The Way We Were

Note: This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Good Old Boat magazine.

          Boats and books each do the same thing. They transport you to distant places and, if their builders have knocked together craft that are good and true, to another time as well.

          Just such a craft found itself hard aground on the sale table at the Mariners Museum’s library in Newport News, Virginia.(The Compleat Cruiser; The Art, Practice and Enjoyment of Boating, by L. Francis Herreshoff, Sheridan House, New York, N.Y., 1956.) Its original cover price was five dollars, but for less than a buck I booked passage back to when our cars had huge tail fins and whitewall tires, we all liked Ike and Mickey Mantle’s bats and Herreschoff’s boats were made out of wood.

                The Compleat Cruiser is a book well read. L. Francis brings us a snootful of nautical knowledge, just as you’d expect  a Herreshoff to do. It comes to us in the comically stilted instructional dialogue between Mr. Goddard and his daughter Primrose (Honest!) as they cruise around southern New England aboard their 32-foot ketch Viator.

                 The dust jacket alone tells you all you really need to know about the way we were in the mid-1950s. The cutaway end view of Viator presents us with Mr. Goddard and one of his male friends, probably Mr. Coridon  from the 24-foot catboat Piscator, sitting in the cabin after dinner. Mr. Goddard puffs contentedly on his pipe watching proudly as a beskirted, halter topped, perfectly coiffed Mrs. Goddard pours the coffee with a beatific smile. Her June Cleaver image is spoiled only by the fact that she appears to be wearing boat shoes instead of heels.

                Mrs. Muldoon saw this illustration after a long, hot day of cutting and positioning fiberglass panels during a lurid affair involving rotted out chain plates.

                “That’ll be the day,” she snorted after getting rid of her respirator and safety goggles and combing a small blizzard of fiberglass dust from her hair. She poured not coffee, but did crack open a couple of beers to mark the end of a hot Virginia afternoon.

                It should be obvious by now that Mrs. Muldoon, Karen, is a first rate cruising sailor who has been known to do her nails with a rigging knife and is quite proud to be known as a Boat Babe. What can you say about a lady who lathers up epoxy and sheets of fiberglass with the aplomb of Julia Child in her kitchen and can install what felt like a nine thousand pound cast iron exhaust mixing elbow without swearing like…well, a sailor?

                Mrs. Goddard laments leaving her pinking shears and material at home, preventing her from deriving something from the fashion magazines and dress patterns that she brought along on the cruise. At one point Goddard left his wife, daughter Prim and her friend Veronica in the cabin making dresses while he took the dinghy on a row around the anchorage assessing, judging and advising on various boaty bits as a real Herreschoff should.

                This must have been on a subsequent cruise when Mrs. G did remember to bring her pinking shears, etc.

                 It’s true that cruising under sail sometimes raises hell with the body and spirit of femininity, but to suggest that a 21^st Century Boat Babe lay below to make dresses is certain to earn you a swift kick in the flotation device.

                The Compleat Cruiser  also overflows with the old time contempt for powerboats, which Herreshoff dismisses as “chrome plated noisemakers.” His disdain even extends to sailing right past a powerboat struggling in a squall on Vineyard Sound  between Edgartown and Cuttyhunk. Goddard tells his crew that it would have been difficult at best for Viator to have aided the storm tossed noisemaker but also that “it is not customary for sailboats to offer assistance to a power boat.”

                Well, excuse me!  Both times I’ve needed assistance getting my Golden Gate 30 sloop off the bricks (once in the Cape May Canal and once on the way into Deltaville, Va. from the Rappanhannock River) it’s come from a power boat. We’ve all been annoyed by careless wakes and howling watercraft, but there are times when a chrome plated noisemaker comes in damned handy.

                To be fair, Herreshoff’s view of Boat Babes is not really all that retrograde. Primrose and her friend Veronica are smart, capable and cheerful young sailors, the kind of kids you’d take aboard in a minute. Goddard is well aware of this. As Herresoff’s avatar, Goddard has a lot to teach and confidence that Prim and Veronica are more than capable of absorbing it.

                Herreschoff  is not at all dismissive, contemptuous or hostile towards women.  He is reflective of how mid-20th Century sailors looked not so much at women but at sailing itself.

                While the fictional Goddard set off on a cruise with his wife, his daughter and her girlfriend, the boat itself was looked at as the definitive man cave. It was a place where real guys could befog the cabin with cigar smoke, brag about ribald  adventures with the lighthouse keeper’s daughter and pee over the side without a single civilizing influence to spoil the fun.

                The great designer Philip Rhodes reportedly never included a double berth in any of his otherwise perfectly elegant yachts.  Cruising under sail was supposed to be a male bonding experience just as, I suppose, dressmaking was supposed to be for the ladies of Goddard’s Viator.

                A sailor’s bookshelf is ill found without a copy of The Compleat Cruiser, for the knowledge passed on to Prim and Veronica is passed on to all of us. There is basic knowledge, especially of cruising southern New England waters, that remains valid in the 21^st Century and the romance of small ships and the sea that can never pass out of style.

                But what modern Boat Babe is going to sacrifice a golden day at anchor at Block Island or behind Gibson Island in the Chesapeake in favor of making dresses when all she need do is run directly downwind to Talbot’s or the Dress Barn?

                It’s impossible to realize how far we’ve come in fifty-five years without looking back at the way we used to be.