Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Logistics

  WE PULLED INTO Hartford’s Riverside Park a little before 6:00 p.m. This was very much an urban park—a ragged, overgrown place at the edge of the city. It didn’t look like a safe spot after dark. But for now, on a warm evening in June, there was an open stillness about it that was reassuring, especially with the Connecticut River flowing beside it, a wide, windless sheet of moving water.

  A launch ramp the width of a football field provided ample access. A retired couple in a motorhome with New Jersey plates had arrived before us and had already begun to rig their Sunfish. The husband, a wiry man in a baseball cap, River Race T-shirt, and shorts, told us that this would be their tenth River Race. He added that the park was a good deal safer than it had been a decade ago.

  After unloading our boats at the park that evening, we were supposed to drive early the next morning to the race’s finish point, Deep River, where we would leave our car and trailer and board a shuttle bus back to Hartford for a 9:00 a.m. start. We unloaded our boats onto the grass, then stuffed our clothes, camping equipment, and food into five different garbage bags, which we then jammed into the boats’ cockpits for the night.

  The couple from New Jersey assured us that the regatta organizers had arranged for a security guard to watch over the boats, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before a polite, uniformed young man drove in, got out of his car, and began to make pleasant small talk as we put the finishing touches on our garbage bags. By seven we were headed south toward Old Saybrook, where we’d booked a motel room for the night.

  The drive down Route 9, which roughly paralleled the river, was disturbingly long. With map in hand Melissa ticked off the towns along the way. East Hartford, Glastonbury, Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, Cromwell, Portland, Middletown, Higganum, Haddam, Chester, Selden Neck, and then, finally, Deep River. The drive took an hour and a half! If the winds and the weather weren’t in our favor, this could be a very, very long race. At least the current would be with us.

  The weather forecast was lousy. Although the day would dawn clear and fresh, clouds and rain were scheduled to move in. Light winds from the southeast were predicted—just the wrong direction. We would have to beat all the way to Hurd State Park, almost thirty miles down the river.

  Saturday began with wonderful sun. The dew was glistening and the birds were chirping as we piled into the Cherokee and headed for Deep River Marina, a new, upscale facility with wonderfully clean bathrooms. Regatta organizers told us where to park our cars and trailers, then herded us onto a school bus. Just as we were about to leave, a father and his young daughter dashed onto the bus and we were off. The father looked familiar. For the whole kidney-jolting journey to Hartford, during which Ethan quickly faded off to sleep beside me, I found myself staring at the back of the man’s head and racking my brain. Who was this guy?

  Once we’d gotten off the bus and I’d had a chance to look him full in the face, I recognized him as Rip Fisher, an old friend from Long Island. Rip’s curly blond hair may have been a little thinner, but otherwise he hadn’t changed much in the last fifteen years. I first met Rip back in 1973 at the Sunfish North Americans in Newport News, Virginia. I’d been seventeen and there with my brother and my parents; Rip, a few years older and a Dartmouth man, was there with a sailing buddy and two girls. I remember being extremely impressed by not only his sailing ability (he was fast in a blow) but also his casual air of maturity. After greeting Rip and introducing him and his eight-year-old daughter Catherine to the rest of “Team Philbrick,” we all began to rig our boats. Our decks were soon heaped with trash bags, held in place with flabby webs of shock cord. The weather was still picture perfect, even if the wind was somewhat light. Maybe, just maybe, the weatherman had it all wrong.

  Melissa was going to be racing with the old, smaller sail that came with my brother’s boat. I’d offered to buy her a new one, but she’d insisted on staying with Sam’s original equipment. “It’ll give me an excuse,” she explained. When most of the sails in the twenty-nine-boat fleet had been raised, it became clear that she was not going to be alone. Roughly half the fleet was still in the dark ages when it came to sails; this was a group in which boat speed was not an especially high priority. Still, I could see that there were a half dozen state-of-the-art boats, including Rip’s. But wasn’t it kind of ridiculous to think about going fast when you were sharing deck space with garbage bags? Old habits die hard.

  After a brief skippers’ meeting at the launch ramp, during which it was explained that our voyage was to be divided into a total of five races (three on the first day, two on the second), it was time to head onto the river. Ethan and I shoehorned ourselves into the cockpit and ventured into the current. The water was certainly moving, but in an entirely different way from the Sesachacha cut. Instead of rushing, this water was sliding with a powerful dignity that seemed unimaginably old.

  Soon we were in danger of being swept under the bridge, so Ethan and I beat a hasty retreat back to shore. The couple we’d met the evening before were already over there, hanging on to the branch of a tree. This looked like a good strategy, but available branches were hard to come by. It was then that the tip of our spar got hung up in the trees overhead. Although this kept us from being swept down the river, it was not an especially good thing for our sail, which seemed dangerously close to ripping as the water sped past and the tips of the branches poked into the sail.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered as I tried to scull us out of the trees.

  “What’s wrong?” Ethan asked.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “We’re stuck in this tree, aren’t we, Dad?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  I was feeling inept and flustered in a race that was supposed to be carefree and fun. If ever there was a Ferdinand the Bull race, this was it. But no, here I was, tangled up in a tree and cursing. As I flailed away, green leaves raining down on the deck, I noticed that Melissa and Jennie, along with Rip and Catherine, were playing it cool and hanging out at the dock beside the launch ramp. Of course, this only made me feel all the more inept and flustered.

  Meanwhile, the race committee—two guys in an aluminum fishing boat with a small outboard—was setting up a starting line just upstream of the bridge. After one last flurry of leaves, Ethan and I finally disentangled ourselves from the tree and began to make our way toward the starting line. “BEEP!”

  True to form, the race committee had just given us a surprise start, and we were still a good half minute from the line. A handful of boats were poised to take advantage of the race committee’s spontaneity, while the rest of us crossed the line in our own good time.

  The Connecticut River Race had officially begun.

  Rollin’

  WE WERE UNDERNEATH THE BRIDGE, the sail strapped in, with Ethan down to leeward and me squatting in the cockpit. Ethan looked up into the girdered, pigeon-infested complexity of the bridge. It was cool and dark, with a faintly metallic scent in the air.

  “Think there’s an echo?” Ethan asked.

  “Give it a try.”

  “Yo!”

  Melissa and Jennie were just a little way behind us. “Yo!” answered Jennie. We all agreed that, yes, indeed, there was an echo.

  Meanwhile the wind, which had been extremely unsettled as we drifted underneath the bridge, settled down a bit. We had a direct beat to windward, with factories and warehouses on either side of the river, which now seemed to have changed, chameleon-like, from blue to a gritty, industrial gray. I tacked on a wind shift. Half a minute later, I tacked again. I asked Ethan how we were doing.

  “We’re beating Mommy and Jennie.”

  Despite their old-style sail, they were doing surprisingly well. I pointed toward Rip and Catherine, who were right on our heels, and told Ethan to keep an eye on them. He watched them like a hawk.

  We found ourselves tacking at regular intervals. With all the garbage bags and with Ethan aboa
rd, the boat was certainly heavier than I was used to. Indeed, Rosebud had an almost keelboat-ish momentum to it as we ghosted through the lulls and searched out the puffs, the wakes of passing motorboats slapping hollowly against the hull.

  Rosebud. I had used my boat’s long-lost name. My children had rolled their eyes when I revealed the name I had given my boat after watching Citizen Kane in college. Given yesterday’s revelation, it now seemed only appropriate to call my Sunfish by name. Suddenly the boat seemed less like a disposable Bic shaver and more like a member of the family. Rosebud. With all of our belongings aboard and Ethan with me in the cockpit and Melissa and Jennie not far behind in Poisson (my brother Sam’s boat), these were no longer singlehanded racing dinghies; these were Arks on which we sailed, two by two.

  As we tacked our way around the first bend in the river, I noticed that Rip and Catherine were not the only team we had to worry about. There was another mixed doubles team that looked very sharp. Ethan thought their boat was cool because it had so many stickers on it. The one on their transom read FOLLOW ME, I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING. I asked Ethan if we should do what it said. He shook his head.

  Although Ethan had demonstrated enormous powers of concentration for the first half hour of the race, routinely informing me of where the “sticker boat” and “Rip” and “Mommy and Jennie” were, the novelty soon began to wear off.

  Ethan, a seven-year-old recorder and flute player, has always been a very musical child. He had learned how to read music before he learned how to read words. So, with the garbage-bag shock cords providing a basslike accompaniment, we sang songs—some of them old favorites (“Baby Beluga”), some of them of our own devising. Ethan would sing the melody; I’d harmonize as best I could. At one point we attempted a Connecticut River version of the song that made Ike and Tina Turner famous:

  Left my good wife with my daughter

  In an ol’ boat, she barely does float,

  But I just had to leave her—

  ’Cause we’re rollin’ . . . (Rollin’!)

  Rollin’ down da riva.

  The wind is too light for sailin’,

  If it rains we’ll soon be bailin’,

  The weathergirl I don’t believe her—

  ’Cause we’re rollin’ . . . (Rollin’!)

  Rollin’ down da riva . . .

  We had other lyrics, but neither Ethan nor I could remember them the next morning.

  We’d been racing for a little more than an hour. If anything, there was less wind than when we’d started. By maintaining our aggressive, quick-tack strategy we’d worked out a sizable lead. In the meantime Ethan and I kept singing as the riverscape gradually shifted from industrial to rural. Instead of factories and warehouses, there were fields and forests as the river shifted from a uniform gray to a swirling mix of blues and browns. Unfortunately, clouds had begun to appear above the western shore.

  Up ahead I spotted the committee boat and a buoy. Our first race was apparently coming to an end. As we finished, the race committee directed us toward a tree-shaded, slate-colored beach on the eastern shore. The second we touched land, Ethan and I headed into the woods to take advantage of our few moments of privacy. Almost immediately we were swallowed up by what seemed like an almost primeval forest of towering trees, thick vines, and waist-deep ferns. It was so wild and lush that I felt as though I were choking on chlorophyll. And we were only a few miles downriver from the biggest city in Connecticut.

  By the time we emerged from the forest, the rest of the fleet had begun to arrive. In a pattern that would persist throughout the weekend, the race committee assigned finishes to those in the back of the fleet and towed the stragglers to the finish.

  Melissa and Jennie had finished a highly respectable fifth overall in the race, the first boat with an old sail. Rip and Catherine had finished third, and it wasn’t long before we met Malcolm Dickinson and Sarah Harms, the team on board the “sticker boat.” Malcolm was a recent graduate of Yale; Sarah was soon to graduate. I’d heard about Malcolm from my parents. Originally from Chicago, he’d been a fixture on the Sunfish circuit during the last couple of years and had developed a reputation as a solid light-air sailor. In May he’d won the annual Bolton Lake Regatta, a one-day event that traditionally attracts New England’s top Sunfish sailors. To know that Malcolm had done so well at that regatta made our first race win all the more rewarding.

  We didn’t have long to gab on the beach. Since the wind was light and from the wrong direction, we were already way behind schedule if we were going to reach Hurd State Park before nightfall. Almost as soon as the last boat was towed to the finish, the committee was once again performing one of its off-the-cuff starts.

  As it turned out, one boat was positioned to make the most of it. Ethan and I referred to it as the “Party Boat.” These guys were true Connecticut River pros. They had a beer cooler that was the perfect size for a Sunfish cockpit. They had a radio that hung off the boom. Since there was no place for them in the cockpit, they reclined on the aft and forward decks, with cushions to keep them comfortable. They sipped mixed drinks from foam-insulated sport cups and were having one helluva good time, and for two and a half minutes they were leading.

  Once again, Ethan and I worked out into the lead, with Rip and Catherine and Malcolm and Sarah behind us. The weather was deteriorating dramatically. As the clouds moved in, the temperature dropped; rain now looked like an inevitability.

  The river began to curve quite a bit, but no matter how much it curved, the wind always seemed to be right on our noses. Given that we were sailing a serpentine course, the river naturally divided itself into separate sections, where entirely different sets of wind shifts prevailed. This meant that once the fleet sorted itself out soon after the start, the gap between boats began to increase, until by an hour or so into the race, the distances between boats was, relatively speaking, huge.

  From my perspective it was great. With the river curving this way and that, it didn’t take long before we were enjoying puffs and slants of wind that the boats behind us never even saw. In fact, Ethan complained about how boring it was since there weren’t any other boats near us. For me, it was a most splendid isolation, our wake extending out in a gradually widening V that seemed to reach out beyond the shores of this river to the invisible edges of the universe itself.

  Maybe, just maybe, all those months on Nantucket’s ponds and that long weekend in Florida were beginning to pay off. But then I began to wonder: What possible relevance could a two-person race with garbage bags on deck have to racing in the Sunfish North Americans? For now, at least, I wasn’t going to let it worry me.

  A man in a motorboat began to finish us on a rolling basis. This was the race organizer, Dick Campbell, a buoyant “let’s go for it” kind of guy in an Australian bush-style hat, who pointed at us and shouted, “The winner!” and took off toward the rest of the fleet. Ethan urged me to turn back so we could search out Melissa and Jennie. Not long after we’d found them (they’d finished seventh), the race committee decided it was time for a collective tow.

  Part of the equipment required for the River Race is a twenty-foot towline, and during that first day it was a line with which Ethan and I became highly familiar. Our particular string of boats included twelve Sunfish, of which our two were the last. Ahead of us were two guys with a little yellow rubber ducky with dark sunglasses suspended from the upper spar. It wasn’t until our tow had ended at Rocky Hill, a small section of dirty brown beach on the western shore, that we learned that the ducky was the race’s perpetual trophy. The previous year’s winner is required to “display” the ducky throughout the following year’s race.

  On the beach we ate lunch and got to know Mark and Max Weiner, the winners of this fabled rubber ducky. They were a father and son who had driven all the way from Rochester, New York. As it turned out, Mark had also attended the Midwinters, and once he’d taken off the hood
of his raingear I recognized him as one of the sailors who had been fighting it out in the trenches with me.

  Rocky Hill was a place of three-wheeled recreational vehicles; there was also a huge RV out of which emerged one of the crew members of the “Party Boat” in a full-length wet suit and, of course, a drink in hand.

  By now it was raining fairly steadily. The temperature had plunged into the sixties and was still falling. Ethan and I were both in foul weather gear and doing occasional jumping jacks to keep the blood flowing. Then, miraculously, a breeze from the north sprang up, giving us a run down the river. Soon Dick Campbell was dashing around the beach like a madman.

  At first I wasn’t sure what he was up to, then I realized that we were in the midst of a Le Mans–style start. When Dick pointed at your boat and said, “You—go!” that’s exactly what you were supposed to do.

  So as Dick approached, Ethan and I readied our boat for what was to be the final race of the day, and, shouting some encouraging words to Melissa and Jennie, we pushed good ole Rosebud into the river.

  The Deluge

  THE WIND GODS had been only toying with us. Less than ten minutes into the third race, the breeze had died and shifted back into the south. Then it started to rain.

  The word “rain” does not do justice to the level of precipitation we encountered. It pounded on our heads and backs. It flowed down the sails, pooled along the boom, then dumped on us like an upturned bucket when we tacked. The sponge in our cockpit began to float. We lost all hope of having a warm dry tent that night. We knew our sleeping bags were probably soaked. And still the members of Team Philbrick pushed on heroically. We tacked. We adjusted our sails. We watched the competition. We froze.