FEBRUARY 2015
Dale’s Corner
NW SAILING NEWS
PAGE 13
by Dale Waagmeester
A Literary Guest We l l , a n o t h e r Portland Boat Show is in the record books. To my knowledge, our family business is the last original exhibitor still at the Dale show. Fifty five years Waagmeester of Portland Boat Shows under our belts. I can remember our booth in the first one. I was dressed up in a suit and tie, handing out white neck ties with advertising for Naugahyde upholstery fabric silk screened on the front of it. As people walked by, I held out a tie, asking them if they would like one. “Would you like a tie?” I must have uttered that line hundreds of times! Enough times, anyway, to still have strong memories of it. My five-year-old mind could not understand why people would turn down a free tie. They were actually pretty ugly, with a picture of the fictional “Nauga”monster, whose “hide” was the end product of this upholstery fabric. While the Boat Show can be a grind at times, it is always fun to see people who you haven’t seen in years. Sometimes you see a sailor that has retired and has been out of the game for a long time. One of these old sailors showed up at this years show. His name is Jerry Crane, a guy who just celebrated his 80th birthday, but looks younger than his years. Back when I was getting into the Columbia River racing scene, Jerry was “the guy.” He was the one who had all of the answers, won all of the races, and was always happy to share his knowledge. Jerry was one of the founders of Corinthian Yacht Club and Vancouver Lake Sailing Club. He owned a Geary 18 “Flattie” (ever heard of one of those?), a Lightning, and later owned one of the original “plastic” boats on the river, a Cal 20. The Cals were introduced to the area by Fredi Wallen of Columbia Corinthian Marina, who at one time had a communal Cal 20 that people could use at their leisure. What a great marketing ploy.
Jerry still looks fondly at the Cal 20 display at the Boat Show and you know that his mind is comparing the set up of the modern boats with the early boats. Jerry eventually moved on to a C&C 27, and then went to a Hawkfarm 28. Simply said, Jerry is one of the Portland sailing pioneers who got this whole “racing on the Columbia” gig started. Jerry is one of those sailors who always stays current with what is going on. During his racing days, few on the river knew more about the concepts of sailmaking than Jerry. Even today he remains fascinated by sail design and he listens intently when I show him how far computer sail design has progressed over the years. I can demonstrate our sail design program for Jerry and it is evident that he understands, soaking it all in. At the show I sat, listening to Jerry talk about the “old days” of sailing on the Columbia. I started thinking about what a waste it was that I was the only one hearing it, so I asked him to be a guest writer for me this month. The following is some of Jerry’s accounting of the early days on the River… . It was April, 1968 and my wife and I had been racing our Geary 18 dinghy for a little over two years and had struggled to learn how to make it perform. We were doing better at the start of this new racing season and we were feeling satisfied because we had just won the race. We let the mainsail out for our run back to our moorage, upstream from the finish line. Since we were not racing we did not wing out the jib, instead letting it flap gently in the moderate breeze. The current was running strong as it does during the run off in the spring and both the highly polluted river and the sky were gray. We were lying back relaxing when the boat suddenly rolled to windward, slamming the mast and the two of us into the water. We were wearing very slim floatation jackets which provided just enough lift to keep our heads
above the surface. The surprise and shock from the cold water made clear thinking somewhat difficult. The boat was completely capsized, bottom-up. We had been in the last fleet of boats to finish and the other racers had motored away or sailed off downstream, leaving very few boats on the river and none nearby. We tried to get a hand hold on the bottom-up hull but it was very slippery, as the bottom of a racing sailboat should be. I was able to reach across the hull and get a couple of finger tips into the centerboard slot. With that grip I could keep both of us next to the boat, which was floating low in the water, thanks to inadequate flotation. I decided to try to roll the boat upright so that I could, maybe, bail it out enough to make it stable right-side-up. It rolled easily but wouldn’t stop rolling. About that time a small runabout with a skipper and passenger showed up on the scene. I didn’t pay too much attention to them as I continued to try to get the boat upright. As it rolled, the mast and sails would come up and arc across only to knife into the water on the other side. On one of the rolls my wife, Cathy, got trapped under the mainsail, her head making a small lump in the middle of the sail, just enough to keep the sail lying flat on the surface. We were both on the same side of the boat and I could not roll the boat back up to get the sail off of her. The guys in the runabout were able to grab the mast and lift it up enough to allow them to pull Cathy up to their boat and out of the water. They then decided to get a little more helpful and moved closer to me and the upside down boat. At some point in the action the skipper of the runabout hit the throttle causing his boat to run over the Geary 18 leaving a corkscrew shaped scar from bow to stern. Fortunately he missed me! At some point, I managed to get the boat upright long enough to climb into it from the stern, take
the sails down and start bailing, only to have it roll again. About that time the race committee boat showed up. The committee boat was a very unusual piece of work, definitely one of a kind. About 35 feet long, it was modeled after boats of a much earlier era with a bowsprit and two masts, one with a yardarm for a square sail. At the stern was a huge cabin rising off the deck, sticking out above the transom with little windows all around. The boat had been formed out of fiberglass, but it looked like it had never been painted, instead it was a dull weathered gray, matching the sky and the river. The runabout departed to deliver my wife to our moorage. With the hull of the dinghy next to the committee boat, I rolled it right side up and one of the crew on the deck of the bigger boat held the mast as I bailed vigorously. After getting much of the water out of it, we tied it along side and I got on board the committee boat. The skipper pointed us upriver and pushed the throttle forward. I was invited below and given a dry pair of bib overalls and a blanket to warm up in. The clothes, the blanket and everything in that cabin smelled like diesel fuel. Someone gave me a cup of tea which tasted like diesel fuel. I did not complain. There was a problem developing on deck. We did not have enough power to make way against the current and were, in fact, being pushed downstream and the Interstate Bridge was approaching from astern. We could not go under it without being dismasted and there was no mention of the anchor option. We would have to cut my boat adrift. Before I could decide whether to get back into the Geary the tow line broke. As it drifted back the mast of my boat got tangled in the committee boat rigging and it was snapped, broken into three pieces. I had spent many days and hours shaping that mast with a drawknife and a plane. It had many coats of marine spar varnish on it and it would bend perfectly in response to
mainsheet tension. It was among the last of the beautiful spruce masts. With the dinghy drifting away in the current, we started to make progress upstream. We didn’t have VHF radios in those days, so there was no communication with the continued on page 14
Broad Reachings...continued from page 12 of explanation and answer to some of your questions.” Still, Verbaack, who’s already done two of these races (not to mention an America’s Cup and a Barcelona World Race to name a few) feels a little like a fall guy here. As one of my sailing friends put it, “Not really his fault… more of a team fault.” It’s a sailor’s debate worthy of a few pints at your favorite sailing pub. To Verbaack’s credit, he handled the sacking with class. In a Facebook-worthy observation, he said, “Someone recently told me: ‘Life is not about how many breaths you take, but about the moments that take your breath away’. I am looking forward to the new breathless moments to come. Ocean racing tends
to offer many of them.” Yeah Wo u t e r, I wo n ’t a rg u e w i t h you there.
There’s A Reason Why They Call It “Wrecking” Speaking of reefs and running aground, if you read up on the history of Key West, you’ll find that at one time, it was the wealthiest town in the United States, largely due to the salvage industry. That’s because, back in the day, it was quite common for vessels to run aground on the reef there, prompting the wreckers (read: opportunistic salvagers) to head out and rightfully claim the ship’s stores. Heck, word round the campfire is that the really innovative wreckers would turn the light in the Key West lighthouse off, just to give
the marketplace a little nudge into the receivables column. So what does this have to do with sailing? Well, I’m glad you asked. As you can imagine, there are plenty of wrecks on the bottom out there, and some of them aren’t all that far from the surface. Which is what the crew of the 72’ Mini-Maxi Bella Mente learned at this year’s Key West Race Week. About halfway through the series, Bella sailed at around ten knots into the submerged wreck of an old fishing vessel, hitting it’s superstructure with their bulb keel, effectively anchoring themselves good and hard to the wreck. After much work, she was finally pulled off, and Bella sailed the second race that day, damaged keel
and all, before she was hauled out and repaired. Bella Mente went on to take top honors in the IRC 1 class, incidentally. Pretty good salvage work, wouldn’t you say?
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