Here is Sea Breeze, a big, black ketch, high-sided, sharp-bowed, with a wide white boot stripe and a red line over it to make her look less like a hearse. She lay all summer in a slip at the yacht club. Once I saw her sailing with only her big jib set. I think her engine was running. She made it safely back to her slip before the cocktail party.
Next to her stands Tern, a trim white sloop with a self-steering vane on her counter. I haven’t seen her since early last spring when she lay at the yard float, her deck cluttered with sail bags, blankets and a box of cooking gear. Her owner approached pushing a two-wheeled cart loaded with boxes and duffel bags. His wife popped her head out the hatch. “Where am I going to put all that stuff?” Next day, they were gone on a cruise to Scotland, Spain and back through the trade winds. There were traces of tropical weed on the bottom of her keel.
Here is a Friendship sloop, a real wooden boat, her eager bow sweeping aft to a graceful stern on which was painted the simple name, Jean. Her owner told me he chose the name because there was only one crooked letter in it. He painted it himself. I had seen Jean almost every day all summer sailing parties of vacationists, some a bit apprehensive their first time on a sailboat, others who had owned their own boats and wanted to feel again the lift of a sea and a taut main sheet.
Next to Jean stood a rather scruffy short-ended ketch, dark green, double ended, with a North Sea look about her. Her bow was scarred by Arctic ice. Her owner had shown me photographs of icebergs, snowy mountains and places where whales had just been.
I wandered down the rows of sleeping yachts, sliding on the frozen puddles. There were several sleek racing boats with swept-back shark-like keels and spade rudders apparently designed to catch lobster traps. I had read of their triumphs in the yachting magazines. On the end of the line was a sad-looking yawl, her rigging slack, her paint peeling in places, one butt sprung out a little. She had been there all summer. Her ambitious owner had bought her “for a song” and planned to rebuild her but had not gotten around to making a start yet and might never.
In the next row stood modern conventional fiberglass yachts to be distinguished from each other principally the names on their counters: Ocean Girl, Slippery Hitch, Seven Belles, Flying Cloud. One had a deep dent in its lead keel from a solid Maine rock – uncharted, of course.
However, there was one trim wooden sloop with an aperture in her rudder but no shaft or rudder. Her owner had told me that he had taken out her engine to make more room for supplies and equipment in preparation for an Atlantic crossing and found that he liked cruising without an engine so much that he never put it back.
And here is a power boat, Sunny Daze, her two big propellers, one slightly bent, tucked under her broad stern and teak back porch of a boarding platform. She had spent the summer agitating the waters of the bay, making big waves at vast expense and looping back over them towing squealing youths on surfboards. I felt myself losing my Christmas spirit. “But it is a big ocean,” I said to myself, “and it isn’t my ocean. No matter how far you cruise, how fast you go, how many races you win, yachting is for fun and everyone should have his own fun on the water in his own way.”
As I turned to go home, ears tingling in the cold, I turned my back on the yachts and looked across the quiet harbor dotted with summer mooring buoys. The only boats afloat were two lobster boats reflecting the last light from scuffed topsides. They had been at work all day harvesting food and supporting families.