SPANISH POINT
Sailing Sailing at at Historic Historic Spanish Spanish Point: Point: Traditional Craft, Traditionally Built By Allan Horton
Tucked away in a quiet cove of Little Sarasota Bay in Osprey, FL, is an all-volunteer, smallboat building and sailing program that practices and teaches traditional skills using small wooden sharpies. Meanwhile, modern, plastic vessels ply the nearby Intracoastal Waterway. Separated as much by geography as vintage, the old and the new mix uneasily as they meet in the busy, narrow channel.
T
he five, sprit-rigged sharpies sail from Historic Spanish Point, a 30-acre pioneer homestead run by the Gulf Coast Heritage Association, Inc. They typify vessels that sailed the southwest Florida coast long before the ICW. Navigating where their larger cousins cannot, these flat-bottomed and shoal draft craft tack across the shallow grass flats and nose gently against small docks jutting from muddy, mangrove shorelines. The boats range in size from 14 to 23 feet. They replicate the types of shallow-draft boats built on the beach by the pioneering Webb and Guptill families to haul tourists, vegetables and citrus fruit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A replicated citrus packing house and other pioneer structures are also on the site, along with a “Windows to the Past” exhibit, which displays a visible cross-section of an archaic Indian midden. 52 November 2006
SOUTHWINDS
The flagship of the fleet is the Lizzie G, a 23-foot-long, two-masted sailing sharpie reduced from lines drawn by Howard Chapelle of a Cedar Key vessel built in 1884. She was named for Lizzie Webb, daughter of pioneer John Webb, who moved his family from New York to homestead Spanish Point in 1867. Built by volunteers on site of pine and cypress— under the direction of late master boatbuilder Stan Lowe of Sarasota—the Lizzie G was launched in 2000 to the skirling strains of a bagpiper. Those reedy sounds evoked the Scottish settlers who wrenched Sarasota from the heat, humidity and insect and reptile pests that dominated pioneer living. In those days, shallow-draft sailboats served as pickup trucks, offering quicker, more comfortable passage than ox or horse teams plying sandy trails to coastal settlements. Lizzie G was built over a period of 18 months using only hand tools to reduce rough-sawn, 5/4 Southern slash pine boards to precisely fitted planks. Cypress beams, carlins and chines framed her lines and oakum sealed her seams. Her blocks and cleats were carved from buttonwood. Her main and mizzen masts were shaped from sand pine trees harvested from the MJ Ranch near Myakka City in eastern Manatee County. Her vertical-seamed sails are cotton and are laced to the masts with manila line. Her Coast Guardcompliant sounding device is a conch shell horn, and her most effective mechanical propulsion is a cypress pole. The Lizzie G’s most prominent departure from the Cedar Key sharpie that inspired her is her rounded, staved stern counter, painstakingly fashioned by Lowe as his signature contribution. Her essential dimensions are 23 feet LOA, 5foot beam and 9-inch draft (3 feet, board down). She sails like www.southwindsmagazine.com