the summer of 1990, my second ex-wife (a.k.a., the Plaintiff) and I spent a relaxing summer aboard my original schooner Windfall on a mooring in "American Harbor" on Man-O-War Cay, Abaco, Bahamas.  Upon arrival, we found ourselves surrounded by a motley assortment of fellow sailors and it didn't take long before a strong bond formed among us that carried over through our return for the following summer after an intervening winter of charter work in Florida.  Most days were spent spearfishing the reefs on the ocean side of the island.  Most evenings saw the entire population of the anchorage assembled on the deck of our schooner, grilling fish, drinking rum and playing guitars, banjos, bongos, what have you.  At 10 p.m. the island generator shut down and it got dark.  Then we'd all stretch out on the deck as a single-handed schoonerman named John, a former university planetarium director, would take us on a flashlight-guided tour of the heavens. After an inoffensively scholarly discussion of astronomy, the conversation would usually devolve into a discussion of "what's beyond beyond? Where did we come from?  Why are we here?"  Fun!

The senior member of our crowd was a 61-year-old single-hander by the name of H.J. Merrihue.  He was living aboard the 47' Cheoy Lee Luders yawl he'd recently purchased from Jimmy Buffett and was totally refitting for a planned world circumnavigation.  H.J. is among the most interesting people
I've ever known.  He was not only a self-made man but a self-educated one who had amassed a fortune in commercial diving.  H.J. wasn't exactly what's known as a "parrothead."  In fact, as he might have put it, he wouldn't have known Jimmy Buffett if he'd bitten him in the ass.  H.J. had simply found the boat, which Buffet thad named Euphoria III, through a yacht broker and had purchased her.  Although H.J.'s company did major commercial diving jobs all over the world, his headquarters was in New Orleans and his bread and butter had been the maintenance of submarine cables crossing the Mississippi River.  Thus the name he chose for his new purchase: Cable's Length.
I don't know how the boat looked when Buffett owned her but H.J. spared no expense.  He once told me that, when discussing a brightwork job with a potential contractor, if the the latter mentioned sandpaper courser than 400 grit "that was the end of the conversation and I'd find someone else for the job."

I do remember a framed photograph on the saloon bulkhead of Jimmy Buffet tshaking hands with (then President) Jimmy Carter.  Other than that, H.J., like my wife Sundae, was ready to clean house.

I happened to be having a beer in H.J.'s cockpit with H.J. and John the astronomer one day when he suddenly announced:  "I've got a lot of crap on here I need to get rid of.  You guys want any of this stuff?"  The Force 10 stainless gas grill was slightly tarnished and wouldn't do at all.  I agreed to take it off his hands to save him a trip to the dump.  John agreed to remove Buffett's old stereo system.  I guess he can still use the radio but I don't know where he'll find 8-track cassettes!

One man's trash is another man's treasure.  Since I'm thinking of taking my little schooner south this fall, I'm tempted to pack that old grill aboard.  Just might have me a cheeseburger in paradise!

REMEMBERING CAPT. DON LAUNER

It was late April, 2010 in a boat yard in Bayville, NJ.  I was rolling bottom paint on my newly-purchased Hermann Lazy Jack schooner in preparation for sailing her home to the North Carolina Outer Banks when a car pulled up next to the boat and a friendly, grey-bearded gentleman hopped out and introduced himself with a warm smile.

“Don Launer,” he said. “I live right down the bay and I have a sister ship.  I heard this boat had finally been sold and wanted to come meet the new owner.”

Actually, I knew exactly who he was as soon as he stated his name.  I’d seen plenty of photographs of his Lazy Jack Delphinus  inside and out in the numerous magazine articles he’d published.  It was a real honor to meet him.  We could easily have talked all day, but he was reluctant to keep me standing there with the paint drying on my roller so after giving me a copy of his latest Cruising Guide to New Jersey Waters, he gave me his card, invited me to email him any time I had questions, and drove away.

Although I never saw him again, I had a number of reasons to seek his advice and opinions by the time I docked up in Ocracoke a week later. Our correspondence continued over the next few years.  Every time I’d consult him with a question, I’d get a nearly immediate reply, usually containing photographs and/or an attached article he’d written about the issue at hand. Of all these consultations, one stands out vividly in my memory.

My Lazy Jack, which was built in 1979, has an Edson worm gear steering system. After I’d owned the boat for a couple of years, a strange groaning sound came out from the steering shaft whenever I turned the wheel.  I’d always kept the gear well lubricated, but this sounded like friction somewhere in the system. When liberal applications of WD-40 to every part of the system failed resolve the issue, I decided to consult the manufacturer.

I sat down and wrote an email to the customer service department at Edson.

And then it suddenly occurred to me: WWDLD? (What Would Don Launer Do?)

So I sent a copy of my Edson email to Don.

Later that day I received an email from Edson telling me that, being as old as it was, my steering gear was probably in need of a factory rebuild and if I would provide them with the serial number of my unit, they’d tell me how much it would cost to ship it to them for an overhaul.  Ouch!  Expensive as I knew that would be, it was nothing compared to income loss in the middle of my summer charter season.

But a half-hour later I got the following message from Don:

Rob,

On the aft side of the steering system just above where the rudder shaft enters it, there’s a square-head screw.  If you tighten that up a bit with a 7/16” wrench, I believe it will take care of your problem.

Regards,

Don

Needless to say, I hurried down to the boat, opened the hatch over the steering gear and reached in.  I had to work by feel since only a double-jointed dwarf would be able to see the back of the unit.  But sure enough, I immediately located the screw and found that it was loose enough to rotate with my fingers. After tightening it up I’ve had several more years of trouble-free steering.

It’s been over a year now since Captain Don Launer finally “slipped his cable” and sailed on.  As a grey-bearded schoonerman myself in this age of “discard and replace” I recognize in his passing the loss of one of the last of a breed of independent sailors who took pleasure and pride in meeting the day to day challenges of boat ownership.

Fair winds, old friend!

WINTER SAILING'S BACK AT LAST!

“It isn’t that life ashore is distasteful to me. But life at sea is better.”

--Sir Francis Drake

Aahhrrg!  I just pulled up my newly renovated website and realized how long it’s been since I contributed to this “blog.”  I guess I’m an old Luddite who’d rather be doing just about anything other than sitting at an electronic keyboard but today it looks like the rain isn’t going to let up at all so I’m out of excuses.

Early last month for a couple of days the wind and humidity went down a bit and the temperature came up to the point where a winter crossing of the sound was no longer out of the question.  Since most of my sailing buddies were off the island, I decided a little single-handed sailing was in order.

I overstocked the galley against every contingency, packed more clothes than I’d hopefully ever need, and sailed across the sound for a night at anchor in Juniper Bay.  The Swan Quarter ferry was the only other vessel I saw.  I guess I’ll let the pictures tell that story.

 Above are photos from my solo cruise to Juniper Bay.  Note the fisherman topsail (the white one) in the top one.  I know the selfie looks like Chris Christie rethinking his decision to back Trump but I really was having a blast!



The end of February gave us as good a weather break as we’d had in a long time so, along with three adventurous friends, Philip, Bill and Jim, I slipped the dock lines at first light last Sunday morning and set sail across the sound aboard the Windfall II. The light WSW breeze was just a bit too W and not quite enough S to hold our course for Belhaven so we had to leave the engine on for the first couple of hours.  But later in the morning it backed a bit to the S and with the fisherman topsail flying, we were able to make 5 knots without the old “iron jib.”  Although the forecast had us expecting sixty degrees by mid day, it was forty-six when we left and hung in the mid-fifties most of the way across.  But hey, the sun was shining and we were sailing! 

By the traditional Bloody Mary Hour (10 a.m. when the sun has risen above the yardarm) the seas were up and I was the only taker.  By noon we were sitting around the cockpit table noshing Philip’s deviled eggs along with fried chicken and ham sandwiches.

At four p.m. we docked up at the River Forest Manor to take on fuel.  I’d only burned 17 gallons in the two complete sound crossings and a couple of day sails since last fueling up there in November.  I love that little 20-horse Volvo engine whose model the Swedes mysteriously named “MD 20/20.”  As you probably guessed, I affectionately call it “the mad dog.”

Besides the River Forest and a couple of other private marinas, Belhaven has two municipal marinas.  The one next to the hospital used to be free until they put in electricity and water.  The other one, nearly a mile from downtown, is still free. 

Call me cheap (my kids do!) but this time of year I’m always on the lookout for a bargain.  We tied up at the latter.  (And we could have used a ladder – the fixed wooden dock was considerably higher than the deck of our boat). 

The walk to town wasn’t a problem for us – we didn’t do it.  Having communicated by cell phone with our good friends Frank and Patti who live at Pamlico Plantation east of Washington and not very far from Belhaven, we found them waiting at the dock when we got in.  They came aboard for drinks and then drove us to the Tavern at Jack’s Neck, a delightful new restaurant converted from an old grocery store.  This place had been recommended to me the night before by Ocracoke resident Jack Whitehead who owns a house in Belhaven and spends a lot of time there.  We had an excellent dinner and I look forward to dining there again. 

The wind picked up during the night and the morning weather broadcast announced a small craft advisory  (20- to 25-knot winds) for the sound.  Thinking we might need to break the return trip at Juniper Bay to allow the sound to settle down, we had a leisurely hot breakfast at the dock before casting off at 9 a.m.  Winds on our course down the Pungo were gusty but with only the mainsail and jib (no foresail) we were relatively dry in the cockpit and it was sunny and considerably warmer than the day before.  When we entered the Pamlico River we were able to bring the wind more astern and so we put up the fore and began to barrel along at hull speed.  There was no further thought of breaking the trip!

This being Jim’s first experience with sailing, I’d felt sorry to have to start out the previous day with so much motor-sailing but conditions on our return certainly made up for it. He did the lion’s share of the steering, kept us right on course and didn’t complain.

That’s him at the wheel in the photo I took with my phone while inspecting the foresail.

NEW SAILS!

Folks who remember my old schooner Windfall remember her black hull, white trim and tanbark (dark red) sails. When I first acquired the boat in 1985 she had a white hull and white sails.  My ideal dream vessel in those days was the Baltic schooner Lindo (later Alexandria), a three-masted beauty which just happened to have a black hull, white trim and tanbark sails. Immediately upon purchasing my new schooner I painted her black and ordered red sails.

My sail maker tried to talk me out of the red sails.  “It was a 70’s thing,” he said, “Get over it.”  He was right, of course.  Sail makers are always right.  Whatever you may know about sails, you don’t know diddly squat.  Ask any sail maker.

It’s true that in the 1970’s lots of boat owners began to sport tanbark sails.  Some insisted they were traditional, dating back to the Age of Sail when men-o-war with darker sails were harder for an enemy to spot at a distance.  Others argued it was just the opposite: in the late 19^th Century when steamships were making their appearance, a fishing schooner with dark red sails would be less likely to be run down in the fog than one with fog-white sails.

Hell, I don’t know.  My own argument was that I spend a lot of time staring into my sails in bright sunlight in order to keep them trimmed properly and there’s less glare from tanbark.  But truthfully?  I was smitten by the Lindo and it was, after all, my boat, my money.

And speaking of money, some of the purveyors of tanbark sails in the 1970s claimed that the darker sails were more UV resistant than white sails and would last as much as 40% longer. I found that somewhat plausible.  If you’ve ever kept a nylon American ensign past its prime, you might have observed as I have many times that the white stripes begin to deteriorate faster than the red stripes.

“Horesfeathers!” said my sail maker.  “If anything, the dyes used in the tanbark sails render them more vulnerable to UV rays.” 

Either way, there’s no getting around the fact that tanbark costs more.  The three new sails I just purchased for my schooner, Windfall II, would have cost $400 less if I’d settled for plain vanilla. Cheap bastard that I am, I would have done just that had my wife not weighed in.  “White sails on the schooner Windfall?” she cried. “That’s like Coca Cola  painting all their red signs blue!”

If I was enamored of the old black hull/ tanbark sail theme of my old boat I wasn’t nearly as much so as she was.  In the spring of 2010 when I replaced my old schooner with the smaller Windfall II, a white fiberglass boat with white sails like 95% of the sailboats in America, Sundae insisted I couldn’t sail her home from New Jersey before painting her black.  That was easy enough.

But replacing her perfectly serviceable sails with tanbark was going to require me to write another $5000 check on my sorely stressed bank account for nothing more than sentiment.  I had read somewhere about staining white sails with Minwax so I asked my friend Steve whose opinion on such things I trust. “Why not?” he said and I never looked back (although I probably should have – kids, don’t try this at home!)  It sorta worked but the sails always looked tie-dyed.  People were always asking me if the sails were made of leather! Ah well, my mamma always told me that if I can’t be a good example I should at least be a terrible warning.

Having recently been charged with the task of ordering a new 1200-square-foot mainsail for the skipjack Wilma Lee, I was impressed with the price I got from an Asian sail maker and asked them for a quote for new sails for the Windfall II.  They came back with an offer I couldn’t refuse.  After all, there’s a limit to how many times a guy can explain why his sails look all weird.  I was there and ready to move ahead.

My new sails shipped out of Hong Kong Tuesday evening.  The Fed-Ex truck pulled into my yard this afternoon (Friday) at 1:30.  The photo you see here was taken just after 4 p.m.  I’m impressed.

Let’s go sailing!

BEATING THE BOATYARD BLUES

                                            Photos by Bill Monticone

Mention boat ownership to almost anybody and you’re almost certain to be bombarded with platitudes about the constant cost and/or drudgery of maintenance. A few examples:

• B.O.A.T. stands for “bring out another thousand!”
• Boating is grand. And then another grand. And then another…
• A boat is a hole in the water into which the owner pours money!
• The two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys the boat and the day he sells it!
• “Sailing,” according to The Sailor’s Dictionary, “is the art of getting wet and becoming ill while going nowhere very slowly at great expense.”
• Before buying a boat you should stand in a cold shower with all your clothes on, tearing up $100 bills!

So why bother, you might ask. I guess it’s because when we think of our boats, we tend to dwell more on those rare few isolated moments when we’re out underway and everything is as it’s supposed to be. The weather is balmy and clear. There’s just the right amount of wind and from the right direction at that. The engine starts when you need it to and purrs like a well-fed kitten. All systems are working perfectly. The bilge is dry and free of flammable/explosive substances. All of your passengers are in good health and spirits (or, perhaps better yet, you’re single-handing).

If we were honest about it, those moments may only exist in our dreams, but it’s thinking of them that loosens our grip on our wallets (and reality).

For most of us, the major hassle and expense falls in the spring when it’s time to go to the boat yard to haul the boat ashore to prepare it for another season of mostly sitting idly at an expensive dock slip oxidizing the paint, blistering the varnish and cultivating a healthy garden of marine growth on the bottom.

What the typical wealthy yacht owner does is to take his boat (or have Jeeves take it) to a nearby yacht yard where it is handed over to a professional staff of highly paid specialists who clean, sand, prep and paint everything before returning the vessel to its owner along with a staggering bill. Very expensive.

The rest of us always seek out “Do-it-yourself” yards which are also very expensive but allow you to do grueling, filthy, back-breaking work on your boat while exposing your lungs, skin, eyes and ears to highly toxic dust, fumes and liquids in hopes of saving a few bucks. This seems to be just another illusion with which we poor boaters delude ourselves.

After a long winter of basically indoor weather, I was feeling the need last week to have one of those spiritually uplifting boating experiences. The forecast looked not-so-bad for sailing across the sound on Thursday, hunkering down for a rainy blow on Friday and then punching back across on Saturday.

Then, as Thursday approached, the extended forecast began to go south on me so I decided to give up my cruise in exchange for a long, leisurely day sail. I packed some sandwiches and invited my friend Bill along.

Although the weather was pleasant enough, the experience was disappointing. On starting the engine, I discovered a dead battery – not a big deal since there are three others in the system, but enough to create some doubt about the condition of the others. Would there be enough juice to fire up the diesel when it came time to drop the sails?

Then we cast off the lines and put her in gear. The boat oozed out of her slip at about half her usual speed, a clear indication that the propeller was fouled with barnacles. When we put up the sails and stopped the motor, the boat’s continued sluggishness confirmed what we’d already suspected: that the hull itself was badly fouled.

On the bright side, a pod of dolphins decided to tag along and they hung around with us for three solid hours which I believe must be some sort of record, due no doubt to our slow pace. The engine started when needed and we finally called it a day. But as soon as I got home, I went online and ordered a battery and telephoned a boat yard to arrange a Monday morning haul-out. I had, after all, skipped last year’s haul-out by diving under the boat and scraping the hull a couple of times during the summer.

The forecast looked promising for sailing (O.K. motor-sailing) down to Beaufort on Saturday, but even so, I donned a wet suit Friday morning and gave the prop and waterline a quick cleaning. I’d decided to try a boatyard I’d never been to before, Ted and Todd’s, partly because it was down wind and partly because it had been highly recommended to me for years by boating friends who were regulars of theirs.

As usual , Bill was up for it so we laid in provisions and headed out Saturday morning at first light. The hull and prop cleaning had made enough of a difference that we soon realized we could make Beaufort before dark, but rather than spend all day Sunday in the industrial side of town, we opted for dropping the hook in a beautiful wooded anchorage in Back Creek at about 3 p.m.

On Sunday morning we had the kind of breakfast that makes cruising such a pleasure: hot coffee, orange juice, mixed fruit, eggs, country ham and English muffins as we watched the fog lift in the sunrise. A bald eagle flew over. We sat for a while in total silence, appreciating the fact that, peaceful and quiet as Ocracoke is, if you just shut up and listen for a minute there’s always sound. Someone’s heat pump, traffic on the road, a barking dog. Even the surf.

We motored down the waterway and arrived at the boat yard well before noon, tying alongside a commercial fishing boat at the yard’s service pier. We had an interesting chat with Kevin, a crew member staying aboard while the captain took some shore leave. He told us a bit about life 200 miles out long lining for swordfish in the previous week’s icy weather. No thanks!

Monday morning we met Ted, the owner, and his father Gary as the yard crew began showing up at around 7:30. This is a no-nonsense commercial yard. Although there were a few sailboats, mostly under 40 feet, they were vastly outnumbered by large trawlers. Sitting high and dry on the yard’s marine railway was an enormous steel commercial fishing boat which was about half-way constructed. A busy welding crew worked on it the entire time we were in the yard.

We backed my schooner into the slipway and disconnected the backstay to allow clearance for the travel lift. Ted operated the lift and out she came. A friendly chap named Milt did a superior job pressure washing the hull and scraping the barnacles (all included in the very reasonable price of the haulout). The schooner was lowered onto large wooden blocks and supported with prop stands. By eleven o’clock the boat was dry enough to paint. I ordered new sacrificial zincs which Gary picked up for me at the local supply house. These were attached to the propeller shaft and rudder gudgeons to protect them from electrolysis.

Bill replaced the zincs while I applied the copper antifouling paint to the schooner’s bottom with a roller. The boat was lowered back into the water at a quarter past two and we were on our way! That was undoubtedly the shortest time I’ve ever taken on a haul out. We had time to visit the Morehead City yacht basin to take on fuel and motor the 15 miles to our anchorage in Back Creek before sunset.

On Tuesday we were once again away at dawn for a long slog into a cold NE breeze and a nasty chop on the Neuse River and Pamlico Sound. But with the chart plotter and auto pilot (to say nothing of a smooth, freshly-painted hull) things could have been a lot worse. We arrived home at 2:30, now loyal converts to Ted & Todd’s fantastic boatyard.

"SO WHAT DO YOU DO AROUND HERE IN THE WINTER?

It's a question I get asked all the time but I'm not always sure what it means. “What do Ocracoke's year-round residents do here in the winter?” “What do I do here in the winter?” “What is there for a visitor to do here in the winter?” These are all possible interpretations of the question.

First of all, people who have the contrivance to be elsewhere usually avail themselves thereof. My son, f'rinstance is off at college. Would I trade places with him? Twist my arm! My wife has taken our 7-year-old daughter and gone to spend a week in Columbus, Ohio where, even though it's miserably cold, they at least have snow to play around in (to say nothing of museums, bars, movie theatres and shopping malls.) Of all the family, it's just yours truly and our 15-year-old left to hold down the fort.

So let me tell you about today. My day here on Ocracoke only two days after the groundhog assured us six more weeks of this misery. I was dreaming away on the king-sized tempurpedic which I had all to myself when my alarm brought me rudely back into the harsh here-and-now. I could easily have rolled over and slept two or three more hours but I had to wake up my tenth grader and get her off to school.

This usually involves at least three rounds of negotiations finally culminating in death threats (but I no longer take them all that seriously).

After a breakfast of her home-made granola and yogurt along with two cups of coffee and a fistfull of meds (the joys of old age!), we rushed out the door and hopped on the golf cart (yeah, I've got one – if you can't lick 'em, join 'em – you're not going to get there any faster than the golf cart in front of you even if you're in a Ferrari!). Half way to the school we were both cold and wishing we'd brought the van.

Back at home I threw on a down vest and watch cap and took a brisk walk down to the docks to check on my vessels. Returning to the front yard, I noticed that the wind had blown over our recycling container so I walked over to pick it up and that put me in full view of our back screen porch whose door has been ripped to shreds by our cat. There were other tasks on my mental “to do” list, but it occurred to me that I bought some “pet resistant” screen at Lowe's three years ago for this very issue and never got around to replacing the screen.

Amazingly, I happened to remember where I'd put the screen (in the corner of my wife's office, where else?) so I went to get it along with the necessary tools. I methodically gathered together everything I'd need for the job. It seems like half the time I spend on any task is actually wasted in searching for a tool (like a pencil for Pete's sake!) which, as often as not, is behind my ear. I quickly saw that, in order to remove the aluminum molding that holds the screen, I would need a Philips screw driver. In my tool shed I was readily able to locate an assortment of screw drivers but the only Philips was a cordless drill bit and the drill, of course, was not in the shop. I'd left it on my boat. Or was it the other boat? Maybe my car? The one my wife drove to Ohio!

So I got on the golf cart and went down to the boat. I knew I had at least one Philips screw driver in the drawer that my cruising friend Bill calls “the place for everything.” That's in response to my telling him that my motto is “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Eureka! I found two Philips screw drivers and brought them both back to the house. But before I could remove the aluminum trim, I had to remove a rusted steel turnbuckle – one of those long gadgets that you have to turn once in a while to keep the bottom of the door from scraping the floor when it closes. It was too rusty to turn so I made a mental note to buy a new one at the hardware store.

After removing molding, trim and torn screen, I measured and cut the new screen. Then I hopped onto the golf card for a quick run to the hardware store for nails and the new turnbuckle. Of course they had what I needed but the turnbuckle, which I had expected to cost $2.50 or maybe $3.00 was $8.49 plus tax! “Outrageous!” I complained to Jim Piland, the unflappable clerk. “I'll go clean up my old one and put it right back.”

Back in my shop, I carefully placed the rusted turnbuckle in the vise on my work bench. Then I applied a liberal shot of “P.B. Blaster” to it (as well as to my vest and pants – that stuff really squirts!).

Then I clamped on the vise grips and gave it a hefty turn. “Snap!” So much for that thrifty idea.

A few minutes later in the hardware store Jim Piland rang up my purchase of a new turnbuckle with an inscrutable Budhistic smile.

On the way home it was time to pick up my girl for lunch. As we sat across the table from each other eating our soup and crackers it wasn't much like a scene from Ozzie & Harriet. She was feverishly texting on her phone while I read an article in the New Yorker. All too soon it was time to run her back to school. God forbid she should walk or bike the quarter mile jaunt down Back Road. Hard for me to understand since, like all members of my generation, I as a kid had to walk two and a half miles to school in the snow (up hill both going and coming!) but I digress...

Invariably when I take on a project like this screen replacement, there will be one tool or piece of material which I know I own but can't seem to locate and without which, of course, the job simply can't be done. After a long and futile search I always end up going to the hardware store to get a new such item. Then, when I finish using it, I carefully put it away – right next to the original item! In fact, in all my prior screen replacements, the needed item has been the little grooved roller thingy that presses the strip of rubber into the aluminum molding to secure the edges of the screen. Not this time. I remembered exactly where to find the tool. All three of them!

If my wife were here, no doubt we'd have had this conversation:

Wife: Rob, where are you?

Me: Out on the screened porch.

Wife: What are you doing?

Me: Replacing the screen on the door where the cat tore it up.

Wife: How long will that take?

Me: Probably about an hour.

And in a perfect universe it probably would only take an hour. But it's not a perfect universe; it's Ocracoke in the winter time. My house. My tools. Me doing the job. So what if, with one thing and another, I don't finish it until suppertime? There's nowhere in particular I need to be or anything in particular I have to do before some time in April when the place starts to come alive again.

WANNA GO SAILING?

Brrrr, me neither! Just looking at my schooner with her thin coating of ice is enough to reaffirm my admiration for the “iron men” who used to sail her wooden forebears far out into the freezing North Atlantic from New England and Canadian ports every winter in pursuit of the elusive codfish.

As I comfort myself with the knowledge that my boat is, after all, securely moored in a sheltered harbor and that in a couple of days, 60-degree temperatures will melt all the ice, I think of the men who would routinely climb the rigging with axes in gale-force blizzards to chop away the ice before it had time to amass enough weight to capsize the vessel. Just all part of a day's work!

If you are skeptical when someone says, “They don't make men like that anymore,” did you ever hear tell of Howard Blackburn? In January of 1883, this Nova Scotia-born Gloucester fisherman was dory fishing for halibut from the schooner Grace L. Fears off the coast of Newfoundland. In a sudden snowstorm, the 24-year-old Blackburn and his dory mate Tom Welch lost sight of the schooner. Welch gave up hope and died after the first night of bailing the dory and busting the ice off its rails but Blackburn continued on for five days at sea without food, water or sleep, rowing the dory (with Welch's corpse) 60 miles with his mittenless hands frozen around his oars until he reached the coast where he buried Welch before losing all of his fingers and one toe to frostbite. Returning to Gloucester in the spring, he opened a successful tavern where he amazed customers with his ability to palm coins off the bar with his fingerless hands.

But Blackburn never lost his love of adventure. In 1897 he joined a Klondike gold-prospecting schooner cruise around Cape Horn which ended in failure. Two years later he sailed the 30-foot sloop Great Western from Gloucester to England (alone and fingerless, no less)! And in 1901, he topped that by sailing the 25-foot sloop Great Republic from Gloucester to Portugal.

Of the Gloucester schoonermen Blackburn was among the more fortunate. He did, after all, live to the ripe old age of 72. As the Gloucester fishing fleet sailed out each winter, it was just a sad fact of life that some would not return. 1879 was probably their worst year with 29 schooners and a total of 240 men lost at sea. Of that number 13 schooners and 143 men perished in a single February gale.

And for what? Well, it all depended on luck. That and, of course, skill and backbreaking hard work. But if you didn't drown (and, as you can see, that was a pretty big IF) and if you managed to luck into a good catch of fish (another IF), you had a good chance of making a very decent living – two to three times the average family income. The fishermen were all paid in shares so they were likely to do better economically than their wage-earning brethren ashore if they could just manage to stay alive.

In my early schooner sailing days back in the 1980s, I was reading one of my favorite books on the Gloucester schooners, Fast & Able: Life Stories of Great Gloucester Fishing Vessels by Gordon W. Thomas,(1952). The book is full of detailed accounts and photographs of 76 schooners.

I read about the schooner Mary F. Curtis, one of two fishing schooners chartered by Hollywood film studios for the 1937 movie Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy. She carried cameras, film and equipment valued at $30,000 which was believed at the time to be the most valuable cargo any Gloucester schooner had ever had on board. The summer that I read that, I was sailing sunset cruises out of Hilton Head Island, S.C. And it occurred to me that it was a slow night indeed when my passengers on any given trip were not wearing more than that amount in clothes and jewelry!

I didn't contemplate turning pirate for more than a half hour before realizing that the number just seemed low because of a half century of inflation.

I have to admit that in this sort of weather, I'd a hell of a lot rather read a good book about sailing than go sailing myself. So if any of this has sparked your interest, in addition to Gordon Thomas's above-mentioned book, you might want to check out works of the late Joseph E. Garland. Like Down to the Sea: The Fishing Schooners of Gloucester, (Boston: David R. Godine, 1983) or Lone Voyager: The Extraordinary Adventures of Howard Blackburn Hero Fisherman of Gloucester, (Little, Brown 1963).

                                                          Howard Blackburn

Wilma Lee Returns to Ocracoke

                                          The skipjack was returned to her element on Thursday.

Wilma Lee is back at the dock in Ocracoke after nearly two months in the boat yard. Last Friday Tom Pahl, Bill Monticone, my son Emmet and I defied the time-honored sailors' superstition against beginning a voyage on Friday and made the 45-mile trip down the sound from Wanchese.

Sundae (my adoring wife) said, “What!? You're going to leave on Friday?” Well, leaving on a Friday might have been tempting fate, but waiting until Saturday would have guaranteed a miserable slog to weather in much colder temperatures and a gale on the nose. Been there. Done that. No thanks!

Years ago, a friend of mine who was a captain of large merchant vessels told me he was leaving in the morning for New York to take command of a container ship bound for Holland. Although the ship would be loaded and ready to depart at noon on Friday, they were not departing until 12:01 Saturday morning. I told him I was surprised that a large shipping company would be superstitious enough to waste time and money like that. “Oh the company's not superstitious,” he explained, “but the seamen are. If word got out that we planned to depart on a Friday, half the crew would jump ship!”

According to an old legend, the British Admiralty once became so annoyed at Jack Tar's reluctance to sail on a Friday that they set out to show how silly the superstition was. They commissioned a warship on a Friday, laid the keel on a Friday, Christened it “H.M.S. Friday” launched it on a Friday and sent it to sea on a Friday under the command of a Capt. Friday. Needless to say, she was neither seen nor heard from ever again!

Of course I don't believe all that bilge. I'm not superstitious. But before we reinstalled the mast I did place a Sacajawea dollar coin under the base of it, heads up. I couldn't believe the folks that last stepped the mast had overlooked that formality. Not superstitious mind you but hey, no point in being a damn fool about it!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Topping my list of resolutions is to post more stuff to this blog to keep my loyal readers abreast of the ever-changing developments with the various vessels with which I’m involved.

The skipjack Wilma Lee, after a reasonably busy first season, is high and dry in a boatyard in Wanchese.  Philip Howard, Hunter Collins, Steve Musil and I took her up there a few weeks ago for annual maintenance and a Coast Guard dry dock inspection.  We had hoped for a nice westerly wind to sail her up the sound but what we ended up with was no wind at all and pea soup fog for the entire trip!  Thank goodness for the chart plotter (GPS).  Only touched the bottom once (lightly) and that was on an uncharted shoal that had built out into the otherwise well-marked Old House Channel.

The inspection was the most rigorous I’ve ever seen.  We had to remove the mast (easier said than done with a 65’ 2000-lb cypress trunk!), drop the rudder to repair a small spot in the transom and replace a few of the stainless chain plate bolts. A couple of fatal rigging failures in Hawaii a few years ago have caused the Coast Guard to pay very close attention to masts and everything that supports them. The exam, which usually takes no more than an hour, involved two inspectors going over every inch of the hull and rig for 2.5 hours.

At least with the mast at ground level I was able to sand and refinish it without risking a neck-breaking fall.  All that remains is to paint the bottom with copper anti-fouling paint, re-launch, re-rig and bring her home.  With any luck, that’ll all be done before the end of next week.

MAKING HOOPS

It's hard to believe that less than a year has passed since the skipjack Wilma Lee assumed control of my life. The 95%-restored 72-year-old oyster dredger was donated to the local non-profit Ocracoke Alive, Inc. last February and with the help of a motley crew of enthusiastic volunteers and a generous grant from the Outer Banks Community Foundation, I went about the pursuit of a U.S. Coast Guard Certificate of Inspection to enable the old girl to carry passengers.

The certification process had become considerably more complicated since I'd last gone through it 27 years before with my schooner Windfall so it was not until October 3 that we finally received the Coast Guard's green light. That put us at the very end of the tourist season, just in time to turn our attention to all the cosmetic issues that had been put on hold during the more urgent business of obtaining the certificate. Most of this work involves cleaning, sanding, painting and varnishing but some of it deals with replacing worn out stuff.

I mentioned that the skipjack was 95% restored. The boat was originally built in Wingate, MD in 1940 by a famous shipwright named Bronza Parks. She dredged oysters on Chesapeake Bay until 1996 when, badly rotted, she was purchased by Herb Carden of Sandy Point, VA. Mr. Carden had a deep affection for the Chesapeake's work boats and a strong desire to preserve them. Fortunately for Wilma Lee, he also had a large lumber company! As Mr. Carden and his employees began to strip away the deteriorated wood, they soon realized the boat was in worse shape than expected. Practically everything except the keel, stem and spars had to be replaced with new material. But finally, in 2002, she was relaunched looking better than ever.

Along with the original spars, Mr. Carden retained the original mast hoops. These are laminated wooden rings (17 of them) which encircle the mast and attach to the luff (forward edge) of the main sail. To be honest, neither I, the two surveyors who checked out the boat nor the coast guard inspectors had paid much attention to the condition of these babies until (wouldn't you know it?), the day we had to take the coast guard inspectors on a sail. We hoisted the gigantic main sail, the wind billowed it out

and three of the mast hoops flew into pieces that showered down on us! Needless to say, there was a lot of throat clearing and eye rolling as I assured the inspectors that (a) we still have 14 hoops holding the sail in place and (b) we'd replace all of the hoops with new ones as soon as possible.

Well, last week Bill Monticone got down to the serious business of making new mast hoops. After scanning the internet for advice on how to proceed, he built a custom steam box out of PVC pipe, a molding wheel out of plywood, and proceeded to manufacture ash hoops. He asked me how I thought we should get the new hoops onto the mast (short of pulling the 65' cypress trunk clean out of the boat!). It was obviously a choice of either spiraling the hoops onto the mast like a key on a key ring and then fastening them together with rivets and/or bolts, or borrowing a bucket truck, going to the top of the mast, detaching all of the standing rigging (wires that support the mast), and dropping them down from the top.

I didn't know the answer but I did know that there was only one best way to do it and that Capt. Ed Farley would know what it was. Sure enough, a brief e-mail exchange with Capt. Ed told me exactly how to proceed (the key chain approach). It wasn't the first time I'd turned to Ed Farley for advice and I'm pretty sure it won't be the last. Followers of this erratic column may recall that he was the oyster-dredging captain who, on a cold day last March, took me and two other gluttons-for-punishment on an all day dredging trip out of Deal Island, MD. At the tender age of 61, he was far from the oldest of Chesapeake Bay's six remaining skipjack skippers. That distinction belonged to The Reverend “Daddy Art” Daniels who was exactly 30 years older! Last I heard from Capt. Ed, “Daddy Art” is still at it this year at 92.

I'm frequently asked by my passengers if I've been a sailor all my life and if I don't say, “not yet!” I usually say, “so far.” But I've always been quick to point out that I'm still just learning. If I thought I knew anything about sailboats and sailing, I've recently come to realize there was a lot I didn't know about skipjacks which are somewhat of a breed apart.. But it's been a relief and a pleasure to discover that the small but dedicated fraternity of skipjack owners consists of a terrific bunch of guys who are always happy to share what they know. This includes not only Capt. Farley but also Capt. Ben Bunn of the Ada Mae in New Bern, Capt. Wade Murphy of the Rebecca T. Ruark in Tilghman Island, MD, Capt. Jack Russell of Dee of St. Mary's in St. Mary's, MD and Capt. Frank Newton of the Nathan of Dorchester in Cambridge, MD. (There are several others but these are the ones whose advice I've requested and received). Pretty much all of them, myself included, are, like most of the Wilma Lee's volunteers, eligible for $1 cups of coffee at McDonald's. These vessels, which date back to the late 1880's, don't seem to hold much appeal for the younger generation of mariners.

Having been a great eater of oysters since my early teens, I also might have thought I knew a thing or two about Crassostrea Virginica (Atlantic Coast oysters). I even spent a summer of my college years at the University of Georgia Marine Institute at Sapelo Island working on a federally funded oyster study. But kind friends have recently lent me a great number of books about oysters: not only the biology but the history, economics and politics as well as the technology of cultivation, harvesting, transporting and cooking of these critters. Clearly I've got a lot to learn in that department as well but, hey, there's plenty of time. I'm not even seventy yet!

SKIPJACK WILMA LEE ARRIVES IN OCRACOKE

Ever since I gave up the original schooner Windfall, I've received scores of calls from people wanting to take  large groups sailing.  My little Windfall II is a terrific boat but can only accommodate 6 at a time. Well, we're finally working to address that problem.

On February 29, the local non-profit Ocracoke Alive Inc. received the donation of a totally reconstructed Chesapeake Bay skipjack, the Wilma Lee and I have been working with them in an effort to obtain Coast Guard approval for carrying thirty or more passengers.  The boat was built in 1940 in Wingate, MD by Bronza Parks and was used for dredging oysters right up until 1996 when she was purchased by Herb Carden of Sandy Point, Va.  Mr. Carden has a deep love of traditional Chesapeake Bay vessels and has restored a number of them but the Wilma Lee was by far his most ambitious project.  He hired master shipwright John Morgenthaler to tear the boat down to the keel and stem and reconstruct it with the best available materials.  (Fortunately, Mr. Carden happened to own one of the largest lumber mills in the Southeast!)  Wishing to put the vessel in a place where she would educate and entertain a wide public, he finally settled on Ocracoke.

Although skipjacks were designed in the late19th Century for dredging oysters on the Chesapeake Bay, they soon spread south to the sounds of North Carolina as Chesapeake oyster beds became depleted and over the next half-century many skipjacks were built and used in North Carolina.  One such vessel, the skipjack Ada Mae was built in Rose Bay (mainland Hyde County) in 1915 and is currently based in New Bern where the non-profit Coastal Carolina Classrooms uses it to educate school children about marine biology and environmental science.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Pahl, Steve Musil and I brought the vessel down from the Potomac River to her new berth at the Community Square Dock in Ocracoke where, with her 72' sparred length and 64.5' mast, she will be the most prominent feature visible to people arriving by ferry into Silver Lake.

You can find out more about the Wilma Lee and, ever better, get involved by visiting www.ocracokealive.org/skipjackwilmalee.

In an effort to learn more about how these vessels work, I went out on the skipjack H.M. Krentz last month out of Deal Island, MD for a day of oyster dredging and wrote about it in my wife's online newspaper, the Ocracoke Current.  (www.ocracokecurrent.com).

Next time you're on Ocracoke, come check out the new vessel!

SCHOONER WEATHER!

As I write this on one of the last days of January I'm down in the newly re-upholstered saloon of my schooner, sitting at the dinette table with the oil lamp swinging rhythmically overhead. The weather's fantastic! It's sixty-eight degrees with blinding rain and a southwest breeze of thirty knots gusting to forty. The little vessel is pitching and rolling in her dock slip with such spirit that it's easy to imagine myself at sea in any number of places she's taken me. Springsteen on the stereo. Life is good.

What a January it's been! Yesterday afternoon it was even warmer than this without all the wind and rain. As soon as my son Emmet got out of school I took him and three friends out for a sail. We went out to the end of Nine-foot Shoal Channel. As we beat back against the increasing breeze the sun began to set and we broke out our fleeces. The boy took the helm and I went below to brew a pot of tea. Back at the dock, as we were securing the boat and putting on the sail covers, we were even greeted by a few mosquitoes, kindly reminding us that summer is not really so far away.

Many thanks to Lou Ann Homan for the photos of Emmet.

Can it really be January 27th?

                                                                                   Rigging the "fisherman." 

 

Chilly as the sun set.

OCRACOKE'S NEW CURRENT

The big news this week is, well, the news! I'm referring to the brand new online news site, The Ocracoke Current which went active yesterday. This is the brainchild of my wife Sundae Horn and her partner in crime, Jenny Scarborough. These two industrious young women have been talking about doing something like this ever since they gave up collaborating on the Ocracoke Observer nearly a decade ago.  When they called in the assistance of internet expert Carol Pahl a couple of weeks ago it began to appear that the idea was more than just talk.  And then, early yesterday morning, voila!

They've dragged me aboard to contribute a regular weekly column entitled "The Shipping News."  Yeah, I know what you're thinking:  "They think Rob's going to make 'regular weekly' posts? In their dreams!"  So, as you can understand, I'll probably be pretty busy in the coming weeks and may not be able to keep up this blog with the dependable regularity you've come to expect.  Just kidding!

Actually, I think the girls have done a terrific job so far (if I say so myself).  But I hope that, rather than take my word for it, you'll check it out for yourselves:  www.ocracokecurrent.com.

If you like it, please spread the word!  Thanks. 

                                                                 Jenny and Sundae at work. (Mariah's with the band).