Born to Sail?

My parents took me sailing at a tender age. Perhaps one? We have an old slide taken of me holding an empty beer bottle on the deck of a 30-something foot ketch sailing Long Island Sound. (My Mom says I didn't really drink the beer; in fact, she says, I hadn't yet learned what bottles were for.) The ketch belonged to my Dad's college roommate at RPI, the fellow who later moved to Haiti, where he raised three children and ran the Coco Cola bottling plant.

A few years later, Dad took possession of Puffin, a heavy wooden 14 foot catboat. He spent hours fiberglassing it and replacing dry rot, and every spring we helped sand and varnish the mast and boom. Puffin was so heavy that Dad succeeded in taking Mom for a sail across Keuka Lake, never noticing that the anchor was still down. Her sail was heavy cotton canvas, bound to the mast with rings of hemp rope. She was the very first vessel I got to sail by myself, which led to feelings of pride but also of terror when she was blowing ashore and I couldn't get the sail down fast enough!

While I was still living at home, Puffin was replaced by the KD Cat, built of wood strips by the shores of Keuka Lake. The KD stood for Kohinoor Dinghy; the builder's bigger design was the Kohinoor sloop. The KD Cat was 12 feet long and seemed light as a feather. She was an open boat with wide wooden seats and a white Dacron sail. Her hull was a light robin's-egg blue with natural wood on the inside. A beauty. The five of us would sail out from the Sacandaga Yacht Club to The Island for a picnic lunch. Sailing her alone was a breeze. Even at my light weight, I could balance her as she heeled.

Dad's boats grew bigger after I left home for college. First the Lightning, then the Venture 21, and now the MacGregor.