A Sandpiper sheds its dust and spreads its wings
Issue 93 : Nov/Dec 2013
I caught the sailing bug early despite the fact that powerboats outnumbered sailboats by a zillion to one on the lake at my grandparents’ home where I spent many a contented summer day. It was the rare occasion I did see a sailboat — placidly and noiselessly exploiting the free locomotion of the wind — that made me ache to find out if the pastime was as unfettered and fun as it looked.
Since there were no plans to add a sailboat to my grandparents’ collection of watercraft (powerboat, pontoon boat, rowboat, and canoe), and I lacked the resources to acquire one, I made do. With 2 x 2s for mast and boom, baling twine for stays, a bedsheet for a mainsail, and pieces of plywood for rudder and leeboard, I turned their rowboat into a laughingstock vessel they were doubtlessly loath to admit had any connection to either their upscale lakefront home or one of their bloodline. The cool thing was, the clunky rig actually worked.
Buoyed that this initial field test affirmed my rudimentary grasp of sailing science, I resolved to get a real sailboat. The Styrofoam board boat I bought with that goal in mind came closer to the bona fide sailing experience I sought, but its scale left something to be desired. By the time I’d begun dating my future wife, I’d graduated to a beautiful racing-class Lightning. But it was all the two of us could do to raise its telephone pole of a wooden mast and lower it though the deck to its step below. Besides, I pined for a cuddy cabin.
A 1979 Sandpiper 565 (with lightweight stepped aluminum mast and four-berth cabin) was just the ticket. My wife and I sailed it on numerous short voyages on Michigan lakes, among which our excursion to Marion Island in the West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay stands out. The wind that day was strong and steady, the skies cloudless, the water a deep cobalt blue, the island wild and deserted, and the freshly baked pasties we’d brought along for lunch a veritable feast. Sitting there, far away from everything, our boat anchored a few yards offshore, I couldn’t help but observe, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Unfortunately, the boat that brought us so much pleasure soon began gathering dust in our garage. The demands of work, an interminably long renovation of our 1895 Queen Anne home, and raising children relegated the forlorn sloop to the bottom of the priority heap. Every now and then, I would express my regret — usually in some beautiful lake setting — that we weren’t out enjoying her.
Memories reawakened
Years passed. A couple of summers ago we vacationed on tiny Garden Island in Lake Champlain. The accommodations included a Sunfish. One day on a whim, with conditions reminiscent of the glorious sail I’d long ago enjoyed on Traverse Bay, I tacked across to the New York side then sailed with the wind — feet dangling over the gunwales in the temperate, relaxing waters — all the way back. It had been so long since
I’d experienced such complete and utter freedom. I raved ecstatically about the foray for months.
After we returned home, my eldest son, who in half an hour absorbed enough to confidently take the Sunfish out on his own, could think of nothing but buying a sailboat. We already owned one I pointed out, though getting it back into the water after it had been ignored for so long would entail addressing a growing list of deficiencies.
My wife came to the realization that if we were ever going to enjoy our old sailboat again, it would be because we finally quit deferring that goal to some vague future date. She had seen my love of sailing rekindled on Lake Champlain and watched our son gravitate to the sport like a sailor born, yet it had taken driving out of state and using someone else’s boat to make that happen. So she enlisted our children’s help and quietly (so as to surprise me) began the long process of getting the Sandpiper ready to go back out on the water.
But the list of problems soon overwhelmed them: mice-eaten headsail and berth cushions, broken through-hull fittings, missing spreader, disintegrated below-berth access panels, corroded mainsheet block, smashed transom light, weathered teak trim, inoperable outboard, dry-rotted trailer tires, and so on. So I joined in. For two weeks we labored on the boat’s restoration . . . sewing, fabricating, reaming (crystallized gas in the orifices of the outboard’s fuel valve), sanding, oiling, varnishing, scrubbing, and power washing. The most remarkable thing was not seeing it glisten after all our efforts but seeing it out of our garage at all, where it had been a fixture for as long as our kids could remember.
Indeed, out on Michigan’s beautiful Higgins Lake a short time later, our daughter quipped, “Dad, can you believe we’re actually sailing in our boat?”
Sailing again
Our celebratory return to the water was attended by barely enough air to fill our sails, prompting skepticism when my wife and I averred that we’d heeled to the gunwales and thrilled to breathtaking speeds in the past.
Two days later, we took the boat out again, this time on Hamlin Lake, separated from windy Lake Michigan by a sliver of dunes. A 15-knot breeze blew in off the larger lake, making it difficult to hoist the main and unnecessary to even contemplate the jib. As the boat began heeling nicely (eliciting a few cries of alarm) and making impressive headway across the chop, I grinned.
I was content to be doing what my younger self in that long ago sail-outfitted rowboat had yearned to do. I was elated to feel the pressure of the mainsheet and tiller in my hands. And I was happy that our kids were finally getting the sailing experience on our boat they’d always missed.
Back when our Sandpiper was still a new acquisition, an acquaintance related that a boat owner’s two happiest moments are when he buys a boat and when he sells it. I agreed wholeheartedly with his first point, but considered him way off on the second. But his words would come to haunt me. The prospect of freeing up a bay in our garage that was for two decades allocated to an unused boat seemed preferable to the long process of readying the boat to sail.
Now, however, with the cleanup and restoration work behind us and only enjoyable sailing ahead, I look at our old Sandpiper parked where it always has been and envision not an empty bay but the new sailing adventures that await us.
Ken Kilpatrick was 3 when his father took him for his first boat ride, stiffly bundled in a classic 1950s-era orange cloth-covered life vest in his uncle’s equally classic wooden rowboat. That may have been the spark that ignited his lifelong love of boating. After reading the National Geographic account of Robin Lee Graham’s 1965 solo sail around the world, Ken fantasized about doing the same, until days of queasy seasickness on a weeklong eastern Caribbean cruise with his wife made him yearn to be back on terra firma.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
