Fun With Sailboats

By Peter Brennan

Fun With Sailboats by Peter Brennan

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644623787

Peter Brennan

Peter Brennan researches the difference between competitive and cooperative humans.

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Fun With Sailboats

Peter Brennan

Copyright © 2018 Peter Brennan

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2018

ISBN 978-1-64462-376-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64462-378-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Sailing the Mighty Pearson 30 Oyster Bay to Block Island, 1998

On the Mist of Avalon

Sailing the Irish Tall Ship Asgard II

Asgard II Again

Asgard II Last Time Around

A Motorcycle Trip

Regata del Sol al Sol 2010Sailing Race St. Petersburg, Florida, to Isla Mujeres, Mexico

Tall Ship ThalassaIreland to Germany, 2013

St. Petersburg, Florida, to Habana, Cuba, 2017

Well, That Didn’t Go as Planned.

Bonus

To the love of my life, Susan, who humored me and kept the home fires burning while I was out having fun. I hope to always be your sunny sailor boy.

The storm has pretty much blown itself out. We cut through Plum Gut, rounding Orient Point, and hang a hard left. The wind is still strong, but now it’s steady, predictable, and useful. No longer howling and gusting. No longer frightening. Not that we were ever frightened. The sky is still one black cloud, but not hanging so low as it was. The waves are more like ripples. And now the wind is blowing great ragged windows in that blanketing black cloud. There’s a monstrous full moon behind there. The cloud is thick. When the moon is not near one of the openings, the night is black. Then the edge of one of the holes lights up bluish silver. When the moon, the whole moon, shines through, it’s bright enough to cast shadows, bright enough to read by.

And now I’m so relaxed I’m giddy. I didn’t notice the tension building, but I feel it draining away. And suddenly, I notice the phosphorescence. The hull, the keel, and the rudder leave a trail of a million sparkles, a green-white glow. One moment, the moon is shining brightly, reflected in every ripple on the surface of the water. The world is blue and silver. The next moment, the sky and sea are black as pitch except the green-white sparks glowing in our wake. And now it starts to rain. It’s not a hard driving rain, but it’s definitely not a drizzle or mist. The raindrops are as big as marbles, and they’re plopping down, splashing down on the surface of the Long Island Sound. I can see the splashes, maybe forty yards in every direction, and every splash makes a green-white flash.

Introduction

The main thing that you, the reader, need to understand for this book to make any sense is—I am not a serious sailor. I’ve always had a day job; just trying to squeeze in a little sailing on the side. The only formal boating or sailing classes I’ve taken had the word basic right at the beginning. Basic Keelboat Sailing, Basic Coastal Cruising, and so on. Never been part of any prestigious racing program or anything like that.

My first introduction to sailing came when I was about nine years old. My dad sent in however many carton tops from Kool cigarettes, and one day the UPS man brought a big box to the house. In the box was an eleven-foot Styrofoam sailboat with the Kool logo emblazoned on the sail. My dad and I put the hull on some sawhorses, and put a fiberglass shell over the Styrofoam. I remember the fiberglass cloth looked so soft and smooth that I had to touch it without gloves, although my dad warned me not to. Boy, did it cut up my hand. Lesson learned the hard way. A pattern that has persisted to this day.

Our family did camping vacations, pulling a pop-up Coleman camper behind a station wagon. We would tie the boat to the roof of the station wagon, and sail around the little ponds and lakes that we camped on the shores of. Eventually, the folks bought a little cabin on a lake upstate New York. Then the folks moved to Colorado, and I went off to college in Florida. The summer after my freshman year, I was staying with a school friend in New Jersey. My folks had sold the cabin and asked me to pick up some of their personal belongings. My friend had a car, so we made a road trip of it, and one last time for me to enjoy the lake. Well, I had sailed the little boat before, and thought I remembered how. I sailed it across the little lake, but I was completely unable to sail it back. After a frustrating couple of hours having no success at all, I dropped the sail, jumped into the water, and swam across the lake, pulling the boat by its bowline.

Lucky for me, my college was on Boca Ciega Bay, St. Petersburg, Florida, and they had a wonderful waterfront program. That September, I enrolled in a basic sailing course. No credits, but also free. We sailed Flying Juniors (FJs). After I successfully completed the course, I was entitled to check out a boat and sail on the bay any time I had some free time. Best of all, that was also free. I just left my student ID at the boathouse and got it back after I had returned the boat, life jacket, and everything, cleaned up and put away nicely. I joined the sailing team for a short while, but I had to work a lot of hours to pay my bills, and I couldn’t make the practices. But I did continue to sail whenever I had a couple of free hours and no money, for the next three years, until I graduated.

After college, I couldn’t find a decent job for a couple of years. I worked for minimum wage, $3.35 an hour. Just barely made rent and lived on ramen noodles. But I had the Styrofoam Kool boat. We had tied it to the top of my friend’s car and brought it down from upstate New York.

Although my friends and I were very poor, we lived near the beach. I grew sugar baby watermelons in the yard. We would get chicken leg quarters for thirty-nine cents a pound, some cheap beer like Old Milwaukee, a $1.99 charcoal grill, some of my watermelons, and go have barbecues on the beach. I had an old Dodge van, and I would tie the Kool boat to the roof, so I never had to do any of the grilling. I would take everyone sailing, one at a time. I don’t know how we got two adults into that boat at one time, but we did. I guess we were very skinny.

After a couple of years, I got a job teaching high school social studies in Miami. I didn’t like the job. My students were a bunch of juvenile delinquents. But I loved having the summer off! I saved every penny I could, and within a few months, bought a twenty-two-foot MacGregor sailboat. During the school year, I kept it on a trailer, and drove it to Crandon Park, on Key Biscayne. There I would raise the mast, hang the seven-and-a-half-horsepower Johnson outboard on the outboard bracket, and sail around Biscayne Bay. When school let out for the summer, I got a slip at Homestead Bayfront Park and started sailing to Elliott Key, Sands Key, and through Sands Cut to snorkel on the reefs of Biscayne National Park. My good friend and fellow teacher, Ed, had a summerhouse on Key Largo, very close to Largo Sound and John Pennekamp State Park. I started trying to sail down to there. Like the incident with the fiberglass and so many incidents since, I learned the hard way, by trying things that didn’t work very well. My first attempt, my dad and brother were visiting from Colorado. We made it from Homestead to Elliott Key all right on the first day. That’s not too hard, eight or ten miles across Biscayne Bay. There’s docks, bathrooms, and showers on Elliott Key, part of the facilities of Biscayne National Park. There’s too many mosquitos to spend the night at the docks, but you can tie up and run in to use the bathroom and showers, and dump your garbage in a trash can. Then get offshore as fast as possible. A couple hundred yards off, you can drop anchor and not be tormented by the mosquitoes. The next day, we sailed north to Sands Cut, out into the Atlantic, and then started south along Elliott Key. The plan was to get to South Sound Creek on Key Largo, then motor the last two or three miles into Largo Sound. The whole trip was about forty miles, so I figured it wouldn’t be too far for a day. Ten hours at four knots. Pretty easy, right? I told Ed we would meet him that evening in Key Largo.

Well, we didn’t make four knots. At least not in the right direction. I seem to remember the wind was out of the south. We made good time going east, out into the ocean. And we made good time going west, back toward the shore. But going south was not happening. I didn’t even realize for hours that we weren’t going to make it. Thank God, there is another way into Largo Sound that I hadn’t even bothered to check out on the charts—North Sound Creek. I was also just lucky in that there were some homes and seawalls just at the mouth of this creek. We tied up to the seawall just as it was getting dark, left the boat, and walked to the Captain’s Cabin Bar and Grill where we got some dinner, drank some beers, and watched a girl in a short skirt play pool. Then we walked back to the boat, where we were devoured by mosquitos all night long. Next morning, we motored the three miles or so down the creek to Largo Sound, anchored, and rowed ashore in a rubber raft. It’s maybe a half mile walk to Ed’s place. When we found him, it turned out he was watching the same girl play pool the night before.

So I guess I learned something on that trip. How far you get in a day of sailing depends on how much wind there is, and the direction in which it is blowing, especially relative to the direction you plan to go in. I learned so many other things the hard way that summer and the next. Sailing back north from Key Largo one day, when the wind was blowing out of the east, I took my eyes off the lee shore for what seemed a very short time, and went aground on the beach. Using the Turkey Point power plant stacks as a landmark, I thought we had cleared them and were to the north of them, close to Homestead. But that was because the boat was pointed to the northeast. When I pointed directly north, I realized we were still well short of clearing the stacks. I got caught out in the Atlantic after dark one night, and had to navigate Caesar’s Creek in the dark. Caesar’s Creek is on the south end of Elliott Key, so it makes the trip to and from Key Largo quite a bit shorter. But it’s about three and a half miles long and very twisty. And it’s bordered by sand banks that are submerged, but only about a foot deep. Trying not to run aground on the sandbanks in the dark was a learning experience. After that, I bought a hundred thousand candlepower searchlight. With that light, I figured I could sail from Homestead to Elliott Key at night, when it wasn’t so hot, and there was much more wind. Didn’t think to check if they were doing night time search and rescue exercises from Homestead Air Force Base that night. There were helicopters, much brighter searchlights than our own, speeding Zodiacs, loud and frightening noises. This was before the advent of GPS. There was loran at the time, but I didn’t have money for that kind of stuff. I used a compass and a chart and relied on visually checking everything. That must be this thing on the chart. Well, the light was good for seeing things up to maybe a hundred yards away. After we got away from the search and rescue exercise, I no longer had any definite idea exactly where we were, other than somewhere in water. Unfortunately, there weren’t any identifying marks within a hundred yards. Just dark sky and dark water. My best guess put us west of the south part of Elliott Key, not far from Caesar’s Creek. If we were anywhere near there, we’d come up on the lee side of Elliott Key or Old Rhodes