The first time I actually went out on a sailboat, it was on a US-1, on a race, on a blustery, rainy day in maybe late April or early May. Which, in New England, means it was also cold once you got about 100 feet offshore. There were 6 of us on the boat, which is 2 too many. Two of us — Stanton and I — had never sailed before. Stanton, as you may recall, was Dan’s roommate at the time, and Archie’s coauthor. He is a big, funny, smart, self-centered somewhat awkward city guy. Ed McMann, the owner and skipper of the boat, put Stanton into the cabin to get him out of the way. His job was to be ballast, and to bail when needed. Now, the cabin on a US-1 is a pathetic affair about 4′ high at its greatest height and no wider than that at its greatest width and wet on the bottom. It has no amenities like portholes (or a head, for that matter). With the hatch off, Stanton could at least stand up straight. Now, the problem was that the mainsail boom stood only about a foot and a half above the deck, which put Stanton into a perilous position when he stood up straight. But never mind Stanton. On to me. I, too, had to be gotten out of the way. I was assigned a position on the aft deck. This wasn’t bad when we were on a reach or a run, but when we were heading up and the boat heeled over, I had only a small (about 1-inch-high) little piece of wood trim (one about halfway between the edge and the center line on each side) to keep my feet on and a jury-rigged line down the center to hang on to. And I had to switch feet around whenever we came about in order to avoid getting dumped into the ocean. My job was to avoid getting dumped into the ocean when we came about, since we had to finish the race with the same number of crew with which we started it. My other job was when we jibed to shout, “Stanton, duck!” So we completed the race in this fashion, and when we got to the committee boat they had a flag up that meant, “Sail the prescribed course twice.” Have I mentioned yet that it was very cold, windy, and raining? But did McMann ask anybody if we wanted to go around the prescribed course twice? No! It was “Ready about!” and “Hard alee!” and off we went around the prescribed course twice. Did I say yet that it was raining? And cold? So after we sailed the prescribed course twice and finished the race and got back into the harbor and tucked the boat in for the night and managed to hail the launch to take us back to land, Dan told me with considerable trepidation that he was afraid to ask what I thought about sailing. And I told him the truth. I told him that I loved it.

Sometimes it would dawn bright and crisp and colorful and windy as all get-out on an October morning, and I’d try to get Dan to go out sailing. But he’d say it was too windy. He’d say he was worried the mast might snap or something because we had no way to reef down that huge mainsail. (This was not an unrealistic concern. The mast on one of the US-1s did snap once in a race. So I’d argue that we could sail on the jib, but he said no, just no, but if I could talk one of the other two owner/skippers into it, then I could go with them. But needless to say, I couldn’t. A lot of perfectly good wasted autumn sailing days.

Thanks for the memory, Charlie.

That was on the 3-boat. Later, Dan and three other people bought the 2-boat, and we spent many a spring weekend day getting her into good enough shape to put her back in the water again. We sold “shares” in sailing for the season to help finance the cost of maintenance. Old wooden boats are not cheap. Usually, we got about a dozen people to chip in for the season, with the hope that we could get four or five for any given race. This was easy in June when the experience was new, but hard in August when the wind died down and a race could take all day. I never cared so much for August sailing, when it could take us three or four hours inching around the course in what passed for wind, and then after we finished and came in sight of the harbor even those pathetic little last breaths of wind would die out, and we’d sit there becalmed just looking at the harbor and not able to get to it, drinking beer and rowing when we got the energy (remember that 2-ton lead keel?) until the stinkpots came out and rescued us. They used to love doing that because we’d be so bloody grateful to them (and we were, too) when they know we really despised them (and we did, too).

The other problem is that in any given year, about half the crew had never sailed before. So there you are in the middle of a race and every second is critical, and the skipper (who is, of course stuck to the tiller) shouts, “Ease off on the topping lift!” And everyone looks at one another and wonders, “The what?!?” The only solution, of course, is to label everything. Thank you, Dymo. TOPPING LIFT, of course. Never mind what it is. Here is where it is. And not just the topping lift. Also PORT and STARBOARD. Lest we forget.