Header Photo: Catboat Spectating

The previous header photo was lifted from a 1904 issue of Rudder magazine. Location is unknown but we could speculate from the catboat type that it was one of the New Jersey shore locations. Oh, the things we found interesting to watch before modern accouterments showed up.

Catboat "Silent Maid" at NSHOF Wooden Sailboat Rendezvous

Peter Kellog, owner of the sandbaggers Bull and Bear, brought his reproduction of the 1924 Sweisguth catboat, Silent Maid, to Annapolis to compete in the 2017 National Sailing Hall of Fame Classic Wooden Sailboat Rendezvous. Unless you see this catboat in person, it is really hard to fathom how big, how massive, the mainsail Silent Maid sets. I took several photos of Silent Maid before and just after the start of this pursuit race. Silent Maid went on to win the race.

Before WWII, Silent Maid was the biggest of the cruising catboats competing in New Jersey waters.

W.P. Stephens: The La Gloria and Scarecrow designs

"The Dean of American Yachting" was how historian Peter Spectre characterizes W.P. Stephens, a seminal figure in the early history of American sailing. Stephens' comprehensive but somewhat disorganized account of the formative years of American sailing, Traditions and Memories of American Yachting,  concentrates on the latter twenty years of the 19th century, and is the primary source for the history of early American recreational sailboats, from the diminutive sailing canoes all the way up to the large America's Cup yachts. (Some of the disorganized nature of Traditions and Memories... is due to it originally appeared as serialized articles in Motor Boating magazine starting in 1939. Besides his personal recollections, W.P. Stephens also added, almost willy-nilly, many of his collection of lines drawings to the series.)

W.P. Stephens started out as a canoe builder and designer but by 1883 became canoe and sailing editor at Forest and Stream magazine. With that editorial bully pulpit of Forest and Stream, the premier sporting magazine of the day,  W.P. Stephens found himself placed at the epicenter of the beginning of American recreational sailing. Forest and Stream, under W.P. Stephens, didn't hesitate to publish and review all sorts of sailing designs, but W.P. Stephens himself was an aesthete who saw yachting beauty in the narrow shapes and swoopy sheers of the sailing canoe and the English cutter and not the boxy chined shapes of the American sharpie or scow, or the vertical stemmed, no overhang, pinched shapes of the sandbaggers.

In 1892, W.P. Stephens published two of his small boat designs in Forest and Stream and shows where Stephens thought, in the early 1890's, the future of small boat sailing should be headed. One is a centerboard daysailor/cruiser based on the sailing canoe, La Gloria, and the other one was a fin-keeled daysailor/cruiser, Scarecrow, that is an interesting hybrid of different design philosophies (a flat sectioned shape married to a long counter stern being one).

A portrait of a senior W.P. Stephens as it appeared in Traditions and Memories of American Yachting. (Artist unknown)

La Gloria was a canoe inspired cruiser designed in 1892 by W.P. Stephens  and shows the effort to move the sailing canoe towards a larger, less athletic centerboard sailboat that could comfortably carry more than one sailor.  W.P. Stephens writes that it was based off his Delta design of 1886 with the intention in La Gloria to "produce a handsomer and more stylish boat, and to realize such advantage as may be had through a moderate overhang forward, the stern being carried out to give a graceful finish, with some added power." This is certainly a more yachty looking centerboarder then the sailing canoes of the late 1880's. W.P. Stephens offered up La Gloria in two sizes: a 15' 4" LWL model with 4' 6" beam, and a larger 18' LWL model with 5' beam. The body sections show flat canoe-like sections with a slight reverse at the keel-line.

Forest and Stream, Oct 27, 1892

The same year, 1892, in November, W.P. Stephens published the lines of Scarecrow, a fin-keel sailboat (though it could be fitted with a centerboard and internal ballast if desired) designed for the more open waters around New York City and offered in two sizes, the two waterlines identical to La Gloria. though Scarecrow's beams are wider. A quick glance at the drawings of Scarecrow shows how innovative it was in 1892; the original owner C.J Stevens had specified a gunter rig instead of the normal gaff rig, and W.P Stephens had added a bulb keel specified at 600 lbs. total weight. It is a narrow hull, the rocker line is easy, finishing in a long counter stern. The sections are flat. (Stephens said he was using the sections to a Barnegat Bay Sneakbox as an inspiration.) W.P Stephens comments on the lines of Scarecrow:

"Whatever disadvantages may be justly laid to the score of modern yachts and small craft with long, ends, this much must be said in their favor, that they are easy models to build, the beam is moderate, the whole form is full and fair, without the humps and hollows of the old fine-bowed craft with full quarters [ed. note: Stephens is referring here to the sandbagger]."

Forest and Stream, Jan 27, 1894

Forest and Stream, Jan 27, 1894

• The closest modern sailboat we have to the Scarecrow (at least when comparing the shorter waterline length model and ignoring the rig) is the Scandanavian Cruiser 20.
• An ad for La Gloria built by the St. Lawrence River Skiff, Canoe, and Steam Launch Company.
• If you can find a copy, Dan Miller has a great article on W.P. Stephens and his influence on the history of canoe sailing in the Wooden Canoe magazine, Volume 35, No. 4, August 2012.

Old Star Photos

Most likely this is racing at Larchmont Y.C; time frame between 1914 to 1918.

Ev Emerson Photo Collection

Ev Emerson Photo Collection

The origin of the Star boat

Kaagweek, 75 Years Ago

Kaagweek and Sneekweek are the two big sailing regatta weeks in The Netherlands. Kaagweek occurs first, somewhere around the middle of July. I came across this historically interesting video of Kaagweek filmed in 1940, seventy five years ago.

Unfortunately the video settings restricts embedding on Earwigoagin, Click here to view the video.

After viewing this video several times, thinking about it and researching, I've come to the conclusion this sailing regatta video offers up so many layers of meaning and so many unanswered questions, it ranks as the most fascinating sailing video I've viewed

My first viewings of this video took in the pastoral beauty, the windmills, the myriad of, now traditional, Dutch classes heeling gracefully as they race their way up the small fingers formed by the dike systems, the spectators dining at the water's edge, the formal race committee attire, the pretty women walking the dock, ogled by young sailors. People are having fun, which is the whole point of a sailing week. The soundtrack of wistful swing tunes from that era adds to this period piece.

It was then I realized that the 1940 Kaagweek took place two months after the Nazi's had overrun Holland. This Kaagweek was taking place in occupied Holland. Kaag looks to be about 15 km. from Rotterdam and during the invasion, the Nazi Luftwaffe had completely leveled the center of Rotterdam.

The 1940 Kaagweek must have been held with the Nazi's approval. The question becomes whether this video was put together as Nazi propaganda to show that "normalcy" had returned to occupied Holland, or whether it was filmed surreptitiously as a home movie by a Dutch videographer. The production values suggests it may have been Nazi propaganda. Of note is at the 8:21 mark of the video, there is a stern-faced spectator wearing the Jewish star.

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Reader WaveDancer disagrees with my assessment that the video was Nazi propaganda. I've dragged his comment over to the main post:

"I doubt that this video was German propaganda. After the surrender of The Netherlands, it took some time for the German occupation to show its true Nazi colors. PS: Whereas de Kaag is definitely in Holland, Sneek is not! The country should be referred to as The Netherlands. Wavedancer (who was born there, just around that time)"

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Wikipedia states that 205,000 civilians would die in the occupation of Holland with 1/2 of that number being Dutch Jews who died in the Holocaust. Many of those young sailors shown in the video would be forced to labor in German factories during the war. I'm not sure how many sailing regattas were still held in Western Europe during the summer of 1940 but by 1941, sailboat racing had ceased (with the exception of the Nantais Moth, which the Nazis and the French Vichy government allowed to be built during the war).

July 10, 2015 also marks the 75th anniversary of beginning of the Battle of Britain, the approximate 2 month air battle where the Nazi Luftwaffe came within a sliver of destroying the British RAF. That the Nazi's didn't break the RAF would mark one of the turning points of  World War II. Goering and the Luftwaffe would then turn in September of 1940 to bombing the British cities in an attempt to force capitulation.

One of the mysteries of my life is how my loving mother, with her parents and siblings, endured the chaos, death, and destruction of the London blitz, and later the V-1 doodlebug, and V-2 rocket attacks. I never detected any true bitterness from her. She still maintains the attitude of always looking forward, never looking back - probably a residue of that British "stiff upper lip".  The courage it took to maintain day-to-day living under such conditions still amazes me.

OPB's and NSHOF Classic Wooden Sailboat Gathering

Wow! I feel good when I can use a couple of acronyms in a post title - goes to my head with visions of a job writing headlines for the Washington Post. One or two of my astute readers may have picked up that I haven't been sailing my Classic Moth this summer. A certain summertime ennui had taken over which made it difficult to find the time to finish some repairs I had started on my Maser (they are more-or-less done now... now being October). To get out on the water I had to make do with sailing OPB's (Other People's Boats), all of them (gasp!) keelboats.

In the middle of September, rather than attend the Classic Moth Nationals, I called up my good buddy Tom Price about the availability of a ride for the NSHOF (National Sailing Hall of Fame) race around Annapolis harbor that is part of the NSHOF's Classic Wooden Sailboat Rendezvous. As it turned out, Tom had been given the very pretty L. Francis Herreshoff,  canoe-stern, Rozinante design, Honalee, owned by Paul Miller, for the race (Paul was the Race Officer for the race). He needed a foredeck crew, not really my bailiwick since I am somewhat keelboat challenged, but I jumped at the chance anyway.

The actual race, scheduled as three laps around the Annapolis outer harbor became a light air slog. The problem I had on the foredeck was trying to cleat everything off on the two horn cleats on the mast, especially when we had the spinnaker up. Eventually Tom pointed out there were two other cam cleats on the mast that had escaped my notice. This helped partially cleaning up the rat's nest of ropes I had created at the base of the mast; a pile of halyards, and topping lift,  and downhaul . We finished third in our division, beaten by the two, very quick, wooden Stars. Mercifully the race was shortened after one lap.

Some photos - mostly mine except where noted:

Sandbagger Bull.

An Ed Cutts design that was sailed by an all-woman crew. Another design with a pretty sheer line. Ed operated out of Oxford Maryland.

A wooden Snipe, one of three dinghies competing.

Skipper Tom surrounded by all that varnish on Honalee.

A photo of a L.Francis Herreshoff Rozinante. This one is not Honalee but one that Tom came across in Maine that has a shorter coach roof than Honalee.

This photo of Honalee racing the 2014 NSHOF race was taken by Captain Ken of the schooner Woodwind which I have lifted from his blog post on the 2014 NSHOF race. I am relaxing next to the mast after successfully jibing the pole and sorting out the halyards.

My report on the 2012 NSHOF Classic Wooden Sailboat Race can be found here.

Throwback Thursday: Going Yotting - 1916

From Rudder Magazine.