Looking astern at nearly 60 years of sailing-
and how things have changed
sunset off Pultneyville Harbor about 20 years ago
When I, along with lots of other baby boomers, began my sailing ‘career’ in 1968, sailboats were relatively expensive as the hobby was then quite popular, and access to the water wasn’t. Things have certainly changed since the days of cedar and mahogany Lightnings built from kits and sleepy algae covered back water harbors with their green frog chorus and flocks of pan handling mallards. We’re the old salts now. What memories from a half century or more do you have of your first adventures under sail?
There were still some K boats built locally at a shop on Keuka Lake sailing in the 1970s
I didn’t ‘discover’ the grand hobby of yachting until my early teens when my best friend’s family acquired an elderly day sailor built a quarter century before. They sailed it out of Pultneyville harbor, a lightly developed shallow gunkhole that still harbored muskrats and herons and a few water snakes. I remember one elderly wooden catboat that spent most of the summer awash on the bottom of its two foot deep slip. A large snapping turtle often climbed aboard and was seen sunning itself in the cockpit.
Back then elderly wooden boats generally had to ‘soak up’ for a few days to swell their planking for tight seams.(I guess the catboat never did that year.) This ritual, at least for boats with inboard engines, was sometimes fraught with the unexpected or even outright panic if it had been a hot dry spring or someone accidentally unplugged the sump pump. At least if the engine took a swim here, it was freshwater, though a couple of oil changes were usually in order. I suspect almost no one around here remembers those good old days
Not many big old gaffers around the south shore of the lake now…
Most of the ‘yachts’ then making up the PYC fleet were small day sailors or pocket cruisers like the little plywood Corsair or the 20 foot twin keel British built Vivacity. I recall a half dozen cruisers seaworthy enough to cross the lake to Canada, the largest being a 28 foot fiberglass Triton. A wooden 23 foot sloop, a True Rocket, belonging to a good friend of my Dad was a pretty typical size of a PYC cruiser back then. The True Rocket was as pokey little round bottom sloop built on the north shore of Massachusetts by A.R. True. I suppose back when Sputnik was making news headlines, ‘rocket’ conjured up all sorts of glamour to the staff of what was surely the boat shop’s extensive marketing department.
More than half a million Sunfish sailboats have been built since the first 1952 kit for a woodie was sold.
We shared the privately owned harbor with another sailing club. Many of its members raced Sunfish in the summer and enjoyed skiing in the winter. The Sunfish became popular after fiberglass production began in 1959. The Pultneyville Mariners were “real” sailors in my eyes as they surfed the big waves with little boats that were easily righted after a capsize.
Early CCA era fiberglass boats included a line made by the Chris Craft company-I’m told Sill’s had a “dealership” for them back in the 1960s. This one is the 32 foot Cherokee.
By the late 1960s fiberglass was rapidly transforming the general yachting world. As a result there were plenty of wooden Lightning day sailors around that had been traded in for a ‘modern’ plastic hull. Many of woodies including ours were nearing the end of a biodegradable boat’s expected 20 year lifespan. My father began a campaign to acquire one by subscribing to the Rudder magazine in my mother’s name and buying several how to books. She didn’t need a lot of persuading though. My mother was not lacking in courage, and she enjoyed being on the wide skies and waters of the lake at least when winds were gentle.
In the 1960s few women owned a yacht, but we had at one point three female Lightning skippers in our fleet. Rochester’s yachting scene was home to a couple of well known female boat owners who raced and cruised around the lake at a time when some clubs still refused full memberships to single women. Times have changed! In 2024 a 29 year old named Cole Brauer became the first US woman to finish in a solo race around the world. She just missed first place and was ‘followed’ by a half million Instagram fans.
Today nearly all the cheap old wooden cruisers are long gone. Even the tired ‘canal crawler’ motor yachts are few and far between. Summer dockage is likely to cost as much as the going price of an old fiberglass thirty footer and good luck getting it. For some of us, the cheerful putter of the gas powered auxiliary engine has given away to the nearly inaudible hum of an electric motor. And we certainly don’t dash across the lake to a Canadian harbor and return the next day without notifying customs. But the summer winds still blow and the open lake still calls with that infinite unbroken horizon.
Got a good “sea story” to share? Send it along for some winter reading. Otherwise you’ll have to put up with some more Sara B memoir…