SUMMER ADVENTURES: by Chip
Hoins
oating and sailing in particular began early for me, primarily as a result of some good fortune and with the help of some mighty kind, although probably misguided, family members.
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My grandfather, who died three years before I was born, helped my p a r e n t s buy a big old house overlooking Huntington Harbor on Long Island Sound. It was during the tail end of the Depression and money was very scarce but Grandpa who had come to America during the previous century had saved enough to be able to give my folks a down payment on a house during a time when there were very few b u y e r s and many, many houses available. After a new heating system, a roof and many other needed repairs, there wasn't anything left over for such luxuries as boats. Plus, by the time I was born, WWII had begun and that curtailed most all activities for our growing family. For some reason, which will always remain a mystery to me, both my Mom and Dad virtually forbade me from playing anywhere near the road - which had perhaps 2 or 3 cars passing each day - but gave me free rein to the beach, the mud flats, the winter ice, the tides, clams, barnacles, eels, blue crabs and human characters beyond imagination. Before turning 5, I had a,
detailed knowledge of every inch of that beach from the shipyard on the south to the yacht club on the north a distance of perhaps a ½ mile in each direction. Flotsam and mud were my childhood companions. A pottery building had apparently collapsed sometime in a prior age and that stretch of beach, next to the shipyard, was prime digging country. There was no greater thrill, after endless days of scratching
MY
First Boat
He had it on a half-submerged float and aside from the engine which would never start after countless tries, the floats leaked, the fabric needed patching and the seats were missing. But "Dnookmorton"- (which approximates the sound of his name) was undaunted. He worked tirelessly on his project for months on end. He truly believed that even though he wasn't fit to join up with his buddies and fight in the war, he could do his part by getting that plane working and patrol Huntington
It was by a long stretch of the imagination, a sailboat. and digging through untold cubic yards of broken pieces, to finally be able to show up for dinner (usually late) with a jug — all in one piece — from the "Brown Bros. Pottery" cradled in my arms.
Harbor protecting his neighbors from marauding Nazi subs.
Finally one day, as I held out the throttle and '"Dnookmorton" spun the propeller, a gigantic coughing roar began which scared every seagull into the he human "characters" were com- air for miles in all directions. Somemon in our town — many lived how, that old engine had come to life! solitary lives in old, unheated houses Surely knowing that it might never or shacks. I got to know several of happen again, wasting no time, and them as I grew up and they were, for hesitating only long enough to push the most part, harmless. Sometime me off the wooden crate (which served shortly after I turned three, I became as the only seat) and onto the floor, he enthralled with a "project" of one of vaulted into the plane, fiddled with the the harmless ones who lived in a clam controls for maybe 10 seconds or so shack in the woods, perched over the his pre-flight check list was mighty beach about halfway to the yacht club. short— and with an even greater roarEach day I would include a visit to his ing of engine, drove the plane off the place — always certain to take a drink float, into the wafer and eventually into of "fresh spring water" which flowed the air. miraculously from a pipe protruding from a seawall along the way. My inMy view wasn't very good, my fear terest was not in the character himself, factor undeveloped and conversation who was barely intelligible when he more than impossible, but somehow I spoke at all, but in his project which, managed to get off the floor and, hangwonder of wonders, was a seaplane! ing on to something, upright. It wasn't exactly the wild blue yonder, just a Seaplanes were something only few kind of square circles over the harseen, in magazines, never "in person."
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bor, but it changed my life. o, I didn't fall in love with fly ing. At dinner that evening when the usual round-the-table question of "what did you do today" got around to me, all I said was — "The swans looked so small from up there." I should explain that although, everyone else in the general area of the harbor had known that "Dnookmorton" had finally gotten his plane to fly, my two brothers had been several miles away at the Junior High School. My dad was in the city and my mom, who kept close tabs on me, was almost completely deaf and therefore missed both the sound effects and the glorious flight. The careful grilling w h i c h f o l l o w e d my nonsensical statement about the swans eventually produced the salient facts and' Dad visited our local flying ace — no more flights for me the result.
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I didn't miss the flying — my recollection and sensation, other than the swans, was something akin to having been stuffed into an empty oil drum with a live lion and shaken for 15 minutes. What this episode did produce was a realization by my parents that allowing me to wander the beaches from dawn to dusk each day could just possibly get me into trouble of some sort.
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pursuits were on the agenda and the most appropriate was, of course, to get me a boat. Through the combined efforts of my mom — canvas, needle and thread, my dad — woodworking tools and the skills to use them and my uncle - forced to come h o m e f r o m the w a r early - w h o provided the essential materials, my first boat was created. If it had a name, it is lost to posterity. It was, by a long stretch of the imagination, a sailboat. Perhaps six, maybe seven feet long. Built almost entirely of plywood. A See FIRST BOAT, page 9