Rob, Tracy and Helen (on the tiller), students in the first-ever Basic Keelboat class offered by the Cape Cod Sailing School, put Blue Skies through her paces. Photo by Mark Barrett
May 2024
By Mark Barrett
In Part I (“The Legacy,” Winter 2024), in a sailors’ divorce decree, she got the boat, and Mark, the coveted Yarmouth, Mass., mooring, which, to reserve, he needed a boat to put on it. Thus the appearance of the “mooring holder,” an old, shabby, inexpensive O’Day Mariner 19 with no apparent bright future. Could this have been boating’s take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling”? Perhaps, because, over time, Blue Skies became a spritely, much used, admired and loved member of the Buzzards Bay sailing community.
After years of wonderful sailing adventures in and around the waters of southern Massachusetts with my daughter aboard Blue Skies, my 19-foot O’Day Mariner, something occurred to me. Not only was the boat – with her big, roomy cockpit and simple rig – ideal for teaching the basics, but, also, our homeport and the surrounding waters were perfect for sailing instruction. There was almost always a good breeze out in Buzzards Bay, and when it was too windy out there, we could sail around inside Bassetts Island where the waters were well-protected.
Kingman Yacht Center was a great marina with docks at which to practice landing as well as all the facilities any boater would need, including a great bar and restaurant called The Chart Room. One day, I approached my boss at Kingman about starting a sailing school there for adult instruction. He liked the idea. A small office was available at the marina for rent and a conference room I could use for classroom instruction. The next step was to get certified as an official US Sailing-accredited sailing school, which would allow me to use their textbook, administer their test, and hand out their US Sailing Basic Keelboat Certificate, the first rung on their ladder of certifications. Over the winter, I took the instructor’s course in Florida and got my teaching certificate, and Cape Cod Sailing School was born – and Blue Skies’ legacy was about to assume added dimensions.
I refer to this period as the glory years for Blue Skies because, in the seven seasons Cape Cod Sailing School was in existence, over 100 adult students learned to sail and received their Basic Keelboat Certification aboard that sturdy little sailboat. Eventually, we expanded the sailing school to include another keelboat, which was a J/24, and added several more instructors besides myself. Still, Blue Skies remained the backbone of the school and every instructor’s favorite boat on which to teach beginners the fundamentals of sailing.
We taught the Basic Keelboat course every single weekend throughout the summer season on Cape Cod. It was fun and rewarding, but, by the seventh season, I started to burn out. I was working full time at the boatyard and teaching sailing every weekend with no time for leisure sailing for myself or my daughter during the short New England summer. After the seventh season, I closed the school and sold the J/24 to one of the students who had taken the course.
But I kept Blue Skies, even though I eventually purchased a J/30 named Mojo. It didn’t make sense to have two sailboats, but I just couldn’t bear to part with her.
One day, in the middle of the summer, I got a call from my friend Rob Dawson. His nephew, G.A., was coming into town, and Rob was wondering if we could take him on an overnight sailing adventure of some sort. G.A. had been living in Hawaii and was into spearfishing, so it would be great if we could incorporate a little of that into the trip, Rob said.
I did not know much, if anything, about spearfishing, but I had been itching to go on an overnight trip on Blue Skies. I picked Oak Bluffs Harbor on Martha’s Vineyard as a destination because it would be interesting for my friend and his nephew, and because it was only 15 miles from the mooring in Red Brook Harbor.
Oak Bluffs Harbor is encircled by bars and restaurants, so there would be plenty to see and do. Moorings were first-come, first-served, and they allowed rafting, so we’d have no trouble finding a place to stay. The trip would take us through Woods Hole, always an interesting passage. We decided to meet at the marina on Saturday, around noon, to take off on this big adventure.
Rob and G.A. showed up with a cooler full of “refreshments,” along with a duffle bag packed with wicked-looking spears and various weapons with which to fire them. G.A., an athletic and enthusiastic young man in his mid-20s, was gung-ho about going spearfishing. When I said something like, “Gee, you brought a lot of spears, huh?” he said, in an ominous voice, “Yes sir, there’s going to be a lot of killing today.”
We loaded all our stuff in the dinghy and rowed out to Blue Skies. I had slept onboard several times by myself and found it comfortable, but I was curious about how it would be with three adults. Once we left the mooring, we had to find a place to anchor so G.A. could spearfish. I figured that the best place for spearfishing was near the rocky shoreline of Scraggy Neck, before we got out into Buzzards Bay. G.A. donned his wetsuit and strapped on all the various knives and spears and other equipment, looking for all the world like a bonafide fish assassin, and he could really talk the talk, too. He kept saying things like, “It’s a fine day for killing fish, and I’m a born fish-killer, yes I am.”
We motored off the mooring, and once we got around the sandbar at the tip of Bassetts, I picked a spot, dropped the anchor, and cut the motor. G.A. sat up on the edge of the gunwale with all his gear on and stared down into the water. “Is this a good spot to go in?” he asked.
“Hell if I know,” I replied. “I don’t know squat about spearfishing. I guess it’s as good as anywhere. I’m pretty sure there are fish around here, anyway.”
“The water is awfully murky, isn’t it? I can’t see anything down there,” he said.
“It’s always like that. This isn’t the Caribbean, you know.”
“Are there sharks around here?”
“Nah, there are no sharks around here,” I said. “They’re over on the other side of the Cape. I’ve never heard of anybody seeing a shark around here.”
“But how do you know? How do you know there are no sharks around here?”
“There aren’t any sharks,” I insisted. “We go swimming here all the time.”
“Yeah, but how can you be so sure? I can’t see down there very far at all. It’s so murky.”
“Hey, are you going to get in the water or what?” Rob said. “I thought there was going to be a lot of killing today. You know, blood in the water and all that?”
G.A. sat there for a while, staring at the water, but he wouldn’t get in. It was too dark, he said. He couldn’t see anything. He was worried about sharks. Rob and I ribbed him mercilessly. We did everything except push him in, but G.A., smiling sheepishly, took off his wetsuit and flippers, and carefully put away all his instruments of death and mayhem.
We shook our heads, pulled up the anchor, raised the sails, and cruised out into Buzzards Bay. The typical southwest breeze was blowing by that time, so we pointed as high as we could across toward Marion and then tacked back toward Falmouth. It was a fine day for sailing, with white puffy clouds in bold relief against the deep-blue sky. Many other white sails dotted the horizon. Woods Hole was directly upwind from where we had started, about eight miles as the crow flies, so it took us a while to get there, never mind all the time wasted while G.A prepared to spearfish and then chickened out.
Blue Skies is a nimble little sailboat, but the operative word here is little. A sailboat is constrained in speed by the length of its waterline, and Blue Skies’ LWL was only 17 feet 8 inches. Consequently, it took us three and a half hours to get down to Woods Hole, and we still had five or six miles from there to get to Oak Bluffs on the Vineyard.
Woods Hole is a treacherous passage, due to strong tidal currents, rock ledges all around, a complicated buoy system, and heavy vessel traffic with no speed limit. We managed to slip through The Hole unscathed but for one near swamping from a powerboat wake. We ran the Tohatsu outboard and motor-sailed through the passage just to be on the safe side.
It was a beautiful Saturday summer evening in Oak Bluffs Harbor, so naturally it was packed with boats by the time we got there. We circled around looking for a mooring, or a boat to raft to, finally zeroing in on a 35-foot Hunter with nobody on it, and no boat rafted to it. We hung our fenders over the side and tied up to it with our port side against their starboard side.
By now, we were all starving, and as soon as the boat was secure, we piled into the dinghy and rowed into shore. We found a restaurant right on the harbor, dined, and eventually ended up late in the evening on the roof-top deck of a place called Nancy’s, with members of a bachelorette party. These girls were on a scavenger hunt and needed to get a pair of guys’ underwear, and I believe it was G.A. who sacrificed his shorts.
We’d had the foresight to set up the boom tent before we went to shore, but we still bumbled around under the tent trying to set up our sleeping bags and get in a position where we could all lie down. Blue Skies was rocking all over the place until we finally fell asleep, or passed out, depending on how you looked at it. Rob, being the smallest, was up in the V-berth, and G.A. and I each reclined on a cockpit bench under the boom tent. The benches were plenty long and wide enough, but it was impossible to roll over because half your body was wedged under the coaming.
In the morning, I got into the dinghy and rowed over to the little market, with its own dinghy dock, conveniently located in the corner of the harbor. I bought bottles of water and soda and a bag of ice, and some muffins and snacks for the trip back to Cape Cod. Back on Blue Skies we took down the boom tent, untied our lines and slipped out of the harbor. It was a little choppy on the sail back, and G.A., with apologies to Ecclesiastes 11:1, “cast his bread upon the waters” all the way home. There was no more talk about spearfishing.
In Part 3, it is not all blue skies for Blue Skies as, in a race, she takes a knockdown and swamps, but she is restored and eventually, sadly for me, sold to a pair of young sea dreamers. Frequent contributor Mark Barrett is a yacht broker at Cape Yachts in Dartmouth, Mass., and he lives in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. Mark and his cruising partner Diana sail their 1988 Freedom 30 Scout out of Red Brook Harbor, in Buzzards Bay.
