They all laughed when Cap'n Briggs went sailing 



Just try to tell a hardworking com- 

 mercial fisherman, supporting a $100,- 

 000 mortgage and a ton of gear, that he 

 needs a sailboat. Tell him to "let the 

 wind supply the horsepower." 



He'll suspect a cologne-scented 

 bureaucrat has been hatching memos 

 again. Or, he'll laugh the whole thing 

 off as a joke. 



And that is exactly the way Captain 

 Lane Briggs' career as a sailing water- 

 man began — as a joke. Briggs is a 

 native of North Carolina's mountains 

 who says he knew he'd spend his life on 

 the water "the first time I ever saw the 

 sun rise over Wrightsville Beach." 

 Since that morning, Briggs has put in 

 30 years as a fisherman, tugboat cap- 

 tain and professional waterman. 



The joke? It began in 1975, when 

 Briggs decided to throw a dockside 

 crabs-and-beer blast, featuring a pre- 

 party sailboat race. 



"I wanted all the people around the 

 dock to join in," Briggs says, "so I 

 made a rule: 'If you want the crabs 

 and beer, you have to race a 

 sailboat.' " 



That sounded fair enough until 

 someone pointed out that Captain 

 Lane Briggs did not own a sailboat. 

 Briggs' company, Rebel Marine, does 

 a lot of tugboat and salvage work out 

 of Norfolk, Va., with some commercial 

 fishing on the side. You don't need a 

 sailboat for that sort of thing. 



But Briggs is a sport, so he went to 

 work on the Steel Rebel, his tug. 



"It all started as just sort of a 

 prank," he says. "I'd salvaged an old 

 mast and some stuff, and just rigged 

 up a squaresail on my boom, and also 

 added a jib. . ." 



Lane Briggs aboard his tug 



The Steel Rebel was not the 

 world's loveliest sailboat. For cloth, 

 the crew hoisted an old parachute, a 

 tablecloth and a few other odds and 

 ends. 



"You've never seen anything more 

 peculiar than a tugboat rigged for 

 sail," says Kathy Hill, Rebel's office 

 manager and a member of the crew. 

 "We ran up everything but the cook's 

 underwear." 



The Steel Rebel wallowed through 

 the race like a sow among the swans. 

 But she finished, with help from the 

 diesel. The crabs and beer were fine, 

 too. 



"Then, a couple of days later, we 

 were towing a barge on the bay," 

 Briggs recalls. "We hadn't bothered to 

 take down the masts and sails. We had 

 a good breeze at our backs, and I 

 looked down, and we were doing a full 

 knot better than our usual speed. So I 

 eased off the throttle and finished the 

 job in less time with less fuel. After 

 that, I made some adjustments and 

 squeezed another knot out of her. We 

 tried several different combinations of 

 sails and rigging, and finally got to 

 where we were going faster and using a 

 lot less fuel." 



Briggs says the gaff rig that he set- 

 tled on lowered his fuel consumption 

 about 30 percent. With a tow, it in- 

 creased his speed 3.5 knots — even 

 more on a light run. The joke was pay- 

 ing off, but there was still a lot of 

 laughing on the waterfront. 



"Everybody thought I was nuts for 

 a while," Briggs says. "That was when 

 fuel was still thirty or forty cents a 

 gallon. Now that it's over a dollar, 

 Continued on next page 



