Of Time & Tide

[03.04 issue]

When an unusually low tide revealed a treasure trove of empty bottles, the neighborhood kids saw cash on the barrelhead.

by Jane Meneely

Memory magnifies events. That said, let me tell you about the time Spa Creek dried to a mere trickle one summer day, when the tide sucked everything out of the creek bed but the docks.

Spa Creek normally wheedled its way past the Annapolis city dock, threaded itself through the Eastport bridge, and rubbed up against a shoreline of old wharves and cattails and massive maple and oak trees that leaned into their own reflections. There were plenty of docks and houses and street ends on the “town” side of the creek; the opposite shore was too far off the beaten track to be worthy of homesteading. A few sailboats lay at anchor in the deeper creek water; workboats clung to the street ends, sterns tied to heavy iron rings in the seawall, bows tied tentatively to an old tree limb or half-rotted piling that had been pounded into the muck.

We lived in a house on Market Street. I was five years old, a grubby little tomboy with scraped knees and hand-me-down dungarees. Photographs show me with an unruly clump of curly hair on top of my head—coiled tendrils reaching this way and that as if flying to the moon would be a safer bet than staying put. My little round belly, tender and yellow as a toad’s, pudges out from my T-shirt like a waterman’s gut.

In those days I rather liked the smell of tar and dogs and the mounds of seaweed, all gnarled with dead fish and driftwood, that bunched up on the lip of the water at low tide, and on this particular morning, the fetid marsh smell rose in hot whiffs from the creek basin and drew us kids down to the seawall to see what our noses already knew: that the creek bed lay as bare and naked as a dead muskrat. We stood there, my eight-year-old brother Dickie, his friends Peter and Vincent, and I, gaping at the broad expanse of muck that lay open to the sky. We stared past the relatively hard sand of the shoreline, which occasionally showed its wet toes on a normal low tide, past the sodden mass of seaweed that lay gasping and sweating without the protective skirt of the creek to hide in, out to where we could actually see the mooring anchor of a little sailboat that lay groaning on its side, a sea gull perched quizzically on the boat’s upended scupper.

As we watched, a group of older boys lurched their way through the treasury of the creek bottom like a ragged band of Neanderthals, pulling pieces of flotsam and jetsam out of the mud and dragging them back to shore. They found an anchor and a few barnacly things that they were enormously proud of, but the muck eventually proved too much for them, and their efforts deteriorated into a colossal running mud fight—fortunately, away from us and around the rim of the creek bed, out of sight.

That was our chance, our opening, our golden opportunity. Those big guys might have found an anchor, but they missed the good stuff. While they whooped and chased each other like savages, they completely ignored the gold mine the creek had laid bare: empty soda bottles. Scores of them. Everywhere. Old ones, new ones. Big ones, little ones. Pepsi. Nehi. Brand names we’d never even heard of—or, more likely, couldn’t read. Some were slimey with goo; others sparkled like diamonds in the hard summer sun. Clearly our ship had come in. These bottles were worth two cents apiece, hard cash, from any grocery store. “Peter, get your wagon!”

The wagon didn’t negotiate the creek bottom too well. Its narrow wheels sliced the mud like a plow. We ended up leaving it on shore. I stayed with it, chief guard and wagon packer. After all, Mom had laid down the law: I’d be whalloped into next week if I had so much as stuck a sneakered toe across the mean low water mark. Young as I was, the irony of such a restriction in this particular situation was not lost on me: Ma, there isn’t water to drown in! But her imposition remained; perhaps my mother thought such an errant tide would sweep back across the flats in a hungry wall of water, scarfing down stray kids and spitting them out like watermelon seeds. Or not—she let my brother go (of course, we had boys to spare).

When the older kids returned from their battle, slimed and choked with mud, they scoffed at our efforts. “Nobody’s gonna take those bottles,” they snorted. “They’ve been lying around for fifty years!” Which doubtless some of them had. “They’re gross and disgusting!” Which indeed most of them were. But blazing with the hope and courage of young enterprise, the boys sallied onward until they’d gotten every last bottle—that is, every bottle that could be had without sinking up to their knees in muck.

It took all of us hauling and pushing to get the wagon up the Market Street hill to a garden hose, where we set to work rinsing and scrubbing our catch of the day. Then we gathered all the empty bottles we could find in our own homes (a paltry haul by comparison) and turned our wagon toward Joe’s.

Joe Collison ran a little store on the corner of Conduit and Union streets. He sold meat and popsicles, and he always knew whether your mother would approve of a clandestine candy purchase or not. (“Not from me, no sir. Not at a quarter to six I’m not selling you a Hershey bar and spoil your supper. No sirree.”) Joe would have nothing to do with our bottles. “You didn’t get those bottles here at my store, you didn’t,” he said, surveying the lot. “I’ll take them there and that’s all.” Like some omniscient god he zeroed in on the bottles we had liberated from the cabinets at home.

We decided to gamble. It was all or nothing. If he didn’t want the whole wagonload, we’d take our stash elsewhere. So we started off for the Acme. This was no mean trek. The Acme stood adjacent to the town dock (Fawcett Boat Supplies today). To get there we had to roll up Market Street, cut through the funeral home parking lot (something we were perennially warned against by our parents, who vowed to thrash us if they ever caught us trespassing there, which threat we perennially ignored), slide down Green Street and across Compromise Street.

Acme would have nothing to do with our bottles either. The manager himself even came out and gave us the once over. “Where’d you get them bottles at?” We told him that we got them from our various basements and kitchens. He didn’t believe us. “I’ll take them,” he said pointing to the same bottles Joe had coveted. We looked at each other with the beginnings of panic. “We’ll try the IGA,” Peter said stoically. “Yeah, they’ll take them,” we echoed dutifully.

So the IGA it was. We had to cross by the gas station (where the flagpole is today) and again by the old fish market to the row of stores that faced the harbor. Then we had to wheel the wagon up the little inclined entryway that had the letters IGA inlaid in the stone. A friendly store clerk gave a laugh as we entered. “Get a load of this, will ya!” he called to the rest of his crew. “Now what do you expect to do with all that?” he asked.

“Turn it in for the deposits?” We faltered, a little abashed by now. We had run out of stores. The A&P, on the other side of the harbor, was too far even for eight-year-old boys to venture.

“You pick all this up out of the creek?”

How did he know? We went honest and told him the whole story, the gathering, the scrubbing, the rejections.

“They wouldn’t take these bottles over to the Acme?” the man asked incredulously. “Why this is the best lot of bottles I’ve seen come through here in all my days. You bet we’ll take ‘em here sure enough. Every last one of them. Count ‘em!” So we counted. I don’t remember exactly how many bottles there were, but I distinctly remember that my share of the haul was 32 cents—a veritable fortune to a five-year-old. You can bet Mr. IGA got every penny of it back, too.

The tide swelled the creek back to normal eventually. It may have taken days for the rhythm to return. Or it may have been the fluke of a single day, an odd oops in the cosmic way of things. I don’t recall that part of the story, only our wagonload of bottles and the remuneration it brought. As for the details, I scan through my memory banks and realize that it was all recorded by a five-year-old. And five-year-olds, I’ve discovered, tell colossal lies.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Jamestown’s Big Bang

[05.07 issue]

Jamestown’s 400th anniversary gives birth to a universe of activities across the Bay.

by Jody Argo Schroath

By the time 2007 takes its own place in the past, there will be perhaps two or three people in the Chesapeake area who have not been touched by a Jamestown 400th-anniversary event—they’ll be the ones wearing Pampers. And even then. . . .

There are so many special events marking the quadricentennial of the landing at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, that they spilled over backward into last year. The replica ship Godspeed, for example, made a tour of the East Coast before returning to Virginia to prepare for this year’s first landing re-enactment on April 26. Jamestown Live! allowed a million students across the country to watch an hour-long webcast on Jamestown’s legacy that featured questions from students to a panel that included Chickahominy Chief Stephen Adkins, Jamestown’s chief archaeologist William Kelso and former astronaut Dr. Kathryn Thornton. The Virginia tribes held a conference last October on 400 Years of Survival. And last month, radio host Tavis Smiley hosted a 2007 State of the Black Union event on the Black Imprint on America. Smiley asked a panel of 36 notable African-Americans to discuss the role that Blacks have played in the development of America, from the arrival of the first slaves at Jamestown in 1619 to the present.

But don’t worry, there are plenty of special activities still on the 2007 event horizon, including the biggest and brashest one of them all. That would be America’s Anniversary Weekend, May 11 to 13, at Jamestown, a mega-celebration that will feature three days of special events and all manner of famous folks—James Earl Jones, Ricky Skaggs, Chaka Khan, Sandra Day O’Connor and, of course, the Richmond Indigenous Gourd Orchestra (they grow their own instruments). To help you make sense of all the Jamestown 400 hoopla—which will include a visit May 3 and 4 by Queen Elizabeth II—we’ve ruthlessly marshaled these activities into several neat groups— Jamestown events, all-around-the-Bay-events and (our readers’ favorite) events with boats. Finally, you’ll find two related stories—the first, how our understanding of what happened at Jamestown has changed over the years as we have changed; the second, information on cruising the Jamestown area.


Jamestown Events
When we talk about Jamestown, of course, we are talking about not one Jamestown, but two. For Jamestown newbies, here’s how we went from zero to two: Since Jamestown had all but disappeared as a town by the middle of the 18th century, 1907’s 300th-birthday celebration was held in Norfolk instead. But organizers of the 1957 event moved the 350th birthday party back to Jamestown—to a facility constructed for the purpose, called Jamestown Festival Park and located adjacent to the original site. Jamestown Festival Park is now named Jamestown Settlement, while the site of the 1607 landing, early forts and town is called Historic Jamestowne. Hence two Jamestowns and three sites for the 400th Anniversary Weekend (the third is Anniversary Park, across Route 31 from the settlement, and where many of the weekend’s concerts will be held).

Jamestown Settlement, under the operation of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation of the State of Virginia, includes a re-created Indian village, a reproduction Jamestown fort, 70,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor exhibition space—where you can walk down a 17th-century English main street—and reproductions of the ships that brought the first settlers: Susan Constant, Godspeed andDiscovery. Special 400th-anniversary programming at the Settlement begins April 27 with the opening of “The World of 1607,” an ambitious cycle of four exhibits put together by 28 scholars using ma-terials borrowed from all over the world with the aim of putting the settlement of Jamestown in a global context. The idea is to make us nonscholars recognize that events do not occur in a vacuum, but rather as a part of larger forces, including political, social and artistic. Items that will be part of the exhibit include a 15th-century copy of the Magna Carta, a 1607 jade wine cup of the Emperor Jahangir of India and a 17th-century African carved-ivory saltcellar. Don’t you feel smarter already?

A lot of the other special programming at Jamestown Settlement will take place only during the Anniversary Weekend. This will include artillery demonstrations, honor guards, story- telling, pageantry and plays. There will be demonstrations by artisans and craftspeople, and more than enough to keep several thousand children as happy as clams for hours at a time. The replica ships will also be open for tours, and costumed interpreters will act as guides in all areas of the park.

The archaeological site, known as Historic Jamestowne, is a partnership between the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). It’s on nearby Jamestown Island, connected to the mainland by the Colonial Parkway and a short bridge across Sandy Bay. In 1994, the APVA hired archaeologist William Kelso to excavate the site in hopes of finding something exciting for the 2007 anniversary. Although earlier excavations had failed to find evidence of the original James Fort, Kelso found it on his first dig—that April. The site of the fort was long believed to have been flooded two centuries ago by the James River. In fact, nearly all the fort’s original footprint is on dry land, with only one corner under water. In the years following that discovery, Kelso and his workers have uncovered more than 700,000 artifacts, including a particularly intriguing skeleton found just outside the original walls buried with a ceremonial captain’s staff. Kelso believes this may be the remains of Bartholomew Gosnold, captain of theGodspeed and one of the colony’s key leaders. [See sidebar, page 57.]

Historic Jamestowne has recently added a sleek, multi-windowed Archaearium, which uses clever display techniques to show off a selection of the artifacts within view of where they were unearthed. Also at Historic Jamestowne, visitors can visit the glassblowers house, the remains of a late-17th-century church, archaeological finds such as the outlines of Jamestown’s last statehouse (1663), an early burial ground, and statues of John Smith and Pocahantas.

Special Anniversary Weekend events at Historic Jamestowne will include commemorations of past Jamestown celebrations, a series of programs called 104 Men and Boys, lectures and the official send-off of the replica shallop that will spend the rest of the summer re-enacting Captain John Smith’s 1608 voyages of discovery on the Chesapeake [see “The Captain’s Trail,” October, November 2006]. Smith had set off from Jamestown not long after the settlers arrived to explore the Bay in search of gold and the long-sought Northwest Passage to Asia and to make contact with the Native American tribes living along its shores. During two major voyages of discovery, Smith and his crew sailed or rowed up nearly every tributary on the Bay and Smith himself created its first detailed map. The re-enactment voyage that leaves Jamestown May 12 will largely retrace Smith’s trips, making about two dozen stops at cities and towns along the way.

Musical events will play a big part in the Anniversary Weekend schedule—including a 1,607-member chorale and 400-piece orchestra, famous performers such as Bruce Hornsby, Chaka Khan and Ricky Skaggs, and award-winning musical groups from dozens of schools and independent organizations all over the country (including that all-gourd orchestra). In addition, there will be re-enactments, plays, fireworks, pageantry, demonstrations and dramatic readings . . . in short, just about everything you can imagine. No more than 30,000 people will be admitted on any one of the three days, so buying a ticket in advance is essential. For a detailed schedule of events, visitwww.jamestown2007.org. You’ll find ticket information there, too, and in the sidebar on this page.


All Over the Bay Events
While the Anniversary Weekend will produce the biggest bang for the history books, you can be sure that there will be a Jamestown 400 boomlet near you. It may be a Signature Event—the term used by Jamestown 2007 organizers for a dozen or so major events around the region, many of which adopt the anniversary’s official theme: A convergence of three cultures. Among these are the American Indian Intertribal Festival in Hampton, Va., on July 21 and 22 and the African-American Culture and Commerce Expo on August 24 and 25 in Hampton Roads. Also on the schedule is the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., June 27 to July 8, which will feature performers, storytellers and crafts from native Virginia, southeastern England and West Africa. September 16 to 19 will see the concluding Forum on the Future of Democracy in Williamsburg. (You’ll find more information on all these events at thewww.jamestown2007.org site.)

Elsewhere, a special exhibit in Richmond is especially worthy of note. “Rule Britannia! Art, Royalty and Power in the Age of Jamestown,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, runs from April 28 through August 12 (www.vmfa.state.va.us/rule.html). This is an exhibition of 17th-century royal portraits and maritime paintings—some of them massive—that include special loans from the collection of Queen Elizabeth II, museums such as the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private British collections. Some of these works have rarely been seen by the public.

In Norfolk, the Virginia Living Museum will offer two special and very different programs as its contribution to the Jamestown festivities. “Survivor: Jamestown Maze,” which runs through November 25, challenges children and adults to wind their way through a maze, making decisions along the way in order to survive in this new world. Also at the Living Museum, backyard horticulturalists will delight in a new permanent garden that highlight’s Virginia’s botanical history from 1607 to the present.

Two more Norfolk events are worthy of note. Sail Virginia, June 7 to 12, will feature military parades and ceremonies, historical re-enactments, maritime and cultural activities with tall ships off Ocean View and Norfolk Naval Base, and Harborfest weekend, with plays and special exhibits. (www.sailvirginia2007.com) Norfolk will also be the location for Working Waterways and Waterfronts—A National Symposium on Water Access, May 9 to 11, at the Sheraton Marriott Norfolk. (www.wateraccess2007.com).

The Kimball Theatre in Williamsburg (www.vptheatre.com) is currently showcasing a historical play, Smith, Being the Life and Death of Cap’n John by Ivor Nel Hume. This runs April 5 to December 31.

We could go on, but the list of Jamestown-related events at locations throughout the Chesapeake would stretch into next month’s magazine, so we recommend that you checkwww.jamestown2007.org/calendar.cfm. You can search by date and area.


Events with Boats
Happily for all of us boaters on the Bay, a great many of the 400th-anniversary events will be taking place in and around the water. Here, too, it’s enough information to sink a ship, so we are only going to hit the high spots. But we’ll give you some websites where you can find out more. The water-centered events fall pretty much into two categories: re-enactment events that feature one or all of the three replica ships, Godspeed, Susan Constant and Discovery, and re-enactment events centered on the 1608 discovery voyages of Captain John Smith and his crew. To make things even more interesting, the Bay has produced not one, but three replicas of Smith’s 30-foot open boat, called a shallop, that was carried aboard ship from England and then reassembled in the New World. Each of the replica shallops has its own itinerary—though occasionally, like on this first event, they will all be together.

By way of Jamestown re-enactments, this is the Big Bang. On Thursday, April 26, all three ships and all three shallops will be at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach for a dramatic redo of the Jamestown settlers’ first landfall in America at Cape Henry. The first-landing program will start at 9 a.m. Can’t make it that early? Don’t worry, the second first-landing program will start at 3 p.m. There will be an admission charge at the park for the event.

The replica ships will leave Virginia Beach on April 28, as the Godspeed takes the lead in the Signature Event called Journey up the James. The Godspeed will stop at three other ports before arriving at Jamestown on May 11 for the start of the Anniversary Weekend. [For all the ports of call of Godspeed’s Journey up the James as well as its journey on the Bay this summer and fall, see sidebar, page 57.] Recreational boaters are invited to join the flotilla from Virginia Beach to Hampton on April 28 in what Hampton calls the Great American Dock Party. The date also coincides with the city’s International Children’s Festival. (For infor-mation on participating marinas, call 800-487-8778.)

Although all three shallops will be at Virginia Beach on April 26 for the First Landing event, the “official” shallop—the one built in Chestertown by Sultana Projects—will get its formal send-off at 10 a.m. on May 12 from Historic Jamestowne for the start of its re-enactment of Smith’s voyages of discovery. (You’ll need an Anniversary Weekend ticket to see the send-off.) The first of 20 official stops in the re-enactment voyage will be at Onancock on May 19 and 20, coinciding with that town’s combined celebration of Captain Smith and the 200th birthday of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). At all of the official stops, visitors will be invited to meet the crew and view the traveling exhibits that go along with it [see sidebar, page 56].

Special events are planned to coincide with official stops of both the shallop on its re-enactment voyage and the Godspeed as it visits ports throughout the Bay following the Anniversary Weekend, so check the schedule in the sidebar and then look for informa-tion near your home port or favorite cruising grounds.

Finally, this summer’s Captain John Smith 400 voyage will inaugurate the nation’s first all-water historic trail, the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Water Trail, which was approved by Congress in December 2006 and which is under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. At three points in the Sultana shallop’s trip, NOAA will activate its first three “smart buoys” that will give information about the historic and ecological significance of the particular location, as well as live readings of weather and water conditions and of water quality. The first buoy will be located 400 yards offshore due south of the Jamestown monument and will be dedicated during Anniversary Weekend. The second will be a mile or so northwest of the Point Lookout Light near the mouth of the Potomac River. The third will be activated when the shallop approaches Baltimore and will sit about a mile east-south-east of Seven Foot Knoll light. Boaters (and everyone else) will be able to dial these buoys by calling the toll free number 877-BUOYBAY. You’ll be able to access the buoys over the internet at www.buoybay.org.

Okay, that’s it for us. Now it’s up to you. Take a look, learn more about America’s beginnings, and then get on board and go see it for yourself!

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Good Men Down

[03.05 issue]

The 1977 sinking of the Claud W. Somers left six men dead and an island community puzzling over what happened and why.

by Jane Meneely

There was no question in Thompson Wallace’s mind about going out that day. He was in debt and the ice had finally broken up. He’d owned the skipjack Claud W. Somers less than a year, and he was bound and determined to make good on her—she was the embodiment of his long-held dream to own his own dredgeboat. When the wind came up and the rest of the oyster fleet headed home, he stayed put in the open water at the mouth of the Honga River, determined to get in a few more licks. Then he headed back to Chance, the small harbor on the Deal Island narrows that he had left before dawn that March morning. He wasn’t worried about the weather, though he knew as well as anyone how treacherous spring gales could be, how they could sneak up on you and hammer you to pieces. What he didn’t know was that today the wind would build to near hurricane force—and that neither he nor his crew would ever set foot on dry land again.

The people who live on Deal Island still shake their heads over what happened on March 4, 1977. The details they offer differ to a degree—because so many people witnessed the event from so many different perspectives—but one thing is certain, they can recall the tragedy as if it happened yesterday, instead of nearly 30 years ago. Some of the eyewitnesses have since passed away, but the community of watermen that continues to work the waters of Hooper Strait, Tangier Sound and the Bay beyond, has preserved their stories and woven them into the fabric of island life.

I saw this for myself when I first began asking questions about the Claud W. Somers. I had driven to Wenona, Md., the harbor on the end of Deal Island and home to a few of the Bay’s last remaining active skipjacks. I’d gone into Arby Holland’s little store next to the wharf and was chatting with Arby’s father Paul. The older Holland had parked himself at a small table where he was dealing himself another hand of solitaire. He was telling me what he knew of the Somerstragedy, but he couldn’t recall the name of the man who had offered Wallace a tow. “Just wait a second. These fellows will know,” he said nodding toward crabber S. T. Webster and one of his buddies out in the parking lot. Both wore the white rubber boots and ubiquitous ball caps of working watermen. When they came in to retrieve some packing boxes for their soft crabs, Holland piped up: “You boys remember who’s the man towed those boys in? Fellow from up Wingate, maybe?”

Webster frowned, and I thought he would say, “What boys? When?” But he knew just who Holland meant. “Don’t rightly recall,” he said, “but I’ll bet Grant Corbin would know.” Webster grabbed a package of crackers and joined in the conversation. “Thompson was a good waterman, lots of experience. I saw him sailing into the dock many a time. It’s a shame about all that,” he said reminding us that all but one of Wallace’s crew that day were related.

In my quest for living memory of the incident, I did eventually talk to Grant Corbin; I also talked to Elsworth Hoffman, retired head of the local DNR who supervised the search when the boat didn’t return; I talked to longtime skipjack captain Art Daniels; I talked to Esther Wallace, Thompson’s widow, and Kevin Wallace, Thompson’s son; I talked to Donald Mills, who went out in the foggy dark after the storm to try and find the men; I talked to Don Simmons, whose father, DNR officer Jennings Simmons, was with the group that found and retrieved the bodies; I talked to Snooks Windsor, who helped raise the Somers off the bottom once she was found, sunk in 20 feet of water at the mouth of the Honga River, and who watched as the bodies of the drowned men were brought ashore at Wingate. I talked to anyone I could find who had any recollection of the event—and gradually the Claud W. Somers’s story began to emerge.


Thompson Wallace was born and raised on Deal Island. He was one of 23 kids (yes, 23), the children of waterman Robert James and Roseana Wallace. By all accounts he was affable and well liked—and he had a streak of the devil. Afraid of nothing, they say. And he was ambitious. He’d set his sights on owning his own boat one day, come hell or high water.

Wallace worked on and around boats all his life. He was a jack-of-all-trades, and he’d captained plenty of boats—other people’s boats. His name shows up on the roster for the 1971 Chesapeake Appreciation Days skipjack races as the captain of the Ida May, owned by Elbert Gladden. When the Claud W. Somers came up for sale, Wallace was at last ready to buy. The boat was a sorry mess, to be sure. She leaked like a sieve and the engine on her yawl boat was unreliable at best. But she wasn’t that much worse off than some of the other boats in the Deal Island dredge fleet—a total of 35 vessels at the time. And there was nothing wrong with her that Wallace couldn’t fix.

The Somers came from good stock. She was built on Virginia’s Eastern Shore by Tom Young in 1911, commissioned by Thomas Edward Somers, a Crisfield businessman, and named for his son Claud Williams Somers. She was 461/2 feet long, with a 14-foot beam, and fast. With then-owner Captain Curwin Evans at the helm, she whipped the chines off the rest of the dredgeboats at the 1931 skipjack race—the last one before World War II. More than 30 years later, she whipped them all again, this time with Captain Linwood Benton at the wheel.

But by the time Wallace bought the boat from Jack Parkinson in the spring of 1976, her glory days were over. Wallace brought her around to Eldon Willing’s boatyard in Chance and set to work. By the start of the dredge season, he’d gotten her reasonably sound—by his standards at least, and he was no slouch at carpentry and boat repair. She’d be nearly sunk at the dock every morning, but he’d get the pump going and she’d be floating again soon enough. She wasn’t the only skipjack known to take on a little water overnight. Besides, water retention has always been the plague of old ladies.

Wallace took all her problems in stride, doing what he could for the boat when he had the time or the money—after paying her “mortgage,” there wasn’t a lot of cash left. He kept her together with sweat and prayers mostly. There were those on the island who told him to his face that he was a fool to run that decrepit old boat, that he was going to drown someone. But there were plenty of others who figured he knew what he was doing and would get by just as generations of oystermen before him had.

The winter of 1976–77 had been a bad season all round. There weren’t many oysters to begin with—MSX had begun to ravage the already dwindling oyster beds. And worse, the Bay had been frozen solid for two months, shrinking the number of days the watermen could even get to open water. The watermen of Deal Island were desperate to get back to work when the ice finally broke up at the end of February during a welcome warm spell. Within days the ice had melted, save for the big piles of broken slab ice that had been pushed up on shore by wind and tide. Even more welcome was the news that the DNR had extended the oyster season two weeks beyond the usual March 15 cut off.


It was gusty that Friday morning, March 4, with four-foot seas and 15 to 30 mph winds. In all likelihood, it was going to get worse. Boats from Wenona could “see” the wind, according to Art Daniels, captain of the skipjack City of Crisfield. They didn’t go out that day. But the Chance harbor is sheltered from a south blow, and 55-year-old Thompson Wallace went down to his boat in the wee hours and pumped it out as usual for the day’s run. His crew gathered: his older brother, “Big George” Wallace, age 64; his nephew Carter Wallace, age 20; his wife’s cousin Thomas James, age 20; his son Gerald Wallace, age 24 and home on leave from the Marines; and one non-relative, Levin Johnson, age 44. Another son, Kevin Wallace, age 15, was at the dock ready to go along when he was unexpectedly called home. “I was there at the dock when they left, but for some reason I can’t recall, I didn’t go out with them that day,” he says now. Another regular crew member, Earl White, who passed away recently, stayed home that day—”Didn’t even get out of bed,” he told me. He knew Gerald would be taking his place.

Captain Elsworth Hoffman, a Department of Natural Resources police officer from Chance, made the rounds of the harbor and advised Wallace not to go out that day. Reports indicated rough weather developing later in the afternoon. That wasn’t enough to deter Wallace. In the dim predawn light, he started up his yawl boat engine and eased the skipjack away from the dock. TheSomers pushed out of Chance harbor north into Tangier Sound, ran past Sharkfin Shoal and along the north shore of Bloodsworth Island, heading for the dredging ground off Hooper Island near the mouth of the Honga River. Any boat that was going out that day would have left the dock in darkness in order to be on the oyster “rock” when the sun came up, so as not to miss a single legal “lick” of the oyster bed. Like hunters, skipjacks can’t begin their harvest till sunrise, but begin at sunrise they do.

Wallace would have been ready for any breeze that smacked him as he left the shelter of the harbor. His crew would have reefed the mainsail the night before. This was standard practice for a skipjack; it’s always easier to shake a reef out than to put one in, especially on a cold winter morning. Wallace doubtless sniffed the breeze that morning and left his reefs in—three of them. A skipjack doesn’t require but so much wind in order to pull a dredge. If it builds up too much speed, the dredge will just bounce along the bottom. The captain will gauge the wind and raise what he needs of his mainsail to fit the conditions. Wallace didn’t need a lot of canvas that morning.

Then, as now, a skipjack was allowed to take 150 bushels of oysters in one day, but by the late 1970s, especially in the lower Bay, where MSX was more prevalent, nobody was pulling in 150 bushels a day. Half that would be a splendid haul for the Deal oysterman. When the wind really began to kick up at noon, Wallace had done reasonably well, but not well enough to quit. The other skipjack working that day headed in, while Wallace stayed on to get a few more “jags”—the waterman’s term for a full dredge. He got more than he bargained for. From all accounts the winds were ferocious that afternoon. Landsmen clocked them at 75 mph. Paul Holland, working as an oyster buyer in Wenona then, says it blew 80 to 85 at its peak. Long before the crest of the storm, Wallace started for home. That’s when hell took over. He started having trouble with that cranky yawl boat engine, and couldn’t make way.

Buddy Jones, aboard his tonging boat the Dana Matt, was hightailing it for Chance when he passed the Claud W. Somers bound for Hooper Strait, according to an account printed in the SalisburyDaily Times, March 7, 1977. Jones said it looked like Wallace was having trouble, so he pulled alongside and offered to help. Wallace took Jones’s spare battery hoping it would help get his yawl boat started. When that effort failed, Jones offered Wallace a tow. “I towed her about ten miles in the first two hours,” Jones told the newspaper. “When we hit Hooper Strait, we were really in trouble.” He said that by then the winds had reached 70 mph with 15-foot seas, and the towline broke loose from his cleats. Jones refastened it, but the line broke loose again. Fearful for his own safety, Jones donned his lifejacket and told Wallace and his crew to leave the boat and get aboard the Dana Matt. Wallace declined, saying “We’re going to try to save her!” Buddy Jones said he’d get help for them and motored away. Looking back, he saw that Thomas James had put on a life jacket and climbed into the skipjack’s yawl boat, probably in another effort to get the motor started.

Meanwhile, Art Daniels had seen the Somers go out, but he hadn’t seen it come back. He called the DNR to tell them Wallace might be in trouble. Corporal Walton Webster went out to look for the missing boat, but conditions were so rough, he turned back. When the Somers wasn’t back in port by 5 p.m., Elsworth Hoffman, the DNR officer in Chance, decided to go look for it himself. He went down to his boat, but couldn’t get the engine running. Conditions had deteriorated so much by that time, he recalls, that even if he had gotten the boat going, he wasn’t sure he could have managed open water. Back in his office, about sunset, he got a radio call from the tug Interstate, probably heading to Salisbury with a tow of coal. The tug reported seeing a boat in trouble in Hooper Strait. From his description, Hoffman figured it was probably the Somers, but he was helpless to do anything, and other DNR boats were too far away. He could only wait—and hope that the fearless and capable Wallace could ride it out or get his boat to sheltered water. Maybe he already had.

Word spread quickly that Wallace was in trouble. When the weather abated, those who could went to look for him, and the Coast Guard and DNR began an all-out search. Donald Mills of Bishops Head remembers that there was a thick fog that night. He came upon a 55-gallon drum floating in the water—the kind a skipjack captain would have used to carry gas for the winder motor. “I knew I was close, and I kept looking. Seeing that drum, I knew the boat was down, but I thought maybe some of those boys would be hanging on to the mast.” He found nothing.

According to some reports, searchers from Wingate, Md., saw the yawl boat around 9 p.m. It had broken away from the skipjack and had washed up on the beach at Bishops Head. A few hours later the body of Thomas James, still in a life jacket, was found floating between

Bishops Head and the Hooper Strait light, and would-be rescuers knew that chances of finding the skipjack or the rest of its crew were slim. Between the fog and the darkness visibility was nil. At that point, nearly midnight, they concentrated their efforts in the area where James’s body had been found, thinking that Wallace had left Hooper Strait, running before the wind toward the harbor at Wingate. Or maybe he had tried to run her deliberately into shallow water to keep her from submerging if she sank. Helicopters with searchlights swept the area but still found nothing.

Finally, shortly before midnight, Henry Gootee of Golden Hill detected the boat on his radar, west and north of where people had been looking. “You know an area well, you can see something on radar that doesn’t belong there,” he says from his office at Gootee’s Marine in Church Creek. He’d left his dock at 7:30 p.m. after hearing that a boat was in trouble. In the thick darkness he had his eyes peeled on his radar screen as much as on the water ahead. One by one the familiar markers came on his screen as he expected, but something unfamiliar showed up in the stretch of water above the Hooper Strait light. Sure enough, when he worked his way closer and could put a spotlight on it, he could see the top of the Somers’s mast, tilting out of the water about 300 yards off Norman Cove. There was no sign of life.

News of the discovery spread fast, and by morning as many as 50 boats had gathered at the site. Captain Ben Parks of Cambridge recalls heading out from Hooper Island with his dad aboard the family skiff. The Hooper Island volunteer fire company, he says, had the only “body drag” around, and they were always being called upon to use it. Not a pretty apparatus, to hear him describe it. It’s a long steel bar on rollers, with sharp, three-pronged hooks dangling from it. “It’ll snag anything,” Parks says. He climbed aboard the police boat to help Officer Harold Pritchett with the drag, but they weren’t having any luck. Back and forth, back and forth, they combed the whole area around the skipjack with no result. It wasn’t until Charles Abbott and a few of the men from Chance had shifted the skipjack slightly in order to hoist her off the bottom that the bodies of the four Wallace men and Levin Johnson were found below the boat’s mast. One by one the men were hauled aboard the police boat and taken to the Wingate public wharf.

“I remember seeing those boys lying there in the police boat like it was yesterday,” says Snooks Windsor, who was at the wharf when the boats came in. He still operates a marina and railway there. “It’s not something you’re likely to forget.”

Meanwhile, the Claud W. Somers was floated and towed back to Chance. Thirty-three bushels of oysters lay on her decks. Within a month she was sold to D. K. Bond, who ran her out of Chesapeake Beach, Md. Now she’s owned and sailed by the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum—one of only a few Virginia-built skipjacks left.


No one can say how or why the Somers ended up at the mouth of the Honga River when, by Buddy Jones’s account, the boat was nearly through Hooper Strait when he left her to get help. Captain Ed Farley of the skipjack H.M. Krentz out of Tilghman, speculates that the yawl boat, with Thomas James still aboard and trying to start the engine, must have broken free of the Somers. Wallace may have been trying to chase the boat down to retrieve the boy. The skipjack, laden with oysters and doubtless taking on water faster than anyone could pump her out, just foundered, settling to the bottom with her load of oysters still on deck.

Regardless of the hows and whys, the outcome remains the same. It’s part of the burden of working the water. Boats sink; people drown. Perhaps the story of the Claud W. Somers remains so deeply embedded in the communal memory precisely because no one can ever really know what happened. Or perhaps the telling and retelling of such a story is a community’s first line of defense, a warning to its children about the vagaries of nature and the dangers inherent in working the water. It is, after all, a cautionary tale, and anyone “coming up on the water,” as the islanders would put it, should heed the lesson.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Birds of a Feather

[01.06 issue]

The annual Duck Drop in Havre de Grace, Md., turned out to be harmless enough. But the idea of dropping a duck . . . well, this author simply had to investigate.

by Jane Meneely

It was New Year’s Eve and I’d heard they’d be dropping a duck in Havre de Grace that night.Dropping a duck, they said. Can you imagine? They were going to take some innocent little duck to the top of some tall tower and drop it at the stroke of midnight. Unconscionable! Paul and I were outraged. Well, I was outraged, anyway. Paul was more nonchalant. “I thought ducks could fly,” he said. Men can be such dolts! I’m hardly what one would call an animal rights activist. Aside from a “Save the Whales” bumper sticker and an “I brake for moose” souvenir poster from the Yukon, I’m animal neutral. Still, the thought of some poor duck plummeting through the frigid midnight air just to satisfy the bloodlust of a bunch of insensitive and no doubt inebriated revelers was enough for me to want to gird my loins and head to the rescue. There was no time to lose!

I had already called to make dinner reservations in town—at the Crazy Swede, in fact, a white-linen-tablecloth establishment on Union Avenue. Very fancy. This would be a dressy sort of place where we would mingle with the Havre de Grace cognoscenti and perhaps glean some important information about the cruelty to come. Like where the duck was held prisoner, for example, and how many guards were on duty.

“And eat?” Paul asked. “We get to eat, too, right?” You’d think he didn’t care about that poor little duck. “We’re going to have to blend in with the crowd,” I said, and handed Paul a nifty little duck hat I’d found on sale. It looked like a mallard with outstretched wings that flapped when you pulled on the chin string. If you tugged on the bill it quacked. Paul balked at first. “You expect me to wearthat?” he said. “No way.”

“Way,” I said, as I donned my own stealth helmet—a ball cap studded with light-up duck pins. “We’re doing this for the duck,” I reminded him. Paul muttered something about the duck on the menu, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I handed him a pair of camouflage hunting pants I’d found at the Goodwill (nice touch, I thought). And I wore my L.L. Bean duck boots with my Sunday-go-to-meeting gold lamé skirt and sequined top. Into my hand bag went binoculars, duck calls, a street map of Havre de Grace, a couple of Jack Daniels minis, and an assortment of lock-picking tools—bobby pins, paper clips and a small silver butter knife.

We made the drive to Havre de Grace in broad daylight, the better to case the town. I’d made reservations at the Currier House B&B, a lovely place, decorated with all sorts of family memorabilia—hand-carved decoys, among other mementos from Havre de Grace’s past. I gave Paul a nudge. “I have a hunch,” I whispered. Then I smiled sweetly at our hostess, Jane Currier. “Havre de Grace sure is Duck City,” I said. “Where do you keep them all?”

“Folks that want to see the ducks generally take a stroll down our boardwalk,” she said. “It’s been rebuilt since Isabel. You can see all sorts of bird life from there.” The boardwalk was barely two blocks from the Currier House, and Paul and I were on our way faster than a duck can wag its tail. But it was a dead end. That Currier woman was one smart dame. She’d sent us on a wild-goose chase. Or whatever. I mean, the boardwalk was lovely. We could see clear across the Susquehanna Flats, and true enough, the place was quacking with ducks. But these were wild ducks, free as . . . birds.

“Where else would a person go to find ducks in Havre de Grace?” we asked a lady strolling by with a baby carriage. (My experience has led me to believe that ladies with baby carriages are inherently trustworthy.) “You want to go up the street to the Decoy Museum,” she said. “They’ve got all kinds of ducks up there.”

Aha!

We followed her directions and soon found ourselves outside the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum. Rats! It had just closed, but there didn’t seem to be any signs of live ducks around, so we decided to wander “aimlessly” down Havre de Grace’s streets to see what we could see. The map made it all easy enough, and plenty of shops were open. We almost got sidetracked by the lure of antiques, books and art on display. But a flock of geese winging overhead soon got us back on track.

“We’ve got to find that duck.” I said to Paul. “We’re running out of time.”

“I’m running out of energy,” Paul said. “Food. Give me food.”

I checked the time—we’d be a tad early for our dinner reservations, but perhaps Paul was right. A bit of nosh would do us both good, so we headed for the restaurant. Which was packed. A great spot for New Year’s Eve dining, we’d been told. A congenial lad named Dave led us to our table. “The duck,” he whispered to us. “Get the duck.”

How did he know?

“We most surely will,” I said to him, in equally low tones, “but . . .” He was gone before I could ask him where to find it. Still, I was dumbfounded. This was a secret mission—or so I’d thought.

“Maybe that Currier dame put two-and-two together,” Paul suggested. “Maybe she’s on your side.”

“Our side,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever,” Paul said, eyeing the menu.

A waitress appeared within minutes. “May I recommend the duck?” she said, pointing out several duck entrees on the menu.

The nerve! “No thank you,” I muttered tersely.

“The veal looks good,” Paul said.

I kicked him under the table. He ended up with the grouper topped with a wonderful crab imperial. I had lobster—real lobster, done beautifully. Aside from the waitress’s questionable culinary tastes, the service was excellent.

“Maybe Dave knows where they keep the duck,” I whispered to Paul as we were leaving. “Ask him.”

“You ask him,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face.”

I wasn’t sure what Paul meant by that, but I sidled up to Dave near the bar, where he was busily conversing with the bartender. He paused for a moment.

“How can I help you?” he said.

“I wondered about the duck,” I whispered. “Where would we find it? The duck for the . . . gulp . . . duck drop.”

Dave waved toward the door. “You’ll have to hurry. They’ll have taken the duck to the tower. It’s all set to drop in . . . “ he checked his watch, “twenty minutes.”

Good heavens! We’d more than dawdled over dinner—delicious as it was. Not much time to spare! That poor duck. We hustled out the door, and following Dave’s directions, headed for the Havre de Grace Middle School. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the action was. Everyone and his duck call were wending through the streets of Havre de Grace and descending on the school parking lot. Paul was right in style. “Thanks for the hat,” he said, pulling on the string and making it quack. The noise only added to the general cacophony of quacks and honks and phwwtts and boings emanating from the multitude of noisemaking devices. Paul got in a quacking duel with a nearby fellow—to distract him, I’m sure.

“So, where do they keep the duck?” I casually asked a matronly lady supervising a half-dozen rowdy teenaged kids. “It’s right up there,” she said pointing to the top of an extended fire engine ladder from a fire truck parked down behind the school. I craned my neck for a look, shuddering to think I was too late. But no. . . .

“That’s the duck?” I asked.

“None other,” she said.

“But it’s made of . . . lights!”

“And Styrofoam.”

Lights and Styrofoam? Well . . . silly me. And in a last final blast of noisemakers mixed with a touch of cannon fire—or maybe it was the first of the fireworks—the emblazoned duck did indeed drop to the ground. As the numerals of the old year, shining brightly and benevolently from the top of the ladder blinked out, the numerals of the new year flashed on to take their place. It was all very cute and perky. And so very appropriate for a place like Havre de Grace.

The fireworks were lovely. The cool night air was soft on my cheeks, like a feather. Paul quacked his duck hat a few more times. And finally, we turned to go, along with a wave of Havre de Grace humanity, blessed and fortified for the year to come.

“Hey,” Paul said. “How’s about a kiss for good luck?”

Sounded like a good idea to me.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Sailing with Pride

[10.04 issue]

It was all hands on deck—even the blistered ones—aboard the Pride of Baltimore II
in last year’s Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race.

by Jane Meneely

It occurred to me that I might faint. Watching my only son climb the rigging onboard the Pride of Baltimore II as we sailed for Norfolk was so overwhelming I was afraid I’d swoon like a B movie diva and hit the deck hard. And if that happened, my son would be mortified, undoubtedly scarred for life. But this was a test for both of us. I looked away as Stewart scampered up the rigging after the crew to furl the main course. And I didn’t faint.

We were headed south full tilt, hoping to whip every other boat in the schooner fleet during the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race last October. Sixteen-year-old Stewart had grudgingly agreed to participate in what I at his age could only have dreamed about—there was no Pride of Baltimore then. But he’d gotten over the grumps and bent to with a will that was a joy to behold—well, except when he scurried up the mast. You see, I’m deathly afraid of heights. Deathly, knee-knockingly afraid of heights. Just looking at the masthead of a ship like the Pride gives me the willies. God forbid I should look up and see my baby perched there like he’s leaning against a corner lamppost. No matter, I told myself, studiously peering at the compass in front of me and keeping my hands hard on the helm. This was why I’d wanted him to come.

When Stewart was born, his father and I had promised him to Jan Miles, one of the Pride’s co-captains and a friend of mine from high school days. Jan could have him for a year, we’d said, before he goes off to college. Naturally, Stewart grew up detesting everything about traditional tall ships. He liked the mechanical advantage of winches, for starters, and he thrived on the fumes and roar of internal combustion. Sailing on the Pride of Baltimore, he announced as high school graduation approached, was for the birds. I tried to convince him that our signing aboard the Pride for the Great Schooner Race was the chance of a lifetime, but he didn’t believe me. He said he’d rather go to school; that missing his calculus test would be an unspeakable hardship; that considering what his father and I pay for tuition it was criminal to even suggest that he miss a few days (I’ll admit, this last argument was pretty convincing). But I played the Mom card and signed him up anyway. It was only four days, not a whole year, I said, and if he really didn’t like it, that would be the end of it. He could join the rat race like everyone else.

And so his father (who gets mortifyingly seasick and thus had begged off ) tumbled him onto the deck of the Pride of Baltimore way too early on the morning of the race. And Stewart sputtered and spit and fumed and generally poisoned the air around him: a child’s revenge, masterfully delivered (no slouch he). And I actually wondered if I’d made a mistake in “forcing” him to come along.

So began our voyage together.

My voyage had actually begun the day before, on Wednesday afternoon. Probably half the fun of the schooner race is the Parade of Sail and the dock party in Baltimore, so I arrived in time to climb aboard the Pride with the full contingent of the A.G. Edwards Baltimore office, Pride’s guests for the parade. (The Pride offices are in Baltimore’s World Trade Center and had been doused into oblivion by Hurricane Isabel. A.G. Edwards, a financial consulting firm, had graciously offered temporary office space, and now the ship was saying thank you.)


Unfortunately the wind was too blustery, so the Parade of Sail was cancelled. But Captain Jan set out anyway. After all, a boat like the Pride is built for wind. Whitecaps sparkled across the Inner Harbor. A bright sun slanted from behind Fort McHenry. The sky was a deep cobalt blue, with just a smudge or two of clouds. We motored past Fells Point and the crew wrestled the ship’s cannon into the gun port. “Fire in the hole!” We plugged our ears as a geyser of flame and sparks shot from what is, literally, a hole in the back end of the cannon. Then, kaboom! We’d just put a shot into the Spirit of Massachusetts’s bow—figuratively, of course. She was the Pride’s main competition in this race, and she’d been put on notice.

With such a breeze, the boat hardly needed sails to move through the water. The wind was abeam full bore as we slid past the green ramparts of Fort McHenry. I looked behind me and tried to imagine Baltimore’s harbor without the tall buildings, without the wharves stretching along the shoreline below the fort. I tried to picture the time when Fort McHenry stood at the harbor’s gate and effectively controlled the shipping up and down the Patapsco River. If I squinted just a little to make things fuzzy and out of focus, I could turn the slope rising from the Canton wharves into a hill of small houses where the laborers for the Fells Point shipyards lived. What a view they must have had from their dormer windows.

The crew had put up the jib and it was enough to pull us toward the Key Bridge. A tanker was coming in from the Bay, and the tugboat Maria Krause idled nearby in the channel. Now that we were at the bridge and looking back at Baltimore, the town seemed smaller, more to scale with my imagination. Steeples poked into the sky. The downtown skyscrapers were hidden.


Our afternoon sail done, the crew retired to the party held beneath Bohager’s giant canopy in Fells Point. A crowd of schooner crew, captains, support staff, assorted significant others and hungry strays had gathered here to eat great quantities of food and drink prodigious amounts of beer. To gain admittance, I was told, I had to wear my official Schooner Race shirt, a long-sleeved affair with a John Barber schooner scene printed on the front. It was cold enough, though, that I was wearing a sweatshirt over it, so coming through Bohager’s door, I was told to peel. Mind you, I hadn’t had any amount of beer yet, prodigious or otherwise, but—transported back to the days of my wayward youth—I felt highly flattered. It had been a long time since anyone had asked me to peel, and I said so. It was like being carded—at my age (a squinch past 50), always a compliment. Turns out they only meant that I had to lift up my sweatshirt so they could verify the shirt. Oh well, you take what you can get.

Sidling up to the bar, I ran into Bill Oliver, once a partner in the nefarious China Sea Marine Trading Company, formerly of Fells Point (where the Fells Point Maritime Museum is now), and now brewer of Oliver’s Ale and proprietor of the Wharf Rat pubs. Not surprisingly, the biggest spigot behind the bar tapped into a keg of his special Ironman Pale Ale. This was a good thing, because Oliver’s Ale is like mother’s milk. You’ve just gotta have it in order to live right. And tonight it was flowing free for the asking. It took me a while to get my first swallow—I wasn’t the only one in line.

Then I was on stage singing with Ship’s Company chanteyman Jim Rockwell (sea music, of course) and the evening took off. More music, more food. And finally the crowd broke up and we walked over to Lane Briggs’s tugantine, Norfolk Rebel, at the Broad Street pier and sang some more. A lot more. Then the sun came up and we staggered back to our boats, some to sleep it off, some to be greeted by surly teenage sons.

Breakfast this morning was a simple meal of strawberries and bagels. Laura Morrissey, the cook, was already about, and I’d offered to help out in the galley. One of my fantasies is to be cook aboard a tall ship. I wouldn’t mind being a deckhand, but hauling on halyards and braces and sheets in the wee hours of the morning could get tedious. And truth be known, I couldn’t, just couldn’t, climb the rigging. The heights thing. Cooks, on the other hand, get to work “normal” hours and aren’t expected to go clambering around on deck unless they particularly want to. At least that’s the drill aboard Pride, according to Laura, who was now supervising me as I put away groceries and generally made myself useful. I was trying to stay as far away from Stewart as possible. Let him fester.

Stewart and I weren’t the only guests onboard. The Pride keeps several guest cabins open for thems that are willing to pony up for the privilege of sailing the ship from here to there—generally speaking, the short legs between two ports of call on the Pride’s hectic agenda. The price of the guest ticket pays for room and board and chucks a little into the boat’s operating coffers. In return, guests are expected to join the crew and work their butts off before the mast. Fun, eh? For the schooner race, Stewart and I were joined by John MacIver and Mac MacIver (fast friends, but no relation), and Ron Shurie and John Menocal. All of them had sailed the Pride in the schooner race before. Nothing to it, they said. Gluttons for punishment, I thought.

As the Pride headed out to the starting line, Laura told me I could make the soup for lunch. Nothing to it! She had what I needed for five-finger lentil stew: an ingredient and a cup of liquid for each digit. In this case, one carrot, one onion, one celery stalk, one bay leaf, one cup of lentils and five cups of water. Saute the dry ingredients for a few minutes before adding the water, then. . . . Oops, I didn’t get it started early enough, so it was a bit chewy at eight bells. (Way to go, Mom.) But the crew was very kind—those that weren’t related to me, anyway. They made their own sandwiches, adding diplomatically that under cooked was usually better than burnt, and it would save Laura the trouble of making soup tomorrow.

I joined the port watch, with Stewart, to work the boat. Even though I was the cook’s helper, I wanted to work the deck when I could. Laura gave me an alarmed look. It’s a slippery slope, said she. Help them once, they’ll come to expect it. But I reminded her that I was here for the fun and the experience, so I wanted to help sometimes. We’ll see, she said ominously. Stewart’s surliness had washed off, thankfully, and he was jumping into the fray, hauling on lines and generally looking lively. I found it a lot easier to stay out of the way and watch, especially after I ripped off half my finger hauling on a wayward halyard. But alas, Laura was right. I was soon perceived as one of the grunts and put to learning the ropes with the rest of the “guests.” I could hear Captain Jan snigger from the helm.

It was like this: Three or four of us picked up a line about half the thickness of my wrist. When the mate (or whoever) yelled haul, we all hauled. Or maybe we yelled haul ourselves to get a rhythm going. Or maybe nobody yelled haul and we just bloody well hauled anyway. For all we were worth. And when we thought we’d hauled enough, the mate yelled haul again, and we bloody well hauled again. And so on, until someone said, “That’s well,” and we could make the line fast. I had blisters before we even got the damn sail up. Before my nervous system could even register the news, the blisters ripped open and any remaining surface skin abraded away. I was a hurting puppy. (Stewart had brought his sailing gloves, smarty-pants.)

It dawned on me that this was not going to be a Sunday sail. The Pride actually needed every muscle the crew could muster. There was a brisk wind, and it was on the nose from Norfolk. We would have to tack over the starting line, then beat down the Bay. So it was all hands on deck, just like in the songs I like to sing. And just because I gouged a big hole in my index finger at the get-go didn’t mean I could weenie out. Jan knew me too well for that. Cook’s helper, hah! I cradled my wound with a moleskin doughnut and wrapped it with black electrical tape. My black badge of courage. I was a real deckhand now. It was like having a tattoo. If only I’d had a knife strapped on my belt.

I headed down below to wash up the pots and pans in the short stints between tacks, but I ran up on deck at the “Ready about!” to haul on lines. And I reminded myself that I’d withstood the rigors of childbirth twice, so a dinky little blister wasn’t going to get me down. Besides, how long could it possibly take us to get to Norfolk? Were we there yet? The warning gun went off—five minutes to start—and all hell broke loose aboard the Pride.


I’ve known Jan Miles for most of my life. In fact, he was my first crush. I met him when we were both in high school. He’d just returned from his first major ocean voyage—to Tierra del Fuego and back—and he carried the swell of the ocean like a sea chest slung across his shoulders. My mother said a girl could go anywhere with Jan. And I thought, first Tierra del Fuego, then . . .

My crush went the way of Clearasil, but Jan went on to crew and captain some of the finest tall ships in America. He’s one of the most laid-back people you could ever know. Years of sailing tall ships has honed his instincts and built a rock-solid confidence. But out there at the start of the schooner race, a change came over my mild-mannered friend. When that warning gun fired and all the schooners pirouetted into position, his eyes blazed, his cheeks flushed and he became absolutely focused on the task at hand. “All right, you sons of whores, get that jib in!” he bellowed (he’s a big guy, and can he ever bellow). And we sons of whores hopped to and tried with all our might—which, in this instance, wasn’t quite enough—to get that jib in. And Captain Jan noted our efforts and allowed as how we were a bunch of lily-livered lumps of lard—or words to that effect—and we did our damnedest to show him that by golly we weren’t. And so it went as the Pride flew across the starting line and the race began with the final bang of the starting gun. This was to be no sedate around-the-buoys affair. This race would be won on the windward leg (aren’t they all?), but with the wind screaming from the south, it would be a long windward leg. And Captain Jan suggested that this pack of puckered prunes had better shape up and get with the program. Which meant getting the blinking jib in when the captain said “in.” Or else. At the rate we were going, if the British had been on our tail instead of the Spirit of Massachusetts, we’d have been toast. But we got better, and by the seventh or eighth tack, we’d gotten a lot better, and the mild-mannered Jan Miles came back and we were making good time. At least, at this point, there weren’t any other schooners nearby, so the competition wasn’t exactly lapping up our bow waves. And the Spirit of Massachusetts had fallen behind.


It’s hard work tacking a topsail schooner. At the moment, running down the Western Shore opposite the mouth of the Choptank River, we had eight sails up: the jib topsail, jib, fore-staysail, foresail, fore topsail, topgallant, mainsail and main gaff-topsail. And they all needed some kind of major adjustment at every tack—releasing sheets, taking in sheets, slacking braces, tightening braces. The only sail we didn’t have to manhandle was the mainsail, which behaved like any proper mainsail and obediently tacked itself. The only sails that weren’t up were the studding sails (stunsails) and the ring tail. But stay tuned. At this very moment one of the studding sails was being checked and patched and readied for rigging in the event the wind came around and we could bear off. The ring tail, I was told, wasn’t worth the bother. Too much work for too little oomph. And oomph counted for a lot in this race.

Night came on with winks and nods, like a fawning deckhand unsure just where to go. The sun blazed down, leaving a puff of color in the crease between land and water. The stars switched on against the dark of the sky. No moon yet. Stewart and I sat companionably on the deckhouse, breathing it all in. He’d worked the kinks out of his system and was ready to acknowledge that I was a fellow traveler. (This is pretty cool, Mom.) I showed him how to find Polaris, the North Star, and we monitored our progress through time by the turn of the other stars around it, and we checked our progress down the Bay by the way it hung astern. The half moon rose like a golden whale’s eye, defining the leviathan sky. We were moving along at eight knots, creaming through the water. There was no phosphorus, but the bow waves spilled away like milk, and moonlight paved the Bay with golden flagstones leading east. It was dark on deck. Even in the glimmer of moonlight, it was hard to see underfoot. It was easy to trip on lines and tackle that in daylight are relatively benign but at night behaved like rambunctious puppies nipping at our heels. At midnight Stewart and I were off watch and the boat had just slipped below the Patuxent River.


We were awakened at 5:30 a.m. to get the studding sail up. The wind had dropped and we were ghosting along on a whisper. Two of the crew were already up on the course yard setting the studding sail boom—running it out from where it normally lies against the yardarm. Moonlight poured down behind them, silhouetting them in a golden haze. The studding sail sat on the foredeck; someone had already carried it up from below. We rigged the halyard and the sheets and hoisted the spar up to the windward yardarm. Sail set, we could go back to our bunks. It was close to 7 a.m. now, and Friday morning was easing up on one elbow with a smudge of cheap rouge smeared across her cheeks. She, like me, had been too long at the fair. Laura was up, though, so I hastily brushed my teeth, washed my face, took off my woolie underwear, smeared on another layer of deodorant and grabbed a cup of coffee.

We were back on deck at 8 a.m. and down came the studding sail—gravity helped. And morning came to the Chesapeake. We could see Gwynn’s Island and Wolf Trap Light, which put us well below the Potomac. And there was no wind to speak of. The morning doldrums had us ambling along with plenty of time to look around and see—no one! We were as solitary on this Bay as Wolf Trap.

The finish was an imaginary line extending east from Thimble Shoal. The wind had picked up and Jan gave me the helm to take the boat across. I was honored. I could feel the boat surging under my hands. The helm was surprising. When the boat was balanced, she sailed a straight line, and for a moment or two I thought that Jan had switched on the autopilot and only pretended to give me the wheel. She didn’t deviate a hair from her compass course. But then we crossed the finish line and Jan told me to bear off, and I stayed on the helm as we tacked and began to work our way west. Full and by, Jan said. Just sail her. And I felt the wind across my cheek and looked at the sails, and I turned the wheel and the boat responded. To me! It doesn’t get any better than this. And then Stewart went up the rigging to furl something and I thought I was going to faint.


The race was over and Jan did some quick calculations. In 21:20 hours we raced a total of 139 nautical miles, at an average speed of 6.53 knots on a rhumb line of 127 miles. We hauled 12 long tons per person. (No wonder I was stiff.) We finished at 10:59:58 a.m. First in class. The Spirit of Massachusetts couldn’t touch us.

Stewart was back on deck and I asked him if sailing tall ships might be in his future. No way, Mom. Yes, he’d remember this sail for as long as he lives. But think about it, said he: He’s spent every minute of his waking life trying to invent his way to easy street. Without getting out of bed, he can turn on his bedroom light, switch on his radio, adjust the window fan, even close his door, using clever labor-saving devices of his own design. He understands the concept of mechanical advantage. Sail a traditional tall ship without winches? Why?

He is my son with whom I am well pleased, and I told him so. When he grows up (sometime next week) he’ll build fast engines for race cars, or maybe engineer the breakthrough for a mainstream hydrogen fuel cell. His house will be wired with buttons and switches that make things open, shut or turn off. Exerting minimum effort he will effect maximum change. If it weren’t for brains like his, we’d all be sailing tall ships—and not for the fun of it. Meanwhile, we headed for the party: roasted pig, awards, more singing. Then home to study calculus.

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