CORWITH CRAMER, JR. by George W. Crowninshield Executive Director, ASTA
BLUENOSE II Bluenose II is a two-masted gaff- rigged schooner owned by the Provi nce of Nova Scotia . She will be the host ship when the fleet of Tall Ships visits H alifax at the conclusion of Race 2 in 1984. " Bluenose" is the nickname given to the fisherme n of Nova Scotia by their ri vals from Gloucester, Massachusetts. The original Bluenose was built in 1921, as one of the biggest of the Grand Banks fis hing schooners. Her wooden hull was 143 fee t long, and carried mo re th a n ten thousand feet of sail. Her objecti ve was not just to get her cod to market quickly in order to realize a good price : he r ma in concern was to win the big Internati onal F ishermen's Races between Canada and the United States. Win she did , aga in and aga in , and became so famous that, like the maple leaf, she is depicted on stamps and coins as a nati onal emblem . Eventually she was sold , to continue her career as a trader in th e West Indies, where she ra n on a coral reef in 1946 and became a total loss. Bluenose II was built in her m em ory, using the origi nal plans, by Smith and Rhul and , Ltd. of Lunenburg-who had built the original schooner. S he was launched on Jul y 24, 1963, wi th the only di fference from her namesake being in the accommodation plan. The space of the hold is taken up by comfo rtable cabins fo r passengers and crew. The nav igatio n instruments are of the most up-to-date type. During th e summer Bluenose II c ruises mainl y in Canadian wate rs; during the winter she does charters in the Caribbean . She carri es a complement of 18: C aptain , 3 M ates, 2 Stewards, 9 C rew, a nd 3 Cadets, and has accommodations fo r 12 overnight guests. She participated in Tall Ships events in 1976 and 1982 , and th rough her past visits has become well known to East Coast boating peo ple and harbor watchers. SEA HIS1DRY, FALL 1983
With deep reg ret we at ASTA note the death , late in July, of Corw ith C ramer, Jr. -founder and until recentl y, Executi ve . ' · · · Director of th e Sea Edu cati on Association in Woods Hole, Mass.achu~etts. . Cory had a long-time mterest m the sea-extending back to his youth , when he was educated aboard the family houseboat by his mother, and nu rtured by adolescent years spent cruising between the West Indies and Nova Scotia . After a traditional education at Yale, several long distance sailing adventures, and a stint in the Coast Guard , he turned to the fi eld of teaching. From 1954 to 1970, he cl imbed the educational ladde r fro m history teacher to headmaster, acquiring a Master's Deg ree in Maritime History and serving as a Fellow at Yale University while pursuing his love of sailing du ring summer breaks . In 1971, Cory decided to fo rsake the ivycovered walls and-with a fr iend 's helpfo unded the organization which he had been dreaming of for several years and which would become SEA . The fi rst task of the fl edgling assoc iati on was finding a ship in which to conduct their program . After a fruitless wo rldwide search , they were told by Irv ing Johnson of a vessel owned by a Hawai ian organization. It was, he said , a replica of his Yankee, and the best to be found . Although the owners at fi rst refused to sell , in July 1971 l#stwa rd did become the property of the recently incorporated SEA. The organization's original concept was to provide a deep-sea sail training ship to serve an association of edu cational institutions which could not individually affo rd such an investment. Cory recently recalled the early days of SEA when he and Edward MacArthur sailed their newly acquired vessel down the coast from Seattle to San Francisco to Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to San Diego: The mission was to wave the flag and beat the drum . We got good articles, national articles. I was no publicist; I had never done it in my life, but if you make enough noise, people pay attention to you. The Associated Press put us on their weekly Sunday supplement. It was a unique and exciting idea to people, and we were the only ones who were doing it . We got enough attention to fi ll the boat, and so on New Year's Day, 1m, fifteen high school and college students arrived in San Diego to get on th.: ship . The fi rst voyage was a fasc inating one. It went dow n the coast of Califo rnia, stopping atsomeofthe remote islandsoffth e Mexican
coast, visited the Galapagos and Cocos Islands and then went th rough the Panama Canal to San Juan, Puerto Rico. T.hat last leg was a hard plug, 1,000 miles stra ight upwind in the Trades . Our fi rst class discharged at the end of nine weeks.* Cory achieved a majo r breakth rough when he registered l#stward with the Coast Guard as an oceanographic research vessel . Then, in 1973, SEA affi liated with Boston Uni versity, and students began attending classes ashore befo re they went to sea, receiving a full semester's credi t fo r their wo rk . And so the nucleus of the program was established . In looking back over the assoc iation's history at the time of his retirement, Cory stressed two key facto rs for success. The firs t is people: " What's really made SEA work are the extraordinary people that we've had involved with us; the list is almost endless." The second is fa ith : " I didn't know where it was going. You don't think ahead , you just do. There were lots of people who quite correctly said , 'There's no way you can do it .' If I'd believed that we had to raise $120,000 just to keep it going in the fi rst two years, I'd never have started . But if you have to, you can do almost anything ; that's, of course, what l#stwa rd teaches." Cory will be well remembered by his fri ends at ASTA as the fo unding father of the Council of Educational Shipowners, the group which was instrumental in the conception and enactment of the Sailing School Vessels Act. It was Cory who called the attention of the delegates at the Annual Sail Training Confe rence at Mystic in 1976 to the need fo r a professional o rgani zation to represent the common needs of shipowners. And agai n, it was Cory who- when progress in the form ation of such an organi zation was at a standstill in mid-1977- arranged for the first meeting of a group of interested owners at St. Geo rge's School in Middletown , Rhode Island in September of that year. We know that we speak for the entire sail training world when we say that he was a pioneer who pointed the way and that his ready contributions of thought and effort w ill be sadly missed . Contributions in his memory may be made to SEA , clo ASTA . w *From Followi11g SEA . journal of the Sea Education Association. Spring 1982.
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