The boat was small, but the crush was huge.
Issue 145: July/Aug 2022
At the age when girls often dream of riding horses, I was falling in love with a sleek, white, fiberglass hull. And though I’ve come a long way through many boats since my first sailboat crush, like all first loves, that first boat is in some ways the most significant in my sailing life.
A few Mercury 15s are reflected in the sunset’s light on Sorrento Harbor. The boat and the place are entwined in Ann’s youthful memories
During those years in the 1960s and early 1970s, for a couple weeks each summer my family rented a cabin on Frenchman Bay in Down East, Maine, where the ocean temperature doesn’t get above 60°F and conditions can be windy and unpredictable. The local yacht club’s training and one-design racing boat was the Cape Cod Mercury 15, a peppy Sparkman & Stephens design with a keel and good ultimate stability—an obvious choice when it came time for me and my siblings to move up from rental boats.
The Mercury 15—not to be confused with the Mercury 18, an older California boat with a still-active fleet—is categorized as a family boat/trainer, with a cockpit big enough for two or three sailors and a hull and sail plan that are forgiving to beginners. With active fleets throughout New England and elsewhere, the boat has never gone out of production.
Our Mercury, hull #966, was a joint purchase with the people who owned the cabin, made so that both of our families could use the boat when we were there at different times. After trying unsuccessfully to find a name we could agree on, by default she became Misnomer (which means a wrong or unsuitable name), and though the word was never painted on her transom, the yacht club recorded her as such.
As luck would have it, I was the first to use her after she arrived in Sorrento Harbor, and I was quickly smitten. During those early weeks of ownership when I couldn’t convince a sibling to sail with me, I’d row out to her mooring and find some chore to do as an excuse to sit in her cockpit.
Ann’s mother, Dorothea Hoffner, enjoys a brisk sail on Misnomer.
The interior of her hull was gray speckled with black, a thin layer of fiberglass except where seats were molded in the same sea-light-green gelcoat as her deck. She was 15 feet on deck, had a beam of 5 feet 5 inches, a 29-inch draft, and displaced 730 pounds. If your feet were bare, they felt the water chuckling by as she sped along on a reach, and the fiberglass was always cold.
There was a fierceness in the way I clung to my love for her. During the winter months in snowy New Jersey, I pored over advertisements for boating gear in Yachting Monthly. I spent the money I made doing chores and later teaching music to buy upgrades like tiny cam cleats and jam cleats to carry lines for the spinnaker I convinced my parents to buy the next year.
At Girl Scout camp, I made a spinnaker pole out of a broomstick, hammering a nail into one end to hold the sail’s clew, painting Misnomer’s racing colors on the other end, and varnishing the whole thing. I equipped a plastic bucket with small-jawed shackles so I could attach the three corners of my green and blue handkerchief spinnaker to store in the bucket, ready for clean, quick launching.
The local yacht club used the Mercury 15s as a safe, stable sailing platform in a place where the weather often dished up tough conditions. Here, the fleet hangs on moorings in Sorrento Harbor with a variety of other boats.
When Misnomer was brand-new, she was faster than the rest of the boats in the fleet, some of which dated to the early days of fiberglass for Cape Cod shipbuilding and were pretty heavy. This made her coveted on the local racing circuit, both in afternoon racing lessons, which were round-robin, and in town races, where I could get good crew.
Though not a spectacular racer, I was tenacious, and I liked to win. Misnomer’s thin skin was particularly satisfying to stamp on when I was in the throes of the excitement of winning (or losing). Mercurys do well racing around the buoys, and when I was in high school, the elimination series for the North American Yacht Racing Union Junior Sears Cup was held on Frenchman Bay in Mercurys.
An Enduring Design
While researching this story, I grew curious how many Mercurys have been built to date, so I wrote to Cape Cod Shipbuilding on the Wareham River off Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts. The answer is, close to 1,400 if you count keel and centerboard models, according to Wendy Goodwin. She’s company president and granddaughter of Les Goodwin, who bought the shipyard in 1939 and built the first Sparkman & Stephens-designed Mercury 15 there in 1940.
Keelboat #966 should translate into the ninth boat built in 1966, Wendy told me. When I replied that it would have been 1968 or ’69 when we bought the boat,
she wrote back, “Grandpa wasn’t terribly strict with sail numbers, and I don’t think he thought these boats would ever last this long.” He had a habit of sending off whatever new sails were in his inventory when a boat needed them, not bothering to change the sail number.
Ann sails on Misnomer in Sorrento Harbor circa 1969. Though shared with another family, the boat became Ann’s first sailing love.
In an article in Cruising World in February 1966, Les said that while gearing up to produce the Mercury, he kept sending the plans back to Olin Stephens for review, only to have Stephens complain that he was spending more time on the 15-footer than he would designing a 50-footer. Les told Stephens he’d make more money on the Mercury because he’d sell a lot more. Indeed, to this day, S & S still receives a $2 royalty on every boat the shipbuilder produces.
In its heyday, the yard produced 50 to 60 Mercurys a year, but the number is down to one or two, largely because of competition from used boats, which don’t seem to break down enough for people to need to replace them.
Thread of Memory
I realize now that some of my emotions are tied up in Misnomer because of Sorrento itself. Though I’ve rarely spent more than a few weeks at a time there and didn’t even own a house, the town is a golden thread woven through my life. In Sorrento, it is always summer or early fall.
But my memories are also bound to the boat and what she provided me. I would sail Misnomer in any weather the bay threw at us. There were times I was out solo sailing clutching the single-purchase mainsheet in my callused, numb hands, tearing away from the safety of the harbor and finding myself in august company with a local sailing legend, the only other sailor out there in those conditions.
Ann with her mother, Dorothea Hoffner (in the white brim) and friend Nancy Zufall sailing Misnomer.
I remember sailing across to Bar Harbor and returning in thick fog, trusting the wind to stay constant and lead me home. In afternoon racing, we used to push the Mercurys hard enough to swamp, but with positive flotation they’d right themselves, and then we’d have to bail with cut-off Clorox bottles until we could move again. I won lots of racing pennants and shared the annual master mariner award with another sailor. Usually it went to just one person, but my co-winner had the technical know-how and I was the seat-of-the-pants sailor, and the powers that be couldn’t decide who deserved it more.
Misnomer became an extension of myself. All-day picnic sails, overnights, and the sheer good feeling of advancing my skills in a small boat totally under my command contributed to Misnomer becoming my own version of the adolescent rider’s first horse.
These days, daysailing a small boat on a small body of water is no longer appealing to me; somewhere along the way to adulthood, my brain learned to step back and examine such experiences rather than live in them. But sailing is still my lifeline, and though I’ve spent much of my adult life on and around big boats, my affection for them lacks the poignancy of my love for a Mercury 15 called Misnomer.
Ann Hoffner spent summer 2021 sailing Ora Kali, her Sabre 30, from New Jersey to Maine, where she and her husband, co-sailor and photographer Tom Bailey, recently moved. She has written numerous articles about their voyages on Oddly Enough, a Peterson 44.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
