Sam Smith - Harry Parker was a genial man with a hearty laugh who ran the boatyard in South Freeport and had a workboat called the Can Do, the motto of the Seabees. Harry Parker was a survior 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 my father and 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. After my mother died, 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; even decades later hundreds of gallons remained.
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 sailers ever 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.
My
sister Meredith claims that I used to take a paperback book with me to
occupy the time during frequent calms and that I would tear out the
pages and dump them overboard when I was finished with them.
There
were races when the whole fleet would anchor in the calm 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 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 Moshiers Island during a
thunder squall, and so I eyed the 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.