Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In five minutes I’d completed my sail around the pond. It took some searching, but Mark discovered a trail that led from the water’s edge to the access road where his Trooper was parked. It was a tight fit, carrying the hull on its side through this curving, thorny passage, but we finally made it. Since I was more than an hour ahead of schedule, Melissa and the kids were nowhere in sight. So Mark kindly agreed to take me and my boat home.

  I couldn’t believe it. The voyage I’d thought would take most of the afternoon had been completed in less than an hour and a half, taking me from the mammoth waves at the harbor mouth to the sheltered quiet of Capaum. I also knew that it wouldn’t have been half as much fun without Mark. Not only would it have been next to impossible for me to single-handedly haul my boat across the sand to the pond, but I would have been without a witness, an audience. Just as a falling tree doesn’t make a sound unless someone is there to hear it, so would I have had a hard time convincing myself, let alone anyone else, that I had actually sailed from Nantucket Harbor to Capaum in a howling November northerly.

  As we drove back to the house I made two resolutions: to purchase a dry suit and never again to venture out of the harbor. At least I bought the dry suit.

  The Suit

  IT WAS MADE OF THICK, blue-and-white Gore-Tex and had black, industrial-strength rubber gaskets at the neck, wrists, and ankles. There was a huge, wax-coated zipper in the back, with a leather strap hanging off it so that I could zip and unzip it myself.

  The following Sunday the weather was terrible—33 degrees, nearly windless, and on the verge of rain—and I dressed myself in the new suit with a certain grimness. It was like the ritual scene in a Schwarzenegger movie when Arnold suits up for the final confrontation with evil. But instead of strapping on a bulletproof vest and loading up my rocket launcher, I zipped myself into my new dry suit. Trapped air gave me a hulking, pneumatic look, as if I were ready for a moonwalk or a deep-sea dive. By placing a finger in the neck gasket I could deflate myself, at least partially.

  Along with the dry suit, I’d ordered a new pair of sailing boots and a lifejacket. Compared to my old one, the new jacket looked like the kind of thing Schwarzenegger himself might wear. It was tight and rode up high on the chest, making me look impossibly well muscled. Top it off with my sunglasses and my Pittsburgh Pirates hat, and I looked like one mean hombre.

  I strutted proudly into the living room, where Melissa, Jennie, and Ethan were sitting on the couch reading a book.

  “Hey, guys, whaddaya think?”

  “My, oh, my,” Melissa said.

  “Daddy,” Jennie giggled, “expecting a flood?”

  “Very funny. Let’s get going.”

  “You’re gonna drive like that?” asked Ethan.

  “Sure. Want to come with me in the Stinker?”

  “No way. I’m going with Mommy.”

  It was a little weird driving around the island with my lifejacket on, and shifting gears in my sailing boots was a challenge. But as I drove the Stinker down Pleasant Street with my wife and kids behind me in the Colt, I felt prepared for anything. Let them laugh, I thought.

  I might look like the monster child of the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Michelin Man, but on that bleak November day I was my own kind of superhero. I was Pondman.

  Steering Without a Rudder

  IT WASN’T LONG before the wind and current were carrying me deeper and deeper into the intricacies of yet another tidal marsh: Pocomo (pronounced POCK ah ma) Creek, nearly identical to the Creeks in which I had wallowed with the Beetle Cat. This, however, was what on Nantucket was known as a “Polpisy” creek. Instead of the commercial buildings that lined the Creeks off the harbor, only a few palatial summer homes dotted the Pocomo shore. The term “Polpisy” refers to Polpis, one of the prettiest sections of the island, centered on a kidney-shaped inlet off Nantucket Harbor, about four miles east of town. In the eighteenth century Polpis was home to a popular tavern where whalemen and their families could have a drink, “throw the bar” (a game rather like horseshoes), and escape the stern Quaker formality of downtown Nantucket.

  Even today, Polpis retains much of its out-of-the-way charm. The little dirt road that leads to the public landing is like no other on Nantucket. The densely packed trees on either side of a meandering road make you feel as if you’re leaving behind one island—the wild remote place of barrier beaches and treeless moors—and burrowing into another: an intimate world of coves and inlets, where naked sand has given way to marsh grass and where mallards and geese have replaced the gulls. Long after all other pleasure craft have been pulled out of Nantucket Harbor, the eastern end of Polpis serves as a refuge for a motley mix of sail- and motorboats. It was just the place for a light-air, mid-November sail.

  My original plan had been to explore the nooks and crannies of Polpis, then leave the boat at the launch ramp for a voyage out into the eastern extreme of Nantucket Harbor on the following weekend. But once I’d followed the narrow and curving Polpis Harbor channel to the verge of Nantucket Harbor, I’d seen Pocomo Creek. Spread out to the east of Polpis, it seemed to be challenging me to give it another try as a creek sailor.

  So I dragged my Sunfish across a narrow sand spit and began my voyage into Pocomo Creek. It was just about then that it began to rain. Not a drizzle but a downpour that rinsed away the already light wind. The tide was coming in, whizzing me along on a rain-dimpled conveyor belt of leaden water. I had hoped to follow the creek all the way to its source, but it soon became apparent that if I was to have any hope of getting out before nightfall, I’d better turn back.

  In the narrow Creeks up harbor, the pudgy Beetle Cat had been unable to make headway against the tide, but this tidal marsh was more forgiving. The relative agility of the Sunfish was also a help, allowing me to tack back and forth on this slightly wider creek. Even though the current was humming, I was making some progress.

  If the weather hadn’t been so miserable, this might have been almost enjoyable as I honed the mechanics of my upwind technique. The secret to success in light air is using as little rudder as possible to steer the boat. Once the rudder strays from the boat’s centerline, it becomes an underwater brake that slows the boat like the extended flaps on a landing airplane.

  To avoid using the rudder, fast light-air sailors depend on the boat’s angle of heel. It works like this: heel the boat to leeward (in the direction of the sail) and the boat turns into the wind (or heads up); heel the boat to windward (what some might call the wrong way) and the boat turns away from the wind (or bears off). The sail can also be used to help steer: to head up, pull in the mainsheet; to bear off, let the sail out.

  All of this means that getting the most out of a Sunfish in light air can be a complex and subtle business, in which the skipper is constantly adjusting the mainsheet and the position of his body in an attempt to let the boat steer itself.

  Nowhere is the use of the body and sail more important than in the roll tack, the nautical equivalent of a swimmer’s kick turn. Instead of simply using the rudder to turn the boat through the wind and onto another tack, the sailor’s body weight “rolls” the boat onto the new tack. When done correctly in light air, the sail never luffs, popping from one side to the other with a satisfying snap.

  A roll tack requires a great deal of practice before it becomes second nature. But that afternoon I was not just rusty, I was also suffering from the cold. My Pondman suit was not the cure-all I had assumed it would be. My body was hermetically sealed, but my extremities were frozen. What might have been a rewarding training drill was becoming a demoralizing battle against the elements and myself. As the heat drained from my body through my head, hands, and feet, I realized how easy it would be to fall into the annihilating embrace of hypothermia.

  By the time I made it back to the launch ramp, the wind had shifted from the northeast to the southwest, and it was snowing. There were near whiteout conditions a
s I pulled the hull up onto the beach grass, flipped it over, and tied it to a nearby tree. By the time I had slid into the front seat of the Stinker and fired up the engine, feeling was just beginning to return to my hands. My feet, however, felt like chunks of stone as I shifted into first gear, icy water sloshing inside my boots.

  Driving back through the snow shower, my feet aching as the blood finally began to flow again, I had a Proustian moment. Suddenly it was twenty years ago and I was driving a VW Bus with my younger brother Sam in the passenger seat, our dog in the back, and a trailer with two Sunfish behind us. Sam and I had spent all day chasing each other over a flooded strip mine in the worst weather imaginable, training for the races of summer. Our faces and hands glowed red as we consumed vast quantities of potato chips and cookies, Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” blasting on the radio. Between the elevated highway and the Monongahela River, the stacks of a steel mill pumped pollution into the air.

  It had never occurred to me then how isolated Sam and I had been in our devotion to becoming sailors in Pittsburgh. Now, on a November Sunday on Nantucket, I missed my brother and those cold weekend afternoons, towing our sailboats back into the vast, smog-shrouded city.

  Death Roll: Coskata

  THAT WEEK MY grandmother died. My daughter’s namesake, Jennie Kramer Dennis, had lived into her nineties in a retirement home on Cape Cod. Toward the end she passed from a period of terrified paranoia into a warm-and-fuzzy state of befuddlement. Whether this was the natural progression of her senility or the product of nursing-home sedatives, she went out of this life with a whimper, and will be remembered by her great-grandchildren as a pinched, pale face above a long bed with straps across it. The funeral was scheduled for the Monday before Thanksgiving, and, unsure as to whether we were going to be leaving that night or the next morning, I climbed into the Stinker for a Sunday sail in a southwesterly breeze.

  Although the temperature was warmer than the weekend before, the sky was just as gray. I found the boat where I had left it, but since the tide was almost dead low, there was a gap of close to twenty yards between the boat and the water. Fortunately, the peatlike muck of Polpis Harbor proved to be as slippery as a damp carpet, and without much trouble I skidded the boat down to the water’s edge. As I rigged the sail, I noticed that quite a few scallop boats had relocated to Polpis during the week. One scalloper arrived soon after I got there, not to fish but to work on his boat. In the back of his pickup he had a little dinghy equipped with a single oar off the transom, and in no time he was sculling out across the harbor, working the oar back and forth from a standing position as his forebears had been doing in this harbor for three centuries.

  My plan was to sail out of Polpis and head toward the northeast corner of Nantucket Harbor where Coskata (kos KAY ta), a saltwater pond, fed into the harbor through a long and shallow creek. Then I’d venture back west to Pocomo Point, just east of the creek, where Melissa and the kids had agreed to meet me.

  Soon I was in the easternmost and broadest lobe of Nantucket Harbor, known as Head of Harbor. With only a low, narrow sliver of sand dividing it from the ocean beyond, Head of Harbor feels like a lagoon at the edge of the universe. But all psychic spaces aside, I was having a more immediate problem of not capsizing in the surprisingly steep chop. With the wind directly behind and the sail out all the way, a charging Sunfish can be a handful. I could see the gusts coming from behind: the water would get dark and rippled and then BAM, the sail would shudder and the boat would roll from side to side, barely under control.

  Twice that afternoon I almost capsized to windward, a calamity known as a death roll. The sail went up in the air, I went in the water, and I thought for sure I was about to test the limits of my dry suit as the tips of my hiking boots clung like claws to the forward lip of the cockpit. But each time I was able to save myself with one desperate tug on the mainsheet. Only later did I realize that I wasn’t just struggling with the conditions; I was seesawing through the wild mood swings of grief.

  Soon Coskata appeared to the northeast, a distant cluster of trees at the convergence of Coatue and Great Point. If it hadn’t been for this oasis of oaks and junipers amid a veritable desert of sand, Nantucketers might not have survived the darkest days of the American Revolution. In the winter of 1780, temperatures dropped so low that the harbor froze over completely. All around the island, ice was visible as far as the eye could see. Cut off from mainland supply ships, Nantucketers gradually began to starve and freeze to death. The only remaining source of wood on the island was here, in Coskata, a once-remote area now made accessible because of the harbor ice. Every morning, Nantucketers would set out across the ice, leading their horses and carts through the bitter cold for more than nine miles to Coskata, where they would cut wood and then trudge back across the ice, often returning to town after dark.

  Now, more than two hundred years after what became known as the “Hard Winter,” Coskata was still home to a dense stand of wind-stunted oaks. The trees grew on a bluff overlooking the stream that fed into the pond, and as I approached on a run, the boat yawing in the puffs and the water getting shallower and shallower, I felt as if I’d already traveled farther than I’d gone in my search for Capaum.

  The scrubby bluff loomed like an abandoned battlement. Waves broke on the bar at the creek mouth. Making it across this submerged speed bump was going to be difficult. Even though I knew it would only make the boat tippier, I pulled the daggerboard up so high that not even its tip was poking out from the bottom of the trunk. There was less than four inches of water beneath me.

  Running with the wind at a very fast clip atop a mere film of water was a strange sensation. And, of course, there was the now recurrent question: How the hell was I going to get out of here?

  Soon the creek began to deepen, enabling me to reach back and push the rudder into a full-down position, and then there was Coskata Pond, a puddle on the eastern edge of America. Beyond this circle of water and a thin margin of sand was the Atlantic Ocean, and three thousand miles beyond that, Portugal.

  After a quick, clockwise sail around the pond, I was on my way back. Initially it was kind of fun tacking back and forth up the creek with the daggerboard partway up. But it wasn’t long before I had to jump out, lower the sail, and start towing the boat up the creek through knee-deep water. It was an exhausting march back to Head of Harbor, particularly since the wind was howling in my face, but unlike the creeping cold of the previous weekend, I was actually sweating inside my dry suit by the time I made it to the creek mouth.

  Soon I was sailing again. Ten minutes into this long, punishing sail to windward I was finding it very difficult to concentrate. As I hung out over the Sunfish’s side and mechanically steered through the waves, I kept thinking about my grandmother and grandfather’s house on Cape Cod, a shingled mansion inherited from my great-grandfather, a Chicago tycoon. Beside a white sandy beach and a breakwater, there had been an old Sailfish, a rowboat, and a motorboat. For me, this harborside house with its sea breezes and sailboats had been the Garden of Eden, the inspiration behind an adolescence devoted to sailboats. And now here I was, twenty years after the house had been sold, mourning my grandmother’s death.

  Suddenly a silver pickup truck appeared on Coatue, hurtling west along the beach at an unbelievably high speed. As it fishtailed its way through flock after flock of flapping seagulls, its tire tracks looking like wobbly contrails in the sand, I remembered Grandfather on the lawn, teeing up an old golf ball and thwacking it out into the harbor. But it wasn’t just Grandfather whom I remembered that afternoon. No, there, too, was Grandmother in a nearby lawn chair, shaking the ice cubes at the bottom of her glass in a gesture of applause.

  Night had fallen when Melissa, Jennie, Ethan, and I boarded the five o’clock ferry for Hyannis. We walked up the two flights of stairs to the main seating area, where we silently shared a pizza. On a Sunday night in November, the boat was almost empty. Against
the outer darkness the windows were mirrors, and except for the side-to-side rocking motion, we might as well have been in a train or bus as we began the two-and-a-half-hour ride across Nantucket Sound. Melissa worked on a quilt, and the kids and I went forward to watch the six o’clock news on the television.

  They had just discovered a capsized sailboat off the coast of Ireland—Coyote II, a transatlantic singlehander. There was no sign of the skipper, Mike Plant, from Newport, Rhode Island, and only a faint hope that he had escaped to a life raft. My God, I thought, what was three hours in a Sunfish on Nantucket compared to a terrifying capsize and swift, cold death in the middle of the North Atlantic in November?

  I was beginning to see that there were limits to my winter sailing. For one thing, the ever-worsening weather made it increasingly difficult to maintain any semblance of concentration beyond an hour or so of sailing. But it wasn’t just the cold; there was a corrosive sense of desolation, a blankness out there at the edges of this offshore island that no dry suit could overcome. If I was going to continue, I needed a short-term goal. The North Americans in July was just too far away to give me the required sense of urgency to make it into January.

  Sailing’s traditional antidote to these doldrums is an institution known as the “Midwinters,” a regatta that gives a sailor an excuse to head south and get a sunburn. The Sunfish Midwinters competition was scheduled for early March in Sarasota, Florida. Perhaps I could fly down and charter a boat. It would be expensive, but it might be money well spent. It would be the perfect early warning device, providing a necessary (and potentially devastating) dose of competition with plenty of time left to recover my confidence before the North Americans in July.