The Beginning of My Sailing Days
“There is NOTHING,” the Water Rat says in The Wind in the Willows, “—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
I love the excitement and the competition of small boat racing where a lapse of judgment or a slow reaction can cost you five boats in the blink of an eye!
I could swim at 4, run my own little outboard motorboat at 5, and was about 8 when my parents bought me my first sailboat. It was an open cockpit 12-foot catboat (single sail). I wish I had a picture of it. I loved that boat and spent hours learning the fundamentals of sailing.
Unfortunately, it was a type of boat that filled with water if tipped too far in a heavy wind and the only remedy was tow it to a dock, pull it up and empty it. Someone on the lake always saw my plight and phoned the house and Mom got in the outboard and towed me to shore. She was always a good sport about it.
In those days, there were two racing fleets on Lake Lotawana, the Snipes and the C-Scows. Our next-door neighbor, Chuck Schwindler, was one of the Lake’s top “C” sailors and I hung around him like a puppy dog. I was dying to crew for Chuck, but my friends said you had to be 16 to crew and that was a long way off. However, when I was 12, my dream came true. Chuck's regular crew was sick, and he asked if I would fill in for a race. Would I! We did well together, and I became his regular crew, winning often. I loved the competition and learned a lot about sailing and life from Chuck.
Chuck was known as “Light-Wind Charlie” for his ability to sniff out the breeze when there was very little wind. Part of that was skill, the other part was that Chuck was a slight man so, between the two of us, we were by far the lightest crew on the lake. If the wind was too strong for the two of us, we took on a third crew and were still competitive.
In one unforgettable race, we were sailing up the lake toward the yacht club and we were a quarter of a mile ahead of the next boat with one more lap to go. We easily had the race won but as we approached the club, we realized that somehow the rounding buoy was missing. We were running out of lake.
Bob Peet, the judge, yelled from his boat, “Make your own buoy.” So we turned at the place where the buoy should have been and headed downwind. The judges came up behind us and set a temporary buoy for the rest of the fleet.
We were going downwind, more than a quarter mile ahead, when suddenly Chuck said to me, “We’re going about.” We hardened on the wind and headed back. I couldn’t understand what was wrong.
“Chuck, why are we going back? We’re going to lose the race!”
“We went around the imaginary buoy the wrong way.”
By the time we returned to the temporary buoy, unwound, and headed back downwind we were in sixth place and I was despondent. We had suddenly gone from a quarter mile ahead to a quarter-mile behind. But Chuck wasn’t about to give up. It was just our kind of wind, and we started to catch boats, one after the other. On the final windward leg we closed in on the lead boat, which was trying to cover us, but Chuck did two quick tacks right at the finish line and won the race. I can still hear the cheers from the crowd at the yacht club.
Of course, none of them could figure out why we’d gone back. I think they assumed we were just giving the others a chance, but I knew I had witnessed an outstanding example of good sportsmanship.