Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Taking Measure

  THE WEATHER NEWS during the week before my departure was all about the terrible flooding of the Mississippi. My arrival in St. Louis confirmed the worst: everywhere there were broken levees, marooned farms, whole towns abandoned to T. S. Eliot’s “brown god” and its murky, inexorable waters. As I drove across the empty reaches of southern Illinois I found myself nervously checking the rearview mirror, half expecting to see a cresting tidal wave pursuing me across the hot prairie.

  By the time I checked into my motel room in Springfield, it had begun to rain. After calling Melissa and the kids, I lay back on the bed and listened. First there was the rumble of distant thunder, then a light drumming on the thin flat roof that gradually built into a roar. Curious, I ventured out into the hallway and watched through a window. Tree branches were whipping hysterically as the rain came down in jagged, savage sheets. An hour later and all was quiet once again, the puddles on the warm parking lot sending up wispy clouds of steam.

  At eight o’clock the next morning I arrived at the Island Bay Yacht Club on Lake Springfield. The air-conditioned clubhouse, built into the side of a grassy hill overlooking the lake, had the dark, big-timbered feel of a ski lodge. Photographs of commodores past and present lined the front hall. One of them was the father of regatta cochairman Todd Gay, whom I’d met at the Midwinters in March. There was definitely a family resemblance.

  Since Todd had not yet arrived, and he and he alone knew the location of my borrowed boat, I decided to take an exploratory walk around the premises. Boats were everywhere, either on trailers in the parking lot or scattered across the yacht club grass. But if there were plenty of boats, there were not yet many people; it was still early.

  One boat, however, was being carefully scrutinized by its owner. He had his sail up, and he was studying it. I smiled. It was Jeff Linton from Sarasota, the same guy who had helped me rig my boat the night before the Midwinters.

  In Sarasota Jeff had been the laid-back local ace. Tall and slender, with a mustache and long curly hair that hung down from the back of his baseball cap, he had reminded me of Robin Hood in the animated Disney movie: an affable, long-necked fox. On the racecourse Jeff had been a notch below the front-runners, ultimately finishing fifth while his training partner Rod Koch, the defending North American champ, had come on strong in the final two races to finish second overall. Jeff had struck me as an excellent sailor who had not yet found the knockout punch of a champion.

  But now, as he shook my hand and motioned toward the windless lake and smiled, Jeff was a changed man. He exuded an intangible quality of confidence, a focused intensity that hadn’t been there in Florida. He explained that he’d already been in Springfield for a couple of days to practice. Indeed, he seemed more at ease at this regatta site than he had during the Midwinters in his own backyard; it almost seemed as if the Island Bay Yacht Club were already his domain.

  Later I would learn that in the months since the Midwinters, Jeff had made the leap to another level. Rather than being the perpetual bridesmaid to Rod, he had begun to beat him on a regular basis. Instead of an also-ran, Jeff came to Springfield with the expectation of becoming a champion, and you could see it in his eyes. Jeff Linton had entered the Zone.

  Once back at the club I was finally able to track down Todd Gay, who was Springfield’s local ace. It quickly became clear that Todd was so consumed with the myriad details of organizing the event that all the advantages of being on his home turf had been, for the time being at least, lost to him. Having run more than a few events myself, I knew what he was going through.

  In between distractions, Todd directed me to my boat. It wasn’t far from Jeff’s, and it lay there on the grass with the forlorn air of an orphan: dirty, sailless, and with a vague arc gouged into the forward deck by the spars. A lump came to my throat. This Sunfish, sporting a faded red-white-and-blue racing stripe, looked almost exactly like old Rosebud back on Nantucket.

  Although the hull seemed in pretty good shape, there were a few scratches that needed some attention. During the next few hours I filled in the gouges with epoxy and sanded them down. Even if it would never be as perfect as the nearly new hull I’d sailed at the Midwinters, this Sunfish, complete with age spots and wrinkles, already felt like an old and trustworthy friend.

  Besides filling and sanding the hull, I also needed to install some hardware. But what I needed more than anything else, as the sun climbed in the sky, was some shade. A few extra tools wouldn’t have hurt, either.

  Enter Joel Furman, an attorney and past North American champ who was the official class measurer for the regatta. As measurer, Joel was required to inspect every boat at the regatta, a daylong process that the heat would turn into an agonizing ordeal. Joel, however, had come prepared. He’d parked his huge station wagon crammed with tools under a tree on the crest of the hill. He’d also brought along a sombrero the diameter of a hula hoop. Most important, he’d brought along his sense of humor, which meant that he was able to take the inevitable static he encountered (“Whaddaya mean my daggerboard’s too big?”) in stride.

  Joel had been at the Midwinters, where he and I had had a similar, almost identical, experience on the race course. Seeing him now, it was as though we were taking up exactly where we’d left off in Florida—on the lawn with our boats. Offering me not only the use of his tools but the shade of his tree, he set out in search of boats to measure.

  As I worked away at Rosebud II, Joel would check in every now and then to get a drink and shoot the breeze. By three o’clock, the heat was really beginning to get to him. He sat on his tailgate, sipping water and wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  “The hell with this,” he said.

  “You must be dying,” I said. “This heat is unbelievable.”

  “You know, I’d much rather be back in my air-conditioned law office than wasting my vacation time here. I’m not gonna spend the whole week sitting on a Sunfish and sweating. I’m going home tomorrow. The hell with it.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. When I’m done measuring, I’m out of here.”

  As it turned out, Joel ended up staying for the duration of the regatta, which from my perspective made all the difference. Because when things began to turn bad in the days ahead, it would be a few simple words of advice from Joel that would save me from myself.

  Doppelgänger

  THAT EVENING THERE was a welcoming buffet and skippers’ meeting, and as I waited in line for my food, I surveyed the crowd. There were a lot of familiar faces. Besides Jeff, Todd, and Joel, there was Malcolm Dickinson from the River Race. Although last year’s champ, Rod Koch, had not yet arrived, Bob Findlay, the current Midwinter champ, was here, as were the Cliftons—the family from Sarasota who had organized the Midwinters—and Eduardo Cordero, a young Venezuelan sailing instructor who had finished an impressive fourth in Florida.

  Sitting quietly beside talkative Bob Findlay was Donnie Martinborough from the Bahamas, a tall, deeply tanned man in his mid-thirties with curly blond hair and a colorful button-down shirt. Since I’d last seen him in 1978, he’d won the Sunfish Worlds a total of three times. This was clearly a man to be reckoned with.

  I was putting food on my plate and beginning to feel some of the same sense of dislocation I’d known at the Midwinters when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and saw a guy who was a few inches shorter than me, thin, and with a baseball cap on backward.

  “Hi, Nat,” he said, his voice breaking into an embarrassed laugh. My God, it was Paul Fendler.

  If there’d been one person against whom I had always measured myself on the racecourse, it had been Paul Fendler. We had both started racing Sunfish in the early seventies. I’d traveled with my brother and our parents; Paul had traveled with his father. At our first North Americans in Devils Lake, Michigan (which, I now realized, bore an eerie resemblance to Lake Springfield), I had finished twelfth a
nd Paul eleventh, qualifying both of us for the Worlds that winter in Martinique.

  That had been in 1972, when we were both sixteen, and over the next six or so years Paul and I had maintained an ongoing rivalry. While Paul had won the Worlds in Venezuela, I had won the North Americans in Barrington, where Paul had finished third; then, the following summer we’d both competed at the Worlds in Medemblik, Holland (the last major regatta for both of us, it turned out), with Paul finishing third to my fourth.

  When it came to sailboat racing, Paul and I were wired in very much the same way. We both took it seriously, more seriously than either one of us would have cared to admit, and as a consequence we never became close friends. We were civil to each other, but I couldn’t think of any one time when the two of us had taken the opportunity to just hang out and talk. There was always an unstated element of tension between us, and any attempt to delve beneath the surface would have been doomed to failure. The truth of the matter was, of course, we were too much alike: a pair of doppelgängers who shared a single, overweening ambition.

  That evening, for the first time in twenty-two years, Paul and I hung out and talked. Almost immediately we hit it off. While being a writer, at-home parent, and sailing director had kept me from fitting comfortably into a traditional career path, Paul was a CPA who worked part time out of his house, with time to do a variety of unusual things: perform in musicals, train for marathons, and read voraciously. Both of us, we decided, were destined to become late bloomers.

  Inevitably we began to talk about the old days, referring to our prior competitive personas with a mixture of awe and horror. We both agreed that our dedication to Sunfish racing had been something of a mixed blessing. While it had given us a focus and direction during what is, for almost everyone, a fairly unfocused time, sailing had also limited our exposure to life. Even when we traveled to a world championship in a foreign country, we had rarely seen much of anything beyond the regatta site. For a competitive small boat sailor, the race course is all.

  My question was this: If Sunfish racing had indeed provided us with a kind of safe haven from the terrors of the real world, had it been a haven that helped to prepare us in any way for that world? Paul initially seemed to have his doubts, then said, “But you know, Nat, there are things that sailing did teach me—emotional things, about my relationship with other people.” Paul laughed. “And a lot of it was, I hate to admit, negative. That’s why I had to stop sailing. I realized I was taking it too seriously. I wasn’t having fun anymore. It was time I moved on.”

  But what had we moved on to? For my younger brother Sam, the Sunfish had come to represent all those youthful experiences you have to leave behind in order to grow up. Now a banker and a golfer, Sam had not only given me his old Sunfish, he’d even bought a cruising boat with a head (boatspeak for a bathroom) on it. When he’d heard I was giving the Sunfish another try, he’d sighed and said, “Good for you, Nat.” The implication was clear: Would I ever grow up?

  Sam had a point. If the sole reason I’d begun this comeback was to prove that I still wasn’t too old, it was going to be an exercise in futility. But maybe by compartmentalizing his life into childhood and adulthood experiences, Sam was running the risk of cheating himself. But out of what, exactly? I hoped I’d have a better idea by the end of the regatta.

  In the meantime I had another question for Paul. Why, after all these years, had we both ended up here in Springfield, Illinois? Paul had a theory: “They say it takes seven years for the body to completely replace all its cells. I think with every cycle you begin to look backwards and reevaluate. After two seven-year cycles—because it’s been fourteen years, right?—it was time for both of us to give it another try.”

  “So are we going to get blown out of the water?” I asked.

  “I just don’t know. I do know I’m nervous about it. I mean I have no idea how I’m going to do.”

  That night at the skippers’ meeting, the race committee divided the fleet into four divisions. During the elimination series, there would be two starts, with the divisions being shifted around so that everyone had a chance to sail against each other. This meant that except for the people in your own division, you weren’t sure who you were going to be sailing against, particularly when it came to the first race on Monday morning.

  The start of Race One bore a disturbing resemblance to the beginning of the Midwinters: a chaotic blur of boats. Although I had a poor start, I caught a few good wind shifts midway up the first beat and then suddenly I saw Paul Fendler, just ahead of me. He might be two cell cycles away from the Paul I used to race against, but he still looked exactly the same in a Sunfish. He had a way of milking each puff for everything it was worth, leaning back as he rounded the boat slightly up and brought in the sail, that was a pleasure to watch—unless, of course, he was ahead of you. I could tell immediately that he hadn’t lost a thing, at least when it came to sailing on shifty lakes.

  Paul rounded in second, I rounded in third, but it wasn’t until the second reach that I got close enough to hail him. Here we were, just where we’d left off fifteen years ago, nearly overlapped at the head of the fleet. “Hey, Paul,” I said.

  He did the classic double take. He had no idea that I was so close. “Jesus Christ, Nat, is that you?”

  I nodded.

  He laughed and said, “This is weird, isn’t it?”

  On the next upwind leg I found a few good shifts on the right side of the course and passed Paul to lead at the mark. Two legs later, however, Paul found just the right winds to eke out a narrow win.

  As I prepared for the next race, I knew that at least one thing hadn’t changed after all these years: I still didn’t like to lose, especially to Paul.

  The Ultimate Captain’s House

  BY THE END of the elimination series, a general pattern had begun to emerge. Paul had burst out of the blocks with a masterful display of shift playing. Onshore, his wife and his mother operated as his support crew, even making sure he’d put on his sunscreen in the morning. Although his father wasn’t at the regatta, he’d been the one who put together Paul’s boat. From his home in Rye, New York, Paul had brought with him the same protective bubble of domesticity that had made my win at Barrington possible fifteen years before. I envied him, particularly at night in my motel room as I filled gouges in my daggerboard (its paint, applied more than fifteen years ago by my father, had begun to blister) and staved off waves of homesickness.

  But at least I hadn’t embarrassed myself on the race course. I’d been in the top five in almost every race. Unfortunately, it was a good news–bad news situation: I now knew that if I didn’t finish in the top ten of the championship series, I’d be very disappointed.

  And, of course, in the final analysis, how you finished in the qualification series had absolutely no bearing on what happened during the next three days. Jeff Linton had not even gone out on Tuesday afternoon, preferring to watch the racing from shore. As he sipped a drink and leaned back in his chair, he explained, “I wanted to see the racing from a different perspective—see if I could figure out these shifts.” He peered across the lake, the Master of All He Surveyed. This was a guy who wasn’t going to peak too early.

  Bob Findlay, on the other hand, had been a bundle of nervous energy. When he wasn’t dazzling the fleet with his boat handling on the race course, he was regaling the assembled multitude at the beer truck with jokes and stories. Bob had brought the dynamics of light-air Sunfish sailing to a new level, but whether he could maintain the necessary consistency remained to be seen.

  If there was a solid sailor in the qualification series, it had been the Bahamian, Donnie Martinborough. No matter how unsettled the wind was, Donnie always maintained an inner calm. Others, too, had shown at least flashes of promise. What was going to happen come Wednesday morning was anyone’s guess.

  In the meantime, it was time I explored at least some of Springfield. This
was, after all, the state capital and the home of Abraham Lincoln. That evening I was picked up at my Holiday Inn by three women in a huge green Cadillac with the vanity plate SUNFISH. At the wheel was Lee Parks, the person who came the closest to personifying the modern-day Sunfish class. Lee had worked for the Sunfish’s manufacturer in the 1980s and now made a habit of attending just about every major Sunfish regatta. Her position at U.S. Sailing in Newport gave the class a vital and important connection to the sport’s power base. Lee was accompanied by Texans Patricia Manning and Vicki Bremer. Vicki was the class’s main correspondent, providing colorful, often hilarious accounts of regattas for the class newsletter, Windward Leg.

  Spirits were high as we drove into Springfield, a city of wide streets and tall buildings that seemed almost deserted on this hot and humid weekday evening. On a tourist map we saw that several blocks just to the south of the city had been designated “Mr. Lincoln’s Neighborhood,” and after several jokes involving the children’s show hosted by Fred Rogers (in whose real-life neighborhood I had grown up in Pittsburgh), we vowed to visit the area after dinner.

  At an Italian restaurant deep within a warren of one-way avenues and streets, we rendezvoused with two more Sunfish stalwarts, Larry Cochran and Peter Beckwith, father of an old friend of mine, Alan Beckwith. It had been at Alan’s wedding in September that I had first heard that the North Americans was to be held in Springfield, and I was particularly anxious to know how he and his wife Nancy were doing. Peter explained that the purchase of a new house and the impending birth of a baby had kept Alan (who’d won the North Americans in Springfield back in 1979) at home this year. It was a familiar story.

  By the time we reached Mr. Lincoln’s Neighborhood, darkness had settled over the city, and with the twinkling lights of a huge hotel looming behind us, we ventured into the nineteenth century. I couldn’t help but compare this block of historic homes to downtown Nantucket, where mansions and stores built during the island’s whaling era also kept the present at bay. While it was a community’s heritage that was being sustained on Nantucket, these houses preserved the memory of a single man.