Chapter 3

Our proficiency as sailors gradually increased. As we gained in experience, we also gained in skill and we became better and better acquainted with our boat, her good points and her shortcomings.

We found that her beaminess and flattish bottom gave her considerable initial stability, making her stiff, up to a point, so that she preferred to sail fairly upright rather than heeled far over to one side. If she did heel over farther than was comfortable for her, she developed a strong weather helm that called for a firm hand on the tiller to make her behave herself and stay on course. This, over a long haul, could be exhausting. However, adjustment of the mains’l, by taking a reef in it or by easing off on the sheet to allow more of the wind to spill out of it, usually restored the helm to normal balance.

The bright side of this pattern of conduct was that if an unexpected puff of wind struck Tinkerbelle it forced her bow to windward as she heeled over, thus lessening the danger of capsizing. Instead of going “bottoms up,” she tended to swerve around into the wind and stop, “in irons. “I liked this for I saw it as a valuable safety factor.

Another thing we discovered was that she was far from being a racing machine. She was lamentably slow in light breezes; so slow, in fact, that we joked about the way it took a hurricane to make her get up and go. Actually, we did some of our most enjoyable sailing when small–craft warnings were hoisted aloft and the wind was blowing so hard few other sailboats ventured out on the lake. In light airs, though, Tinkerbelle simply wallowed in the water like a decoy duck while racing boats of comparable size moved along as effortlessly as swans. It was embarrassing to be left behind, but this facet of Tinkerbelle’s personality also had its advantageous side. The squat sail plan that made her slow in light airs gave her extra stability in hard blows. She could stand up to strong winds better than the racing machines.

As we became more and more familiar with Tinkerbelle and her idiosyncrasies, I couldn’t help thinking of ways to make her more seaworthy. Most sailors, I’m sure, study their boats with an eye to improving them, in one way or another, and I was no different, except that the changes I proposed to make in our boat were a trifle drastic and, some of them, perhaps, of questionable value. Nevertheless, in the late spring of 1962, I began to rebuild Tinkerbelle nearer to my heart’s desire; to make her as able a vessel as I possibly could, without spoiling her portability by trailer.

About eighteen months before this we had acquired a garage, so I took over the whole place as my boat–rebuilding shop and, for the time being, relegated our car to the driveway. Virginia, who invariably anthropomorphizes the family car, thought this was scandalous. To her it was disrespectful, if not downright cruel, not to mention immoral, to leave the poor thing outside, exposed to the ravages of wind and rain. I had somewhat the same feelings, only they were directed toward the boat, not the car. An automobile, to me, was simply a mass–produced contraption of metal, glass and rubber, stinking of gasoline and oil, that couldn’t possibly have feelings, much less a soul. But a sailboat, that was different. A sailboat could feel joy and pain, hope and despair; it could be cooperative or cantankerous, well–mannered or insulting, a lady or a floozie. And every sailboat had an individuality, a specialness that set it apart from all others, even those of the same class. It also, most assuredly, had a soul.

If anyone deserved to inhabit the garage, I told Virginia, it was our sailboat. I reminded her that before we got the garage our car had endured the rigors of more than one winter outdoors; and I recalled the troubles we’d had keeping the boat covered with tarpaulins. I think the memory of the tarps was what turned the tables in Tinkerbelle’s favor, for it was right after I’d mentioned them that Virginia agreed to let her have the garage to herself.

So, for the second time since she had become ours, the boat underwent something like a nautical metamorphosis. I was adequately skillful with woodworking tools, having taken a manual-training course in high school, and had acquired from my reading a sufficient understanding of boat-designing principles to plan and execute the metamorphosis with confidence. It required a full year of spare-time labor to complete the transformation, but when it was done Tinkerbelle was a proper little yacht, with a cabin, cockpit, running lights, compass and other gear usually found on much larger vessels.

Instead of her original centerboard, she now had a daggerboard–keel that could be moved up and down by winch in the slot of a watertight housing that passed through the keel timber and extended upward through the cabin roof. When the daggerboard–keel was retracted, Tinkerbelle could be moved onto a trailer without difficulty, and when it was lowered it provided the same lateral resistance the centerboard had supplied, plus a dividend of increased stability, for it was made of iron plate and weighed a little more than a hundred pounds.

The cabin roof’s height above the deck was proportionately much greater in Tinkerbelle than it was in larger sailboats and this detracted somewhat from her appearance, but there were three good reasons for making this dimension as ample as practicable: to give plenty of headroom in the cabin; to house (in the through–cabin slot) as deep a daggerboard–keel as possible, and thus (when the daggerboard–keel was down) lower the hull’s center of gravity to the maximum, and to provide, in effect, additional freeboard, thus raising the hull’s center of buoyancy.

The second and third factors, taken together, reduced the chance of a capsize and also mightily improved the prospect of righting the boat if she should happen to be overturned.

Abaft the self–bailing cockpit was a lazarette, accessible through a small hatch at the stern and separated from the rest of the boat by a watertight bulkhead. By bolting down the lazarette and cabin hatches, the hull now could be sealed shut, giving it many of the storm–weathering properties of, say, a corked bottle. This, it seemed to me, was approaching the ultimate in seaworthiness.

I also made a new mast, eight inches taller than the original, so that the boom would be high enough to clear the cabin top, and hinged in a tabernacle to permit easy raising and lowering. The hull’s lapstrake planking was coated with white fiberglass, and the cabin top, cockpit foot well and deck were coated with red fiberglass, the deck also being treated with an anti–skid preparation.

When all the work was done, Tinkerbelle looked like a brand–new boat. Her white hull, red deck and cabin top and varnished mast, cockpit seats and cabin sides gleamed in the sunshine. She was a thing of beauty, at least to me, and there was no disputing the fact that no other boat like her existed anywhere in the world. She had a place all her own.

We decided she could be christened, to give her a decent start in her reincarnation, but we didn’t particularly favor the customary boat christening with a bottle of champagne smashed against the bow. We were afraid the blow might mar her lustrous finish and, anyway, the symbolism of champagne was entirely out of keeping with both our financial circumstances and our drinking habits. So we settled on a ritual that diverged slightly from boat–christening protocol, and, of course, Virginia had the honors.

“I christen thee Tinkerbelle,” she intoned gravely as, watched intently by the rest of us, she ceremoniously sprinkled the stem of our lovely craft with soda pop. It was a breath–taking pageantry.

Naturally, now that the boat was ready to take to the water again, I wanted to try her out to see if she measured up to my expectations. There were skeptics in the neighborhood who silently pitied Virginia for being tied to a husband gone berserk and who needed to be shown that the remodeled boat was not the feckless creation of a deranged mind. These doubters were mostly men, of course. The women, none of them sailors or even the wives of sailors, had no doubts whatever that I was balmy; anyone interested in boats was bound to be. They were beyond being shown the error of their belief. With the men, however, I had hopes. They were willing to grant that a fellow male who fooled around with boats could be sane. It was only what I’d done to the boat that made them doubt my sanity.

During the rebuilding several men had dropped by periodically to see how the work was progressing and to chat. They were always polite, but when they got home they loosened up and, quite often, word got back through their wives to Virginia and through her to me that they thought I had lost my marbles, as the saying goes.

“That old tub will never take him anywhere,” one man told his wife. Another said, “It’ll never go to windward; cabin makes too much resistance. Makes it top–heavy, too.”

A third fellow came over one afternoon while I was away on some family errand and, with Virginia’s permission, studied the boat for about fifteen minutes to see exactly what I was up to. Later, his wife revealed his private opinion: “He’s making a mess of that boat.

The tabernacle will never stand up; too much strain on it. And that daggerboard thing he’s got! That’s pure Rube Goldberg!”

So there was a lot riding on the outcome of the new Tinkerbelle’s trail runs: my reputation for soundness of mind. Fortunately, nothing untoward happened. The boat and I, and all who sailed with us, came back safely every time. I’m not sure that this immediately scotched the rumor that I was a nut, but at least it tended to show that, if I was a nut, I was a passably competent one, or else exceedingly lucky. In any case, no more unflattering comments came my way via the housewives’ grapevine.

I think what did more than anything else to restore my reputation was my first singlehanded cruise, a seventy–mile sail from Fairport, a city east of Willowick, to Erie. By surviving that voyage on Lake Erie I did more than I could have done in any other way to bring myself back from beyond the pale, to convince my friends and neighbors that I actually did know enough about boats and sailing to indulge my passion safely.

It pleased me to find that Tinkerbelle’s behavior had been changed scarcely at all, except for the better, by the alterations she had undergone. The cabin’s windage did keep her from sailing quite as close to the wind as she had before, but the difference was so slight, only a degree or two, that it didn’t distress me. Anyway, she had never been a good pointer. The best she had been able to do was sail within fifty or fifty–five degrees of the wind, whereas most modern boats could sail within forty–five degrees of it.

The loss in windward ability was more than compensated for by the added stability imparted by the below–hull weight of the daggerboard–keel, the all–weather comfort of the cabin and, when the two hatches were closed, the watertight integrity of the hull. This last point, especially, made me confident of the boat’s ability to weather rather severe sailing conditions. In fact, on the voyage to Erie, she took a beating off Presque Isle Peninsula as winds of thirty to thirty–five miles an hour built up steep, six–foot waves; but she bore up under the pummeling in fine style. I began to feel she was fit to embark on much longer voyages.

The next winter, in January or February, 1964, a friend who owned a 25–foot cruising sloop proposed that we sail it across the Atlantic Ocean together to England. I guess he said it half in jest, not knowing that such a voyage had been a dream of mine for nearly three decades and that I would latch onto the idea with enormous enthusiasm and tenacity. We had long discussions about the problems of ocean cruising, both of us having read widely on the subject, and began making plans and assembling the necessary equipment. Virginia, and Robin and Douglas, knew of the proposed voyage, of course, and approved. So I was jubilant. I have seldom been happier than I was during those days when the prospect of achieving my long–time ambition seemed within easy reach. I went about my work at the Plain Dealer in a sort of ecstatic trance, the course my life was following (most unexpectedly) was so unbelievably wonderful.

After more than a month of planning I wrote, on March 18th, to Philip W. Porter, the newspaper’s executive editor, requesting a leave of absence in the summer of 1965 to make the voyage. When he wrote back granting the request, my joy knew no bounds. I felt the major obstacle in our path had been surmounted. In an all but uncontrollable surge of elation I told my friends of our plan to cross the great Atlantic under sail; and, despite my fears, I was pleased to find they received the news fairly calmly. Most of them made it clear they thought the voyage would be hazardous, but very few of them thought we had lost our minds, and two or three even admitted they wished they could accompany us.

I was on Cloud 9 for about six weeks. Then came a crushing blow. The prospective skipper backed out of the venture, persuaded by his wife, father and business associates that it was ill advised; not that it was too risky, but that it would require too much time. I was heartbroken; inconsolably wretched. It was like dropping from paradise to purgatory at the flip of a switch. The instant descent left me stunned. But, of course, groggy as I was, life had to go on. Somehow I continued to perform my duties as husband, father and newsman, but it was a desperately trying period of my life.

As I regained my psychological balance, however, the thought struck me: Why not make the voyage in Tinkerbelle? And the more I mulled over the idea, the less fantastic it appeared. After all, voyages had been made in small boats before. There was the 19–foot–long Pacific that Bernard Gilboy sailed from California to Australia 1882–83. There was the 18–foot Elaine in which Fred Rebell, using a homemade sextant, sailed from Australia to California in 1931–33. There was the 19–foot Mermaid sailed by Kenichi Horie from Japan to California in 1962. There was the 16–foot Little Western that Frederick Norman and George P. Thomas sailed from Massachusetts to England in 1880 and the following year, sailed back to Nova Scotia. There was the 15–foot Sea Serpent that Si Lawlor sailed nonstop from Massachusetts to England in 1891. And there was the 14 ½–foot Sapolio that William Andrews sailed, in 1892 (the four–hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s famous voyage), from New Jersey to Palos, Spain, Columbus’s port of embarkation), with a stop at the Azores.

Other unusual Atlantic crossings had been made by the 18–foot rowboat Richard K. Fox (1897), the 15–foot pneumatic raft L’Hérétique (1952) and the 17–foot folding kayak Liberia III (1956).

All these voyages were remarkable. But there was another, even more remarkable, voyage that made me feel Tinkerbelle should be able to sail across the Atlantic. This was the voyage of Half Safe, an 18–foot amphibious Jeep that Ben Carlin and his wife took from Halifax to West Africa, via the Azores, in 1950–51. If a getup such as Carlin’s aquatic auto could traverse the broad ocean, Tinkerbelle could do it, too; I was convinced of that.

So, without telling anyone except my wife and children of this change in plans, I began making preparations.