“I was conceived on a sailboat” someone once told me. Truly boats do shape our lives in odd and sometimes wonderful ways. I like to tell the tale of how a boat played matchmaker in my life. I met the love of my life through a shared interest in boating as he endeavored to revive an elderly wooden Lightning sloop. Oddly enough my sister two decades before that also met her husband to be through sailing. Boats can act as powerful intensifiers of human relations and emotions. Life long friendships evolve during sailing excursions and cruises. So can bitter divorces
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I have sailed in coastal waters, on the Chesapeake Bay, in the Caribbean and on one offshore voyage to Bermuda. After fifty plus years of boating, I still believe Lake Ontario has a lot going for it as far as sailing goes. It’s big enough to sometimes feel oceanic, and the relatively sparse population on New York shore has resulted in an almost always a manageable amount of boat traffic on the water. As soon as you get a mile or two offshore, you generally have the whole place to yourself. It’s a very different story along much of the East Coast. If it’s not lobster pots in Maine, it’s 40 foot sport fishermen roaring past and throwing huge wakes off New Jersey, or massive high speed ferries in New York harbor that present hazards aplenty to the Sunday sailor on saltwater.
During a half century of sailing obsession, I owned or co owned a number of small ship-lets ranging from 15 to 47 feet. The most memorable of those was the schooner Sara B, acquired on E bay nineteen years ago in November 2004.
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After the purchase, we were faced with the task of delivery from her home on Long Island’s Atlantic shore. UPS or Fed ex was not an option. Eventually we did find a boat hauler, but we had to get the elderly unknown ( and very leaky) wooden schooner up to Kingston NY to be picked up by the trucker. Here’s a short excerpt from “Living on the Edge With Sara B” detailing the start of that endeavor.
We awoke in stillness before dawn. No wind keened overhead and slapped our halyards against the masts. After a hasty breakfast we drove to the Jones Beach overlook to assess the ocean sea state as advised by Gene. A brilliant wintery sun lifted up over the Atlantic and gleamed on the ice of the frozen puddles in the parking lot around us. We could see the ocean was all but calm. At last. After four long days of waiting. Go Sara B go!
We cast off near the top of the tide with just a bit of flood remaining after saying farewell to Sara B's former owner. He glowered at me and barked you CALL me when you get to Kingston. Together he and I ran old glory up to the top of the main mast. I'll leave the dock lines out Gene said, as we shook hands and bid him good bye. But this time I think we all knew she was not coming back.
at her old dock in Long Island -an image from the ebay listing
It was bitterly cold even with three layers of clothes. But the exhilaration of getting underway at last mixed with the navigational demands of the maze-like back channels of the marsh made us forget our stiff fingers and cold toes. We sailed again with lookout, chart reader and helms person. The two brothers aboard were both red-green colorblind which made sorting out the confusion of channel markers particularly interesting. The third “navigator” suffered from severe chart dyslexia while attempting to decipher the multitude of twisting turning branching channels on the chart into a choice of going to port or starboard. We cut across one shoal only to realize it when the depth sounder read five feet, the minimum amount required to float our boat.
The spring tide had filled the channels brim full of wind ruffled blue water, and the early low sunlight of a November morning painted the marsh grass with a soft golden glow. Rafts of brant rested upon the wider backwaters, and several times distant flocks of shorebirds took swift flight before us. As they flew in tight formation turning and twisting, their dark backs and brilliant white bellies alternated like clustered small lights flashing and sparkling against the gold and blue horizon. Here and there a weathered bait shack stood solitary atop its stilts surrounded by prairie like marsh. The little huts were the only obvious sign of human life in this wilderness on New York City's doorstep. We didn't even see any Sunday sport fishermen out and about. Probably too cold.
This Wikipedia photo shows the Rockaway entrance we used. It also shows the maze of waterways we navigated to get to it from Jones Beach.Note the numerous boat wakes visible in this summer time photo!
The marsh before us spoke of the unknown, of hidden byways and mysterious cul-de-sacs. It looked like a superb place for smugglers and other illicit activity.For 300 years some of the baymen who once fished for fluke, hunted waterfowl, or otherwise lived off the marsh clamming and crabbing, used their intimate knowledge of its dendritic and obscure waterways to supplement income from their day jobs. The area has a centuries old history of smuggling and was a bootlegger's haven during the Prohibition era 1920's and that even today cigarettes, pot, cocaine, and probably a few human body parts for organ transplant and South American infants being sold for adoption still filter into New York City by some means. It seems likely that at least a portion of those goods are being transported by water. And it seems all but certain the marsh we traveled through remains an occasional silent witness to the darker side of humanity's activities.
We had to sit at the Rockaway Bridge for about an hour waiting for its grumpy tender's 11 am opening. We were grateful for the pale sun and the shelter from the north wind provided by a large waterfront restaurant as we idled there. Right on time the bridge opened just wide enough for a small gaffer's masts, and we motored the last mile into the channel entrance and the wide cold blue winter Atlantic.
Once clear of the marshes and in open water the urge to get sail on the old boat was irresistible. The brisk wind was offshore so the water was flat except for a slight swell-perfect conditions for three lubbers to try schooner sailing. It was about noon and our destination was only about ten miles away, so we figured we had plenty of time to sail.
And it would be wonderful not to listen to the thundering motor while breathing fumes from its very leaky exhaust manifold which had filled the cabin below with a thick blue haze. Long after the cruise, the clothes I had taken aboard retained the distinctive fragrance of diesel exhaust and fuel.
We hoisted sail working from back to front, though we decided in view of the fresh breeze that sang in our rigging, that the outer jib wasn't needed. No one wanted to climb out on the jib boom to take the sail cover off anyway. Sara B leaned to the wind and went to work with a will marching along over the easy swell. We monitored the bilge pumps anxiously and stayed within a mile of shore and were reassured to see no dramatic increase in the leak. It's only twenty feet deep here, we told ourselves. If she goes down on an even keel, the top of the mainmast will still be above water. We can hang on to that until someone rescues us. The salt sea foamed and hissed away from her bows, and we listened to the mournful sigh of the wind through her rig.
With no jib up forward Sara B had a bit of a weather helm, but otherwise her behavior was exemplary. We were thrilled with our new ship, and our joy of sailing her for the first time on a wintry afternoon chased away the chill. We took turns steering, and Toby and I each made a trip forward to stand braced against the foremast with an arm around it, where we could listen to the surge and rumble of her bow wave and feel her lift to the swell. What a grand little ship we cried in delight. Look at her go! We hugged the mast tightly as we stood on the slanted deck and gazed aloft at her twin mastheads with Old Glory streaming against the cold cloudless sky.
Before we knew it, her effortless glide had carried us to the entrance of Sheepshead Bay. We would have kept sailing gladly, but already at 3:30 the sun was growing low, and the cold was getting sharper. Days are short in mid November. So we furled her white wings, fired up the engine, and thumped up the channel to the calm anchorage behind Coney Island where a surprising number of boats were still afloat. We picked up an empty mooring and settled in for the night
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Surrounded by apartments, sirens, traffic, and all the intensely urban activity of Brooklyn, Sara B spent her first night on the road to a new life. She had left her quiet little hole with its electric outlet behind Gene's house forever, and I couldn't help but wonder how the move to fresh water would work out for the old girl. She seemed willing enough to give it a try. So far.
By 10 am the next we were passing lower Manhattan, location of the South Street Seaport, one time home to Sara B. Gene had told us a previous owner had lived aboard her year-around there at his place of employment where he worked as a museum ship keeper. We wondered if Sara B would miss the bustle and traffic of her old home's tidal waters by the big city. Thinking of the cracked lodging knee I'd noticed back aft along with several large putty filled areas on her well worn topsides and of the almost constant three foot ferry wakes slamming ashore against the steel bulkheads here, I thought perhaps she won't miss it too much. But after New York City’s harbor with its ferries, ships, tugs, barges, tour boats and fishing boats all in a tearing hurry to get somewhere, how quiet and dull the waters of tide-less Lake Ontario might seem to her.
This photo was many taken years before we bought the boat. Sara B was then named John A Noble or “JAN” for short. Her then owner photographed the famous marine artist as he cuts the cake for his friend’s newly christened schooner. Sara B led an interesting life among the old salts of Gotham to be sure!
The sun rose higher and took the edge off the chill as Sara B plugged along past the ferry terminals, the rotting and broken piers where once the grandest ocean liners in the world had docked, and continued on her way to Yonkers and the Palisades. I snapped a shot of the Empire State building in the distance. We passed a ferry unloading. A stream of office workers like a line of black ants marched ashore in single file each with a briefcase, each busy with thoughts of the day's deals to be made. Two hundred yards away in another reality, three anxious travelers upon a wide and empty river were trying their best to get their slowly sinking schooner delivered to her new home. A million people lived and worked within a half mile of us and none of them cared. The city and the vast indifference of its sea of humanity to us felt a bit like the open ocean's neutrality toward human struggle.
Another photo from the boat’s former owner, as they chug out for a sail. Note Brooklyn Bridge astern
The day warmed up and grew soft and sweet as only those rare last few Indian summer days of late fall can be. The engine kept chugging and Sara B kept floating, and above Haverstraw Bay the Hudson became increasingly scenic. We began to think she might make it.
For the rest of the story my sailing memoir Living on the Edge With Sara B is available from my Etsy store for $8.99 (free shipping)bookstore here
Sara B aka. Windsong, departed Cape Charles, VA. for the Great Schooner Race. After completion she is now Wintering in Norfolk, VA. Returning to Cape Charles in March 2024.