The Chief and I: A Concrete Dream

By George H. Brisbin

As a young boy, the author met a retired schooner captain by chance. They both admired an abandoned one-hundred-foot schooner hull on a sandbar near the captain's home in Tampa Bay. The captain assured the boy that the hull could be salvaged and repaired to sail again, but it never was.

Years later the author remembered the vision that the captain had about rebuilding the hull. The author was working for the Panama Canal Company, where an unused ferro-cement schooner belonging to Explorer Ship 8 of the Boy Scouts of America was sitting idle at a dock. Pushed by his teenage son to "get the Chief fixed up" so the scouts could sail her, the author took on the project.

Finding a way to raise money for repairs was the first challenge. After that, it was a day-by-day struggle to bring the schooner back to a seaworthy condition. This book documents the hard work, pressure, and growth that both the teenagers and the participating adults went through as they brought an impossible dream into reality. The Chief participated in the tall ship parade of the US Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, in New York harbor and then sailed back to Panama.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636925516

Book preview

cover.jpg

The Chief and I: A Concrete Dream

George H. Brisbin Jr.

Copyright © 2021 George H. Brisbin Jr.

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-63692-550-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63692-551-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

In remembrance

In honor and memory of those who have already taken their last voyage

Captain Vernon Whitehead

Delores Soule, RN

Dr. Charles Latimer

Mr. Nicolas Benton

For tho’ from out my bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Foreword

This writing represents roughly twenty years of on-and-off-again jotting and thinking. My wife, after proofreading the first draft, asked, What is the purpose of this? That question remains. First, I thought this, and then I thought that, but, well, it might be… I still have not really settled that question in my mind.

I would like to think that the purpose is to tell the story of this project in the hope of encouraging someone else to pursue at least one dream in their lifetime. Despite criticism, setbacks, and dozens of other things that came up, we were able to see a dream come true: restoring a reef wreck of a concrete boat using oodles of teenage and adult help and then sailing that boat northward over deep water to the gigantic Bicentennial Parade of Sail.

My writing began in 2002, and now it is late 2020. We never had the full support of the Panama Canal Company that I longed and looked for almost daily, yet some of its most important leaders were among our best supporters. This project had a profound impact on the lives of those who participated, both young and old, but especially the young. We all learned lessons about life and how to live with others, including those who do not agree with us.

Besides the group of workers who transformed the Chief from the reef wreck that she was into a functioning sailboat once again, there was a small army of workers who took care of major and minor things, such as obtaining permission from the Panama Canal Company to represent the Canal Zone at the Bicentennial Parade of Sail and negotiations with the school system to allow the young men and women who would sail the Chief out of school early. Then there were those who kept the checkbook and tracked our money, as well as those who worked to raise the money. Eventually they were able to raise over $40,000, which is about $190,000 in 2020 dollars, to repair the Chief and support her on the voyage.

Lastly, as the writing about this project draws to a close, it is about four years until the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I hope the story of this project will foster new ideas and new dreams for that celebration and that many will get to be involved in similar projects for that event.

Acknowledgments

Iacknowledge the mercy of God, the hard lessons of life taught to me by my parents, and the love of boats instilled by an old sailing captain for the inspiration and tenacity to accomplish this trip. Each was instrumental in returning our young crew safely to their parents after the voyage to New York and back to Panama.

I wish to acknowledge the four brave adults who shared the voyage with me, taking on burdens and responsibilities that none of us could have understood in advance. I called them the ship’s officers, and they proved themselves not only capable but great companions to have on this adventure.

Then we have the crew, an assorted group of twenty-odd high-school-age youngsters who could achieve anything once they set their sights on it. Some worked on the project briefly, while others dedicated months of their young lives to the project. Not everyone who participated ended up on the voyage, but many did. They all contributed to the vitality and enthusiasm that made the project possible.

Behind all of this, there was a group of people from the Canal Zone community who, at some level and for some reason, were involved in making the dream come true for the rest of us.

After nearly half a century, I cannot personally offer my gratitude in person to you all. But please allow me to say Thank you to everyone who helped bring the dream in this story to reality.

Finally, and foremost, I am ever indebted to my loving wife, Lois. Her intelligence, optimism, and faith carried me over countless sandbars and lifted my sails in the deepest of doldrums. This is my story, and it is our story. Thank you, Lois.

The route of the Chief May 22,1976 to August 30,1976

Chapter 1

The Beginning

Everything has a beginning and end. Most of the time they are hard to locate.

For me, the Chief Aptakisic story started on the banks of Tampa Bay when I was around ten years of age. Just south of Gandy Bridge on the Tampa side of Old Tampa Bay, hard aground on a sandbar, was the hull of a schooner over a hundred feet long.

From the shore, she looked to be in fair shape. Just north of the bridge by a couple of miles, Captain Pop Lightner lived on Shotgun Creek. Pop was a schooner captain out of Maine who had washed up on the beach in Tampa like that schooner. It was there he swallowed the hook (sailor talk for retiring). My father met him one night, fishing for snook, and he became a good friend of the family and a great source of stories for me.

Many times, Pop and I talked about the schooner on the sandbar. She was a grand sailor, he would tell me, seeming to have some knowledge of her before she went aground and lost her rig, though he never claimed any ties to her. He told me how she should be rigged and would make a fair living, for someone if she were fixed up. In 1949, Pop died, and in 1953, I graduated from high school. I went into the Army in 1954.

In 1955, while home on leave, I discovered that the hull had been blown up by the Coast Guard. They had inspected her and found that in a storm surge produced by a hurricane, she would most likely float off the sandbar and wreck into something. When I found that she was missing, I think a small part of me went missing. Before I went into the Army, I built models of ships just to learn how the hull should be fitted out. Now both Pop and the schooner hull were gone, but one thing did remain: my love for boats.

In 1959 Lois and I got married and the next year welcomed our first child, a son whom we named John. I spent a summer helping repair a Nova Scotia fishing schooner that was going into the Caribbean charter trade. As time passed, I learned to sail. I had been in a liberal arts college in Aurora, Illinois, preparing to enter a seminary and go into mission work. I struggled with classes, and I kept coming back to drafting- and engineering-type jobs as I tried to support our family. I became a college drop-out in 1960 after John was born. In 1963 friends convinced Lois to encourage me to go back to college and get my engineering degree. I was accepted into North Carolina State University.

I graduated from North Carolina State in 1966, and we lived for five years in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I owned a National One-Design sailboat. She was a tough nineteen-foot racing boat designed in 1936, and she taught me much about sailing, including how to get wet without capsizing. We moved back to Tampa in 1971, and we had a small sailboat there. Mid-1974 found my family (Lois, John, George Allen, Ruth, Rachel, and me) on an airplane bound for a new job working for the Panama Canal Company in Central America—a new job and a place that would change my life in more ways than one.

At Tampa International Airport, as we were getting ready to leave, I bought a Sail magazine. While reading it on the plane, I noticed an article about a giant parade of sailboats that would be in New York Harbor on July 4, 1976.

As soon as we landed, the magazine drifted to the back of the hall closet, and I settled into my new job. Our sponsor told us about a Boy Scout trip to Ecuador, and John, age fourteen, could go on it if he signed up right away. John was eager to go, and we signed him up. It was August 1974, and things were getting ready to change.

It was a cold, wet, misty Saturday morning when John and the other Sea Explorers returned. As we left the pier at Rodman Naval Base, John pointed to a sailboat at a nearby floating pier just visible in the fog and said, She belongs to the Scouts and needs a captain to take her sailing.

The next weekend John coaxed me into going over to look at the sailboat. He did not have to work too hard at it because I am always ready to look at boats. A few weeks later John and I took Lois and the rest of the family over to see the Chief Aptakisic, a six-year-old fifty-three-foot ferro-cement schooner. She had been acquired by Ship 8 Sea Scouts following a lawsuit by a towing company against the owner of the schooner for towing her off a reef and back into Balboa Harbor, or so the story went.

Cotton sails rot quickly in the tropics, and cotton was what the Aptakisic had for sails. John and I put up the sails to let them dry as the family was sitting on the stern talking about the boat. She needed a lot of work before it would be safe to drop mooring lines.

At that time there was a destroyer lying over against the pier where John had landed from his trip. Lots of Navy brass was coming and going, but the day was still quiet. Suddenly the wind shifted just enough to carry the main gaff on the Chief over to the other side, but not the boom. This had the effect of creating a goosewing jibe that split her mainsail from leach to luff. Everything that was noisy went quiet as the navy officers looked over at the mess. I thought I heard groaning—maybe it was me. By this time, I told John that we could take the schooner out for a trial sail, but the splitting of the mainsail now presented a large problem to that promise.

Discussions with Dr. Charles Latimer, scoutmaster for Sea Explorers Ship 8, were disappointing. He explained that there was no money to repair the Chief. The Sea Explorers is one of the lesser-known divisions of the Boy Scouts of America and received little funding from anybody. Not that Dr. Latimer did not want to see the Chief repaired and sail again, but there just was not any money. Money was going to be a big problem unless we could find a way to raise a lot of money to repair and outfit the Chief. The Chief needed a worthwhile purpose. A purpose? Where was that Sail magazine?

Frank Braynard was the general manager of Operation Sail 1976 and organizer of the Parade of Ships from all over the world. In a letter, I asked him if a boat as