Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  After two reaches and then a beat, Don was still in first, with me in second and Jeff in third. The breeze was dying and the three of us were well out ahead of the rest of the fleet. While Don and I sailed with a certain giddiness, Jeff sailed with a quiet confidence. During the long run down before the final beat, Jeff made a point of not mixing it up with me. He could have positioned his sail directly upwind of mine, but instead of pushing every situation for the maximum advantage, he had the big picture firmly in view. If he scored a third in this race, he was on track to win the regatta; if he did something stupid by playing around with me and had to do a penalty circle, he might blow it. So he hung in there and waited.

  Given the fact that Jeff had begun the North Americans with a twenty-first, this unflappable mode of conducting business was all the more impressive. It was also just how it had been for me fifteen years before. I, too, had begun the finals of the North Americans with a bad race (an eighteenth, if I remembered correctly), made all the worse by the fact that in 1978 there were no throw-out races. But instead of getting rattled the way I had done this morning, I had taken it in stride, never finishing any subsequent race out of the top five. But if 1993 wasn’t my year to be relentlessly consistent, I’d take erratically brilliant.

  As we started the last beat to the finish, I knew exactly what I was going to do. There was a line of wind on the right side. Rather than tack on the shifts, I was going to keep my boat in that wind line and see what happened. Midway up the beat, I was in first. By the finish I was way out there, with Don in second and Jeff in third.

  I had done it. With Paul and Joel’s help, I had stopped my demons dead in their tracks. I had won a race and now, for the first time in the regatta, I couldn’t wait for the next start.

  Day Three

  THE RACING INSTRUCTIONS required that six races must be sailed for there to be a throw-out. We had already sailed five going into Friday. But by two o’clock that afternoon, it was looking like we might not have a throw-out. Lake Springfield was a vacuum.

  Although it was certainly in my best interest to sail a sixth race, there was one man who desperately wanted a race: Jeff Linton. Without it, Paul Fendler would win the regatta. However, if one more race was sailed, all Jeff had to do was finish within five boats of Paul and the regatta would be his.

  Going out that morning, Paul seemed philosophical about the day that lay ahead. “Whatever will be, will be” had been a phrase both of us had bandied about throughout the regatta, and that morning it seemed to have a special relevance. Jeff Linton, I’d noticed, had been anything but philosophical. Even though there’d been virtually no wind, he’d been the first one on the water. Where the 95-degree heat had prompted most of us to load our cockpits with water bottles and fruit, Jeff, knowing that Paul weighed thirty pounds less than he did, had taken nothing more than a lifejacket.

  Also in the hunt was Bob Findlay. If Paul and Jeff dragged themselves out of the top ten and Bob managed to win the race, he would win it all. Springfield’s finest, Todd Gay, was also poised to take advantage of any disasters among the front-runners. For my part, I needed another gift from God to finish in the top ten.

  The challenge for me was to maintain my intensity through the seemingly endless wait. But, finally, when the starting sequence began in the middle of the afternoon, I was ready. Jeff and Paul might have their mountains to climb, but so did I.

  I was at the windward end of the starting line with twenty seconds to go when I realized that I was going to be over early. Rather than delay the inevitable, I sheeted in the sail, shot across the line and tacked around the committee boat as the starting gun went off. Luckily the black flag was not up, enabling me to restart without being disqualified. If this had happened to me the day before, I would have been devastated, but today it was a different story. I was not about to roll over and die.

  Once across the line, I tacked onto port and headed toward the right side of the course. Although the wind was from an entirely different direction from the day before, I saw something familiar on the right side—a band of air, if not wind, that had some kind of motion to it. There were about a half dozen boats over on the right side of the course, with the rest of the fleet spread across the middle and left. The wind was painfully light as I sat on the leeward side of the boat with my back bent underneath the boom.

  Midway up the leg, I had begun to dig my way out of the hole I had made for myself at the start. By the end of the leg I was in the top ten, rounding in about seventh, just ahead of Jeff Linton and Bob Findlay. Paul was ahead of me, as was Todd Gay, but not by much. Meanwhile Malcolm Dickinson, skipper of the “sticker boat” in the River Race, had a huge lead.

  If the beat had been a challenge, the two reaching legs became a true ordeal. The nearly nonexistent wind dropped. What few zephyrs there were came in from behind, inevitably bringing the fleet with them. Ahead I could hear Paul cursing as he attempted to jibe around the mark. Soon Jeff, Bob, and a legion of others had sailed past me. One of them was Charlie Clifton. As we rounded the jibe mark, he said to me, “Nat, do you realize you’re going backwards?” It was true. I was going backwards beneath a searing sun. It was so hot that even my legs were dripping with sweat. I was so overheated and frustrated as I watched Paul, Jeff, Bob, and now Charlie go past me that I wanted to scream. Then someone did it for me.

  We were about halfway down the second reach and headed for the leeward mark when the committee boat fired a gun. Thinking that the race was about to be canceled, the fleet began to cheer. But wait a second, instead of three shots, which would indicate cancellation, there were only two, meaning that the race wasn’t being scrubbed, it was being shortened. Once we rounded the leeward mark, we had one more beat to the finish and only then, after a leg that might take hours in these conditions, would the 1993 North Americans be complete.

  There was one competitor for whom the absence of the third gun was apparently the last straw. As soon as it became clear that the race must still go on, he leapt to his feet and began to scream: “I hate this stuff! It’s driving me crazy! How are we supposed to sail when there’s no wind?! I hate this! I hate this! I hate this!” At first I thought he was kidding, but as he continued to shout and jump up and down on the deck of his boat, it became clear that the sun, heat, and tension had taken their toll.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d watched someone start to crack under the strain of a regatta. I’d seen people break into fistfights on the starting line. I’d seen a competitor get so angry about being thrown out of a race by a protest committee that he’d let the air out of the chief judge’s tires. I’d seen an otherwise well-adjusted Sunfish racer burst into tears when he accidentally fouled another boat. I don’t care who you are; if the conditions are bad enough and the tension is high enough, any sailor has the potential to lose it.

  Meanwhile, back on the hot, still waters of Lake Springfield, the guy finally ceased his ranting and collapsed onto the deck of his Sunfish. After a few seconds of stunned silence, people began to speak and then laugh, and then suddenly it was clear that the entire fleet had experienced a vicarious form of release through the outburst of a single competitor. I knew that I owed him a debt of gratitude. Despite the frustrations of the last two legs (I was now in about sixteenth), I was ready to give it one more try. But this time I wasn’t racing against the fleet; I was racing the wind.

  Once around the mark, I headed for the right side and that elusive breeze line. In the middle of the course Paul and Jeff were in the midst of a tacking duel, with Paul attempting to put as many boats as possible between them while slowly working his way to the front of the fleet. Jeff, however, was perfectly willing to suffer a little backwind if it kept him in touch with Paul.

  Meanwhile, Bob Findlay was positioning himself for the mother of all comebacks, hitting the left side with a flamboyance that caught the attention of several younger sailors in the fleet who followed him into the left-most reces
ses of the course. If the breeze came in from that side, Bob just might pull it off.

  Midway up the leg, I was off almost completely by myself on the opposite edge of the course. I was in some vague band of wind, but every time I tacked I would get headed and be forced to tack again. It seemed like I had worked myself into an alternative universe that had no connection at all to what the rest of the fleet was sailing in.

  But if I kept getting headed, Bob Findlay, way over there on the left, began to look lifted on port tack. Then a breeze hit me. Suddenly I was ghosting along on starboard tack at what was, relatively speaking, a truly astonishing speed. Making it all the stranger was that there was no evidence of wind on the water.

  Up ahead I could see that Malcolm, although not as far ahead as he’d been at the leeward mark, was about to finish the race with a well-deserved win. To leeward and ahead of me were Paul, Todd, and Jeff, all fighting it out for second. By this point the promise of the left side had begun to fade as the breeze I’d found on the right just kept on coming. Within fifty yards of the line, I passed Jeff and Todd. Up ahead was Paul, inching his way toward the finish. Wouldn’t you know. No matter how much I might pretend that it was just me and the wind, in the end it all came down to my doppelgänger, Paul. Although I knew it would probably have no bearing on the final results, at that moment it meant everything in the world to me if I could pass Paul at the finish. He had passed me in the first race of the qualification series; let’s see what happened now, eleven races later, on the last beat of the finals.

  I sailed into a lull and quickly rocked my body to leeward to induce some heel, just the move I’d practiced during that cold rainy day at Pocomo Creek back in November. The boat rounded up as a small, infinitesimal puff of wind freshened the sail. The acceleration was just enough to carry me across the line in second place, a few feet ahead of Paul.

  Jeff Linton ended up winning the regatta. Paul took second, and I, thanks to that last puff, wound up in seventh. Okay, I wasn’t a champion again, but I had achieved a goal that I’d dared not hold myself to as recently as the day before: I’d finished in the top ten and close, oh so close, to the top five.

  Jeff had seemed fated to win. Dick Tillman, a past Laser champion, said it best, describing a kind of road map to the Zone: “It’s like you’re on a trip of a thousand miles and you’ve already gone 999 miles before you even get to the regatta. You know all you have to do is go that last mile and the journey will be ended.”

  That night at the awards ceremony, after Jeff had received his ritual dunking in the lake, I surprised myself. I had expected to feel relief that at last it was all over. Instead I found myself asking people about next year’s North Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, and then the Worlds in Bermuda. I was reluctant to see it end.

  Maybe the Never-Ending Sunfish Regatta was more than just a fantasy. I sure hoped so. Because at that moment the future was looking pretty bright. I had just scored a first and a second, and I’d only just begun.

  Epilogue

  . . . But all these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  I RETURNED FROM SPRINGFIELD on a roll. I talked to Lee Parks at U.S. Sailing about bringing the Sunfish Worlds to Nantucket. Paul Fendler and I exchanged several phone calls, making plans for Paul and his wife Eileen to visit us on Nantucket that fall. By September my Nantucket history was at the printer.

  But by October, I was beginning to feel a little lost. It had been almost exactly a year since I’d started my comeback, and already it seemed as if it had never happened. My Sunfish leaned against the house in exactly the same place it had been for all those years prior to my first sail on Gibbs Pond. Even the ivy was beginning to close in again.

  At two o’clock on Wednesday, October 6, Melissa called from work.

  “Want to go for a sail?” she asked.

  At first I was caught so off guard that I didn’t know what to say. All summer and fall Melissa had been extremely busy at work, with little time to do anything spontaneous or fun like sail or go to the beach.

  Certainly the weather was perfect—a beautiful Indian summer afternoon with a twelve-knot westerly breeze. By that late stage in the season we had moved our Beetle Cat and its mooring out to Polpis, the small harbor near the heart of the island. We agreed to meet there at 3:00.

  By 2:30 Jennie and Ethan were home from school. As soon as they’d had juice and a snack, they helped me load the canoe that served as our tender onto the car roof. With Molly in the back, we headed for Polpis. Twenty minutes later, we were paddling the canoe toward the Beetle. As Ethan and I pumped out the boat and Molly paced restlessly around the cockpit, Jennie paddled back to the landing to pick up Melissa.

  The previous spring we had made the decision to buy, not just borrow, the Beetle Cat, and Ethan now went about the business of rigging the boat with a proprietary air. Although I’d been too busy with Sunfish racing and running the Nantucket Yacht Club’s sailing program to spend much time sailing with the kids that summer, things were different between Ethan and me when it came to boats. We had the River Race behind us. Jennie, too, had changed. She could now row and paddle with confidence; she was also developing into a capable skipper.

  Soon the boat was dry, the sail was up and luffing in the breeze, and Jennie had returned with her mother. After tying the canoe to the mooring, we were off, beating toward the western end of the harbor with the kids standing on the bow and clinging to the mast. Meanwhile, Melissa and I moved aft to help balance the boat, and as Molly lay on the cockpit floor with her head in Melissa’s lap, we approached the center of the harbor.

  I was soon lost in the sensations of a boat sailing upwind. The sun-warmed cockpit smelled of salt, sea grass, paint, varnish, wood, and rust. The bronze blocks on the boom squeaked with every adjustment of the sail; the tiller tugged at my hand with a fluttering nervousness as the hull’s cedar planks flexed rhythmically through the wavelets.

  The tide was high and still coming in, and Melissa suggested that we try sailing up nearby Pocomo Creek. I was stunned. Not only had she been the one to suggest that we go sailing in the first place, now she wanted to sail up a creek—just the kind of harebrained idea that had gotten me into so much trouble almost a year ago. I was all for it.

  So we sailed from Polpis to Nantucket Harbor and hung a quick right into the creek entrance. With the wind and the current behind us, we were soon deep within a watery maze, jibing regularly as the channel wandered back and forth. Above us, two ospreys glided lazily in the clear blue sky, never straying far from their man-made platform and its ragged nest of sticks.

  The farther we sailed, the narrower the channel became, and to prevent us from running aground Melissa stood up in the cockpit to help sight the channel. It occurred to me that unlike a year ago, when I’d hijacked the Beetle for that ill-advised journey through the mud, this time the two of us were working together as a team. It reminded me of our first summer together back in 1974, when Melissa would sometimes crew for me in the 470, a hot rod of a boat in which the crew hung out over the water on a mast-suspended wire known as a trapeze. In waves, when the up-and-down motion of the boat threatened to knock her feet off the gunwale, Melissa would reach back and hold the forward corner of my lifejacket for support, a connection that inevitably sent a shiver of electricity down my spine. Now, almost twenty years later, there might not be thunderbolts, but I still felt sparks.

  Eventually the creek’s convolutions terminated at a wide tidal pool, a pond surrounded by a perimeter of marsh grass and a few houses. This was the destination I had been unable to reach in the rain last November. Now I was here in the yellow light of an October afternoon, and instead of being alone in a Sunfish, I was with my family in the Beetle.

  With Jennie and Ethan once again up on the bow, this time to keep the rudder out of the mud, and Melissa playing the centerboard, I sheeted i
n the sail and began the long beat back. Soon we were tacking on an almost continual basis, the kids dancing around the deck like ballerinas as we swooped from bank to bank.

  We’d emerged from the creek and begun to turn toward Polpis Harbor when I realized that Melissa and I were still sailors. Even after all these years, even after jobs and children, we still found joy in simply being together in a sailboat. If there was one thing I’d learned in my comeback year, it was that there is no such thing as a singlehanded sailboat. Even in a Sunfish, I needed my family, my friends, and, yes, even my dog.

  When it came to sailing, I had lost the Zone. Even when I was at my best in Springfield, I was too aware of my past, of having done it before. The Zone is not a place for looking back; it requires a fierceness, a single-minded commitment to the moment that I could no longer sustain. This didn’t mean that I was all washed up. As I’d proven at the North Americans, I could still win a sailboat race.

  But if I’d lost the illusion of mastery and control, at least I was no longer landlocked. I was sailing again on an island that was beginning to feel like home.

  Now I understood. From a pond on Nantucket, to a bay in Florida, to a river in Connecticut, to a lake in Illinois, my comeback had always been leading me here—to a crowded sailboat on an island harbor twenty-four miles out to sea.

  Acknowledgments

  A writer incurs a great many debts when working on a book, and thanks for this project are long overdue. First, I’d like to express my appreciation to everyone who has ever raced a Sunfish, especially Peg Beadle, Vicki Bremer, Charlie and Cindy Clifton, Paul Fendler, Joel Furman, Todd Gay, Jeff Linton, Patricia Manning, Lee Parks, and Alan Scharfe. Former Sunfish-class historians Rapid and Donna Buttner were a huge help. Thanks also to the friends, especially Marc Wortman, Mark Poor, Wes Tiffney, and Bruce Perry, who provided essential encouragement during my year of pond sailing.