1958: KOLLEGEWIDGWOK’S INTRODUCTION TO THE GLASS ATLANTIC:
“A-58” in ‘58

The Kollegewidgwok Yacht Club’s Atlantic fleet and I turned 75 this year. We also share another milestone: Fifty years ago, I graduated from college and the first glass Atlantic joined the Kollegewidgwok fleet. Herewith is a narrative log of Lucero’s passage from Saugatuck to Blue Hill.

In the spring final exam week at Union College I received a letter from Dr. Edwin Pyle, in Blue Hill, that read in part: “I hear you bought an Atlantic and that you are sailing it to Blue Hill. I would like to go with you, if you will be sailing nights as well as days.”

His letter was well timed. Departure date was rapidly approaching; I was having second thoughts about doing the trip alone. For all my single handed bravado in sailing about Blue Hill Bay in the “J” boat Ranger, I was unfamiliar with Atlantics, as with the waters I would be making the passage through, and the prospect was making me squeamish. Graduation day was approaching even faster. With the press of exams hovering over me, I put Dr. Pyle’s letter aside and turned my attention to the courses I had neglected all year.

I had hoped to be on my way by June 20th. Inevitably, the departure day slipped. Minor but important last minute chores insinuated themselves into the picture. Even though Mother had given me some money as a graduation present to help defray expenses, I did some things on the cheap. I ordered a three horse outboard and a hard chine plywood pram that I named Pal Smurch after a Thurber character. I regretted not spending more money for a sturdier dinghy because I had intended to use it as a push boat when weather and seas were calm. Right away, Pal Smurch began leaking copiously, perhaps offended by the name I had given it. I did not spare expenses on ground tackle, though. I bought the best and I bought heavy.

June 29th, Gus Schmidt, of Schmidt’s Boat Yard where Lucrero’s conversion to glass was done, towed us from his yard under the I-95 bridge to a mooring area at the mouth of the Saugatuck River, where I anchored Lucero.

July 1st, my sister-in-law dropped me off at Schmidt’s Boat Yard. I paid Gus, boarded the dinghy and cast off. As I chugged down the Saugatuck River in Pal Smurch I felt exceedingly lonely but I could take comfort that at least the weather god smiled upon me. While muggy, the day started with a light westerly, putting the wind directly on my stern. I liked the way Lucero handled, although with the wind directly at my back there was wasn’t much to handle.

I had not thought through what I would do for sustenance. I had a couple of gallons of fresh water squirreled away in large thermoses and I had laid in a quantity of beef consommé. The salty consommé – nobody told me it had to be diluted – made me thirsty and I consumed just about all my fresh water in that first day’s run down the Sound.

Near five in the afternoon we passed New Haven and I decided to put into Branford Harbor for the night. I tied bow and stern between two pilings next to the local yacht club and took stock of how the trip was going. We (Lucero and I) had not done badly on our first day, having covered more than 40 miles. It is about a four hundred mile run from Saugatuck to Blue Hill. If the weather held we could get there before the end of the month, in time for the August Series, but I decided that I wanted company. When I went ashore for dinner, I called the Kollegewidgwok Yacht Club Manager, Charlie Dethier, telling him I wanted to take Dr. Pyle up on his offer to crew. After dinner, I crawled into the cuddy, got into my sleeping bag and listened to the wind that continued to blow. I fell asleep as Lucero bobbed gently between the two pilings.

I woke soon after dawn. I went ashore for breakfast and refilled my water bottles, returned to Lucero and cast off. The wind freshened and with an adverse tide the seas built up. Pal Smurch adopted the unattractive habit of surfing on some of the higher seas until she was abeam of Lucero and then dropping into a trough, to be violently yanked out of it when the painter brought up sharp. We had an invigorating sail along the Connecticut coast and up the Connecticut River to New London, where we anchored near the Coast Guard Academy. I was pleased with the ground we had covered, but I decided to get a tow to Stonington the next day because it was a more accessible port for an Atlantic and I had planned on taking a couple of days off to await favorable tides. When I went ashore to eat, I called Charlie and learned that Dr. Pyle couldn’t make it after all. Family obligations intervened, but Dan Hutchinson, who was on a brief holiday before he started OCS at Newport, might be available. I engaged the owner of a fish boat to tow me to Stonington. The fish boat arrived along side in the morning, soon after I had returned from a shore breakfast, and towed Lucero the short distance to Stonington. I called Dan that evening. He agreed to sail all the way to Blue Hill, if time permitted.

When Dan arrived, I discovered he had endearing quality I hadn’t expected. Starting with Stonington, he knew people all along the coast. No sooner had he arrived in Stonington than he made contact with a local family. The couple lived across the railroad right of way from Stonington Harbor. The husband owned a thirty-some-odd foot Nielsen designed yawl named Alibet. With the Fourth of July weekend upon us, we accompanied them to some shore side festivities, including a blessing of Stonington’s fishing fleet. Their other guest was Aage Neilsen, designer of Alibet. They put us up for a couple of nights and on the morning of our departure the wife said that we could stay longer if we wished. I was touched by her gracious offer but I was getting impatient. My intention was to sail to Point Judith, where we had a window of two or three days to catch the fair tide into Buzzards Bay. This would be the most hazardous part of the trip because of a convergence of currents from Block Island Sound, Narragansett Bay and Buzzards Bay off Point Judith. The cruising guides cautioned that even a normal afternoon breeze could produce substantial seas in adverse currents. With Lucero’s low freeboard, I wanted to choose my weather carefully.

We departed late on a grey morning and by the time we reached Napatree Point, we realized that the winds were too light for us to make it to the Point Judith Harbor of Refuge, so we turned around and sailed into Watch Hill. Unfortunately, I made an egregious error as we entered Little Narragansett Bay, where a narrow channel leads to the anchorage off the Watch Hill Yacht Club. About a mile into the Bay, a nun marks a shoal off Sandy Point, southwest of the start of the channel. To avoid short tacking up the channel in a dying southerly, I elected to sail straight in and that meant cutting inside the nun. I reasoned that since we were close to the top of the flood, we should have sufficient water to clear the shoal but I was wrong. Just as we had the nun off our port beam, we felt a “bump” and Lucero stopped. It was our bad luck to have hit the shoal at the top of the tide and it was obvious to all who could see that we were on the wrong side of the nun. We strapped in the main and jib, hoping there was enough wind to give Lucero the heel to sail off, but the tide had fallen rapidly. A couple of motor boats went by and, seeing our predicament, made several attempts to bounce us off with their wakes but that tactic didn’t work, either. Later, a substantial powerboat took our towline to see if, with a little muscle, we could be pulled off. The skipper gently applied power but it was too late. Lucero was hard aground. The skipper and I agreed that his boat had the power to pull us off but doing so might cause damage. My worry was that at the bottom of the tide Lucero would be completely out of the water and lying at such a steep angle that the rising tide would fill her cockpit before she had sufficient buoyancy to float. Then the skipper hit upon the idea that I, too, had been thinking about: Tie the anchor chain and rode to the main halyard and drop the anchor well off the beam, with plenty of scope, to keep Lucero upright until the tide came back in. The success of the plan depended upon the anchor holding and that neither the halyard nor the mast would break. The plan worked. While I was alone aboard Lucero making sure everything was properly secured, a cub reporter in a small outboard boat from the local weekly stopped by to ask what happened (we went aground!) and to take pictures, I would have preferred not getting the publicity but I had little control over the events that were unfolding.

After we got Lucero secured, the powerboat took us off and anchored on the channel side of the nun, where we could keep an eye on her as the tide receded. Her crew also fed us and as night came, so did the fog and occasional flashes of lightning. With lightning flashes and the ship’s spotlight, we saw through the fog that Lucero’s vertical stance looked most precarious. At the bottom of the tide barely a foot of water covered her keel. We were blessed in that whatever thunderstorm lurked in the distance stayed where it was and the weather was calm. When Lucero floated free around midnight, the powerboat put us back aboard and towed us to the Watch Hill Yacht Club dock.

Frank Rutan came down the next morning and offered us taxi service. I invited him aboard so he could go over the charts with me and point out hazards I might encounter or at least should know about. He had owned an ancient black sloop Xanadu that he had sailed many times between Blue Hill and Long Island Sound so he was familiar with the waters. He shook his head when we had finished and then expressed a profound skepticism over my mission to get Lucero to Blue Hill on her own bottom. But Frank was the gracious host, like Dan’s Stonington friends, and he had us over to his house, where his wife Sloanie prepared lunch for us.

That afternoon, Frank dropped off the local paper that carried a banner headline “Maine Sloop Freed after Spending Nine Hours off Sandy Point.” Actually, the story was accurate and sympathetic. Its author preferred to focus his piece on my destination and on the boat itself.

We set sail in a fair dawn the following day. Despite the favorable current, seas began building but we decided that if conditions did not look bad off Point Judith, we would sail into Buzzards Bay, putting ourselves within easy reach of the Cape Cod Canal. That would give us a couple of day’s leeway in waiting for a fair current to transit the Canal. The Canal represented a psychological and physical barrier between southern New England and the Maine coast. Then Pal Smurch started surfing off waves again. Rather than worry over how we would retrieve a swamped dinghy, we sailed into the Point Judith Harbor of Refuge to await more favorable conditions.

We started early the next morning. We passed Weatherly and her mother ship in the outer harbor. She was on her way to Newport for the America’s Cup elimination trials. She made a beautiful sight. We had discussed detouring to Newport or Sakonnet, where Dan knew more people, but decided it would be wiser to take advantage of the currents, the gentle breeze and press on to South Dartmouth in Buzzards Bay, where Dan also had friends.

We anchored off the New Bedford Yacht Club. Dan called his friends, who invited us to a picnic that evening. We were storm bound for several days. The New Bedford Yacht Club crew moved Lucero to a mooring and we enjoyed sorely needed showers. Dan’s friends also took good care of us. Through them, I met a lady who was working in Boston but whose family had a summer place in Cohasset. My fantasy had her visiting us on a succession of weekends as we sailed east until I was too far out of range to make the trip from Boston worth her while. As with all fantasies, it did not quite turn out that way but she gave us some land support that we needed on a few subsequent weekends.

When the weather settled down, we sailed to Onset, where we engaged a tow to take us through the Canal. I struck the deal by standing on Lucero’s foredeck waving a ten-dollar bill and shouting to the assembled power boaters that we needed a tow through the Canal. Eventually, someone took the bait – a guy with his girlfriend in a substantial looking runabout. When he swung by, I handed him the towline and the ten-dollar bill, and we were off. Tides run swift through the Canal and within an hour of leaving Onset we were tied to a float outside the Sandwich basin. Something curious happened to us in the Canal. As we approached the Bourne highway bridge, I saw a man walking toward the bridge’s western approach. When we got closer, he started walking faster, picking up stones as he walked. Then he began running so that he was directly overhead when we passed underneath. As we went under the bridge he started throwing rocks at us. We were “bracketed” by two of the rocks he threw; I didn’t see where the others landed because I had taken what shelter I could find by the tiller, which wasn’t much. It was the closest I ever wanted to come to getting shelled or bombed on the high seas.

Our habit was to eat two meals ashore: breakfast and dinner, the latter in a restaurant where the cuisine was as haute as we could find, have a couple of drinks to ease the tensions of the day, eat dinner and then head back to Lucero and our damp, salty sleeping bags. Dan had been a good sport in putting up with the squalid conditions I had subjected him to, and I decided to treat us both to a couple of nights ashore at a local motel. Dan made a call to his family in Maine and gave me the news that one of Dr. Pyle’s grandsons was spending the summer in Watch Hill, had seen the story of our grounding in the Watch Hill paper and had sent the paper to Blue Hill. It was not exactly the sort of news I wanted broadcast.

The weather turned sour again for several days and Sandwich in those days wasn’t a good place to be weather-bound in an open cockpit day sailor. Yet life was interesting for us. It was home to a Coast Guard station; yachts transiting the Canal often layed over to wait out a tide and it was a refueling place for commercial fishermen. One night, a “Bounty” yawl tied up in the basin. Her homeport was Camden, Maine. Assuming that owners of fiberglass boats shared common interests, I introduced myself to her skipper. He enthusiastically showed his boat to Dan and me. She had the traditional layout below decks but the interior lacked the “warmth” of a wooden boat. The owner introduced us to his crew, one of who was Hodding Carter.

I should have known the name. Having read All the King’s Men, I had become interested in Huey Long. Hodding Carter had written extensively about Huey Long, when he was a newspaper editor, but hardly as a Huey Long admirer. Hodding delighted in telling stories on himself. Over drinks, he told us of a stormy, terrifying transatlantic passage he had made years earlier. We had a great evening of hilarity but unfortunately one that was not repeated because the next morning the Bounty departed for Camden.

Eventually, the weather settled and we sailed to Scituate, where Dan served notice that he would have to jump ship. My lady friend of Padanarum came to Scituate that weekend and took us to a picnic with another lady from Cohasset. The next day, Sunday, she drove Dan to Boston.

I had a blissfully uneventful sail in light air across Massachusetts Bay to Gloucester, where I found a mooring in the crowded anchorage at Smith Cove, near the Annisquam Canal entrance. The Canal is too narrow to sail in, so the next morning I strapped Pal Smurch to Lucero’s starboard side, started the outboard and dropped the mooring. Pal Smurch easily pushed Lucero but then an Atlantic is an efficient hull. Despite the motorboat traffic, I had no difficulty maneuvering through the Blynman drawbridge at the Canal entrance. Most of the traffic was moving at speeds that hardly raised any wake but we got into trouble at the railroad drawbridge where the Canal takes a sharp turn to the left. I could see a large powerboat on the other side of the bridge and it appeared to be moving toward me at flank speed. The boat was leaving a massive wake so I motioned him to slow down (please!) but he ignored my hand signals. When we were directly under the bridge I realized that he was not going to slow down, so I had to shut down the outboard and cast off Pal Smirch before his wake did any damage. While casting Pal Smurch free, we ran straight on to a mud bank. That’s when I lost it. “THANKS A LOT, YOU SON OF A BITCH” I bellowed at the boat, then picked up a can of beef consommé and threw it at him. I was amazed at my throwing arm. The consommé can (my last one, so it was my lunch that I threw), cleared the vessel’s superstructure by a safe margin and landed harmlessly in the water on the other side. I don’t think anyone on board was aware that they had been fired, or thrown, upon. After I got Pal Smerch re-strapped, Lucero was easily pulled off the bank. By noon, we were anchored in Lobster Cove, Annisquam. I went ashore and bought myself a lunch that was superior to the one I had thrown.

Although it had only taken us a week of sailing to get this far, it was past the middle of July. Unless the weather broke soon we wouldn’t get to Blue Hill before the end of the month. I figured that we had at least another week of sailing and from the reports I was getting, it looked as though it would be several days before conditions were favorable enough to sail to York Harbor or Isle of Shoals. Annisquam did not attract many transients and at night the harbor was quiet and lonely. Restaurants within walking distance had passable fare but I was restless. And I was getting grubby. Carleton Mitchell, in his book Passage East about the 1952 Transatlantic Race, makes the observation that at sea “Cleanliness is not only next to godliness but next to impossible.” The same held for cruising the New England coast in a vessel bereft of amenities. That it was altering my appearance for the worse was rudely brought home to me one day, when I went to Gloucester to purchase items for Lucero. As I was standing on a street corner in Gloucester, a car bearing New Jersey plates passed by and, to the delight of his fellow passengers and some mean spirited pedestrians on the sidewalk, the driver bellowed at me “HEY FELLA! WHAT FREAK SHOW DID YOU ESCAPE FROM?” Not everybody regarded me with such disdain. A couple of days after that embarrassing encounter, I was aboard Lucero in the cuddy reading, when I heard a knock on the hull. I crawled out to find that a young lady had come alongside in a rowboat. She was a student, working as a reporter for a local weekly. She had seen me enter Lobster Cove several days earlier and thought she would check to see if there might be a story for her weekly. We talked for a while and realizing, I guess, that I was living a Spartan life, she invited me to her home for lunch and a shower. I filled her in on my trip and told her of my hope to get to Blue Hill before the month was out. She told me she was in her last year in high school and did not know where she might go to college but she was interested in studying journalism. She arranged to come back to the boat the next morning to take photographs. When she had finished taking pictures the next day, she brought me back to her home for breakfast. About a month later she sent me a clipping of her article that started, “A lovely white sloop sailed into ‘Squam Harbor this afternoon,” with a picture of me standing by the mast.

The weather broke briefly the day after in that there was no fog but there was not much wind, either. We had an anemic sail to York and while I was profoundly satisfied that I had finally made it to Maine, I had to face the prospect of yet several more days of being harbor bound because of easterly weather.

It rained for almost five days and when it wasn’t raining it was misty. In a break in the rain and mist one day, I went ashore and walked to a bluff on the seaward side of town. An easterly was blowing fresh and there was quite a sea running. I saw a small schooner leave the harbor and she made heavy time of it to the sea buoy. I could see her crew on the foredeck, clinging to the masts for balance. She went a couple of hundred yards beyond the buoy before turning back to York Harbor. It was no day to be sailing an Atlantic. I spent much of my time in the cuddy sleeping and reading, but the cuddy wasn’t much of a shelter from the weather. When Gus installed the deck fittings he had neglected to bed them in any compound and they all leaked. There was hardly a dry place in the boat. I felt as though I was growing mold. I pondered whether I should try to find another crew in Blue Hill. I called one prospect, the Club’s ace Atlantic sailor. He demurred. In fact, when I said, “Hey, would you like to do a spot of sailing in a glass Atlantic from York to Blue Hill?” there was a pause, and then he answered “Excuse me while I get the waste basket so I can throw up.”

After days of being rained and “damped” upon, I decided that I had enough. I moved Lucero across the harbor where there was a resort cum marina, that is, it was a motel that had a dock, shower facilities and a restaurant. The motel owner, Dave Lusty, gave me free use of the shower and of a washing machine. I accepted the shower happily. I can handle a boat, understand enough about outboards to perform simple maintenance on them, but operating a washing machine was beyond me. When I went in for breakfast a day later, I wondered out loud to the motel guests in the dining room whether to hitch hike to Blue Hill to check on crew availability. “Y’all can use my car,” one of the men said in a thick Texas accent. “My wife and I are heading off but we can use her car.” I was touched by his offer but I demurred. They didn’t know me and I didn’t want to make that kind of imposition on them, but he was insistent. “Naw, go ahead! Ah don’t need it.” I tentatively accepted, telling him, truthfully, that he was being generous beyond the call of duty. I agreed to pay for the gas, was willing to pay mileage, but he waved off those offers with “C’mon, I’ll show you the car.” I followed him out of the dining room; assuming that my car for the day would one that showed severe wear from having survived the trip from Texas. The car that he offered to a total stranger was a late model, top of the line Cadillac convertible. I was flabbergasted. “Are you sure you can trust me with this?” He was determined that I have it. Besides, he reminded me, he did have collateral of sorts in my boat. So off I went in the car, terrified that I might put the smallest of scratches in it. But if I felt the awesome burden of responsibility, I was also amused in thinking of the reaction I would get in Blue Hill.

My first destination was the Yacht Club. Charlie did a double take when he saw what I was driving and he was delighted when I told him how I got it. More to the point, I learned that it was Bill Starkey’s last day on the job there and he enthusiastically signed on. Bill may have been six years younger than I but he had sailed in two Bermuda races and had skippered the St George’s School’s Satuest to a win in the previous year’s Mt Desert Rock race. After making a number of stops to show off my acquisition, I went to the Starkey’s house to retrieve Bill. I was anxious to have us on our way to York. About 8:30 that evening, we pulled into a rest stop on the Maine Turnpike for dinner and I called the owner to assure him he would have his car soon. His answer: “Ah ain’t sweatin’ it, boy!” It was late when we arrived at Lusty’s marina and there was nobody around. I never saw my benefactor again; whose largesse was the same size as the state whence he came, but every time I hear the term “perfect stranger” I think of that Texan. At last, the prognosticators were offering favorable weather on the morrow, so we went directly to Lucreo and bedded down.

The weather wasn’t quite as favorable as I had hoped – they predicted “occasional” afternoon thunder showers, but as we had planned to go no farther than Cape Porpoise, a mere 20 mile run, we decided to leave. We left in the late morning and we made sluggish time in the leftover seas. We saw a couple of boats well to seaward of us, who seemed to be faring no better. We could also see a buildup of cumulus clouds to the northwest, precursors to thunderheads. They bore watching. After the standard Lucero lunch fare of consommé, we got a little more wind but when the clouds, which were showing themselves as no nonsense thunderstorm cells, moved closer the wind went flat again. I watched a line of rain obliterate the shore as they moved toward us. We couldn’t tell how much wind there might be but we took no chances and dropped the main. We altered course to seaward so as to take the elements on our beam. When the rain came it was torrential. One gust did bury the rail, even with only the jib up, but at least it got us moving. The storm passed quickly. The boats to weather closed in on us the closer we got to Cape Porpoise.

Duncan and Blanchard, authors of the cruising bible for New England coast skippers, were not exaggerating when they said you could walk ashore on the lobster buoys at the entrance to Cape Porpoise. We three boats anchored close together. One was a high-freeboard glass boat; the other had a varnished wood hull and looked like a 5.5 or 6 Meter. She got worse weather than we did and her main had been blown to tatters. Bill and I went ashore, where I treated us both to the fine dining of Cape Porpoise.

For all the sound and the fury of our previous day’s storms and what they signified, Bill actually brought with him a spate of fine Maine summer weather. We agreed it would be counter productive, but pretty, to sail through Casco Bay because it was off our track, so we squared a course for Boothbay Harbor. Once clear of the off lying islands, we set the spinnaker. We sailed high, with the wind almost abeam, but the spinnaker had narrow shoulders and drew well. I judged our speed at about 6 knots, remarkable in the light air. We had a glorious spinnaker run in a wind of ideal strength. The cruising guide did sound a note of caution about seas off Seguin: Strong tides from the Sheepscot River ebbing against a fresh southwesterly wind can create a substantial sea in the vicinity of Seguin Island. We gave Seguin a good berth and had no problem. We anchored off the town of Boothbay Harbor in the late afternoon, after a forty-six mile smooth sail.

The next day dawned ominously overcast, with a wind blowing fresh from the west, but we set sail anyway. We were in waters where protected anchorages are abundant and we had the wind at our back. We had hoped to sail to the western entrance to Penobscot Bay, putting us within a day sail to Blue Hill. Bill had signed on to crew in the Nevin Cup and that started August 1st. It was already July 29th; I didn’t have much time to deposit him where he could be conveniently picked up. As we approached Pemaquid Point the wind was blowing almost 20 knots; Lucero was sailing at hull speed. We were at the point of having almost too much wind and I worried over how the seas were making up. As we would be completely exposed sailing across the bottom of Muscongus Bay, I decided I didn’t want to chance it. “Hey Bill. How about putting in at New Harbor?” He reminded me that time was against us if he was to sail all the way to Blue Hill but he agreed that we might be reaching a point of having too much wind. We altered course for New Harbor, a short distance up the west side of Muscongus Bay. The wind got squally under the lee of Pemaquid Point, where it was blowing off the land. Our new course put us on a beam reach, a fast point of sail especially for an Atlantic, and with a substantial sea on our stern, Lucero did something neither of us had seen an Atlantic do. She surfed. We had no idea how fast we were moving, but we were amazed to see spray spewing out by the shrouds as her bow lifted up and by the colossal rooster tail she left. For once, Pal Smurch never stood a chance of passing us. She strained at her painter but she stayed obediently astern. When we went ashore in New Harbor, we saw white caps dotting Muscongus Bay. Logistically, New Harbor was a good spot in that it was reasonably convenient for someone from Blue Hill to pick up Bill. We ate at an informal dockside lobster restaurant and retired to Lucero’s damp accommodations. I slept forward in the cuddy; Bill in the cockpit with the jib draped over the boom to shelter him from the elements. I had resolved that if I were ever to do a similar trip in an Atlantic I’d have some sort of cover made that fit over the boom and sheltered the entire cockpit.

First light. All was calm but something woke me up. Then I was aware of more noise: the sound of rope being pulled over the bow chock and then the “clunk” when the chain hit the chock and scraped across the foredeck. Peering out the cuddy opening with a sleepy eye, I saw that it was a cloudless dawn. I thought of going back to sleep but then I heard the sound of an outboard starter cord being pulled and Pal Smurch’s engine came to life. A sleeping bag was no place for a skipper whose ship was about to get under way. If it hadn’t been for Bill’s initiative I would have waited until a wind came up but Bill was determined to get us to Blue Hill if he could and if not Blue Hill, then certainly Stonington. There was just the hint of a swell and Pal Smurch moved us at an effortless five knots. Anyone wanting to see a Maine dawn come up on a cloudless day could ask for no better vantage point than Moscongus Bay. It’s one of Maine’s more picturesque bays and when bathed in the light of a clear dawn it is spectacular. Off Port Clyde, we breakfasted on……..beef consommé.

Lucero was not the first Atlantic to sail into Blue Hill on her own bottom but she may have come the longest distance. Charlie Dethier told me that some of the Milliken Atlantics were sailed from Boston, or Portland, and one of the skippers, a lobsterman by trade, had told him the only time he had ever been really scared on the water was in an Atlantic at the bottom of Penobscot Bay, running before a fresh southerly. We were not to get such conditions, fortunately. We had gentle winds and off Tenants Harbor we set sail: main, jib and spinnaker. We sailed up the east side of Penobscot Bay, arriving at Stonington just before sunset. Frank Wanning, a co-worker at the Yacht Club, picked up Bill after dinner.

Saturday, August 1st: I had made my deadline, sort of. I had missed no August Series races but I still had nineteen miles to go to Blue Hill. As distances go, it was not far, and I didn’t weigh anchor until late morning. I had an easy sail through the Deer Island Thoroughfare into Jericho Bay. Near Green Island Light I met the Nevin Cup fleet racing toward Burnt Coat. Big Ralph Semler passed close by in his powerboat and he called out to me: “She looks just lovely!” Coming from him, it was a high compliment for a glass boat. With much of the fleet out on the race, the Club was quiet when I arrived at the inner harbor. I sailed to the Club dock to offload stuff; Molly Royster came aboard to help me move Lucero to a mooring. In a way, I was sorry the trip was over. I had some wonderful memories of the people I had met, and I missed the camaraderie of encountering other cruising yachts. But I still have an aversion to damp sleeping bags and concentrated beef consommé.