60 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Jan. 14, 1911. 
are forever looking at boats and passing judg¬ 
ment upon this or that product of the designer’s 
skill, as if we carried within ourselves a perfect 
standard of taste. Yet it is as true of boats as 
of houses that the variety is infinite. We saw in 
the course of the summer almost every kind of 
thing that floats, boats beautiful, boats ugly, 
boats new or old, graceful or able-looking, in 
the fashion of the day or forty years behind 
it. There is a certain comfort in the very fact 
of such variety, for no man need fear to be 
conspicuous by reason of the old-fashioned look 
of his craft. Some time he will surely find him¬ 
self anchoring alongside a vessel of an older 
vintage than his own. And a yacht must be a 
very great beauty if in some harbor she does 
not have to confess herself outshone. Yet under¬ 
neath all this variety of tastes there exist .such 
things as permanent standards. In one harbor, 
where some 200 yachts were at anchor, I spent 
a forenoon in running about and looking them 
over, and a very pretty and instructive sight they 
were. Of them all the one to which I returned 
with most lasting and complete satisfaction was 
an old boat in short cruising rig, topmast down, 
paint dingy, mast weathered, varnish worn off. 
But her lines! The perfect sweep of her sheer! 
The admirable proportions of her overhangs! 
The very absence of all the usual accessories 
of finish and polish only brought out more clear¬ 
ly the truth that beauty is a matter of proportion 
and line, not of ornamentation. And when I 
ran under her stern a second time and read her 
name, now painted out, and remembered who 
her designer was, I was pleased with my dis¬ 
cernment. For she has been a famous beauty 
and will be a beauty till she is pulled to pieces. 
Encouraged by this recollection of my own 
perspicacity I will venture to express my weari¬ 
ness of the monotonous uniformity of the yachts 
that have been turned out during the last half 
dozen years. At its best the type is very good, 
but it is so rarely at its best. The formula and 
pattern for turning out a boat that shall be in 
the fashion is now an open secret, and the build¬ 
ers are repeating themselves and each other with 
unintelligent facility. But there are signs that 
this fashion is nearing its end, and that de¬ 
signers are again to be allowed to show origi¬ 
nality and individuality. 
Having allowed myself this little fling at men 
who know much more about the subject than I 
shall ever know, I dare not say a word about 
the “raised deck cruiser,” but the most digni¬ 
fied and satisfying vessel that I saw under power 
—with the exception, perhaps, of some steam 
yachts—was a common tugboat. The man who 
shaped her had an artist’s eye. And the very 
ugliest vessels that I saw in the whole summer 
under sail or power were the vessels of which 
you and I are part owners, the vessels of the 
United States Government. There was a revenue 
cutter in Rockland Harbor when I was there. 
She lay out toward the breakwater where all 
her shape could be seen, and near her lay two 
steam yachts of about her size to point the con¬ 
trast. Fellow citizens, it was a contrast to make 
us weep. Bow, stern, sheer, placing of deck 
house, rake of masts, size and rake of smoke¬ 
stack—as one examined her, feature by feature, 
and compared her with the yachts, it was plain 
beyond question that every single thing about 
her was wrong. Everything was wrong; noth¬ 
ing was right. And she is not alone. She is 
typical of what is to be seen wherever you meet 
a Government vessel. They are all alike—ten¬ 
ders, launches, even tugs, conspicuous among 
vessels of their kind for shapelessness and lack 
of right proportion. To what combination of 
causes this state of things is due I am unable 
to conjecture, unless the lines are drawn with 
red tape instead of battens. 
Another subject of daily interest to us on 
this cruise was, of course, the weather. I do 
not know what the accurate records of the 
Weather Bureau would say, but to us it seemed 
to be a summer of exceptional friendliness. The 
log shows that we lay over twenty-eight days 
out of eighty-nine. Of these about half were 
from choice, for pleasure or rest. Four or five 
were days of heavy weather; fog was respon¬ 
sible for four only; slighter causes accounted for 
the rest. The longest delay was at South Bos¬ 
ton, where we spent four days of calm and rain 
and fog. This was on the way home, when only 
two of the party were left. We were by that 
time rather anxious to push on and the delay 
was vexatious. But there was this comfort 
about it, that the calm and fog left no room for 
indecision. The weather was plainly unfit for 
a start. At Provincetown on the contrary, where 
we were detained almost as long, only one day 
was unmistakably bad, and we were, therefore, 
in a constant state of watchfulness and uncer¬ 
tainty, ready to start at any hour of the day or 
night if the weather should be favorable; in 
fact, we made two starts and turned back, once 
because the wind dropped, once because we ran 
into a sea so heavy that we put the whole pulpit 
under, pole and all. At the time when this hap¬ 
pened the skipper was at the wheel and my 
daughter and I were in the galley hanging on 
and trying to get some breakfast. Neither of us 
has ever known seasickness, but the motion was 
extremely violent, aand we were both dizzy, and 
one at least was pea green. We gathered up 
what food we could carry and staggered aft, 
and learning from the skipper when we inquired 
what mountain range we had been crossing, that 
he had been letting the vessel take it easy, I 
thought it time to turn back before we got into 
really rough water. A heavy northeaster all day 
justified the decision. We had our reward, too, 
the next morning, for we were able to make our 
third start in a clear and moderate northerly, 
and though the breeze kept heading us as far as 
Highland Light, giving us a slow beat to that 
point, yet when our sheets were once started 
we had thirty hours of the most delightful sail¬ 
ing of the whole summer. We passed Pollock 
Rip before sunset and the Handkerchief Light¬ 
ship before dark, and then took the well-lighted 
course up Vineyard Sound. There was a fresh 
young moon till eleven, the sky was clear and 
starlit, and the air was not very cold. I am aware 
that the skipper, who wore only two coats and 
his suit of oilers, would not endorse this state¬ 
ment, but I had on a thin jersey, a thick sweater, 
a winter coat and a heavy overcoat, and I pro¬ 
nounced it a fairly comfortable night. We went 
through Quick’s Hole with a strong tide at day¬ 
break, and after a few hours of light and shift¬ 
ing wind at mid-day, we slipped into Stonington 
in time for a comfortable dinner, having made 
nearly 150 miles in thirty-six hours of easy and 
delightful sailing. I think we were agreed that 
this pleasant run was compensation for the de¬ 
lays of starting, as it was a vindication of the 
practice of waiting for a “chance” and then 
using it to the utmost. 
I do not often sail by night, but as the skipper 
smilingly remarked, when I was talking it over 
with him at Old Point Comfort, “We can’t go 
from here to Maine without staying outdoors 
over night.” We sailed at night when we had 
to, or when we were in a great hurry. I hap¬ 
pened to read in one of the few newspapers I 
saw during the summer the account of a col¬ 
lision between a yacht and a tug off Point Judith 
in which the yacht was sunk, and the men who 
were asleep in the cabin escaped with difficulty 
by swimming. Naturally I thought of my family, 
not all of them swimmers, and of what would 
have happened to them in such a case. But 
without allowing myself to prejudge the matter 
on the strength of a brief report in a newspaper, 
I venture to think that we shall never be in such 
a case. There were always two of us on deck. 
The man on lookout was often forward; the 
side lights were frequently inspected and were 
especially examined whenever we were near¬ 
ing another vessel. I am confident that nothing 
under sail or steam got within a mile of us 
without our having already seen it and care¬ 
fully determined its course with reference to 
our own. 
I do not mean to say that there are no special 
risks in night sailing; indeed, I should have 10 
admit that we ran past the bell buoy off Wood 
End, going into Provincetown about 10 o’clock 
without either seeing or hearing it until our 
wave set it ringing. But at least we took great 
pains, not nervously, but steadily, to diminish 
the risks. 
That, I believe, is the reason why I have no 
adventures to relate. The nearest approach to 
an adventure was my shaving too close to a 
rock in Blue Hill Bay. If I had run on that 
it would have been uncomfortable or worse, and 
the fault would have been mine. I had not laid 
a course, but had trusted to a general impres¬ 
sion that I was far enough off to escape the 
ledges which I knew were somewhere near. 
That was poor seamanship, and I am inclined 
to think that most disasters in summer weather 
are due to the same cause. They are not ad¬ 
ventures, jolly or otherwise, but simply evidence 
that the man in command was for the time a 
poor sailor who did not know how to play the 
game. For the essence of the game is that one 
voluntarily puts himself and perhaps his family 
into circumstances where safety depends upon 
an unusual degree of watchfulness and an un¬ 
usual kind of will. One should not enter the 
game and then refuse to play it, trusting to 
chance. But we all know that eternal vigilance 
is a little hard to keep up on a pleasant summer 
afternoon. 
A few statistics for a close. I was on the 
boat 102 days, not sleeping ashore during that 
time and taking only four or five meals ashore. 
We were in commission and cruising eighty-nine 
days, sixty-one under way some part of the day, 
twenty-eight at anchor. We were under way 
five nights, beside some evening runs, one of 
which lasted till 2 o’clock in the morning. The 
shortest run was seven miles in eight hours of 
drifting; the longest were 145 and 146 miles. 
The total distance, not counting beating, was 
1,600 miles. We anchored in fifty-two different 
harbors, some of them several times. The 
longest time in one harbor was four days. 
