Boatyard stories

The Herreshoff 23 Flame just before launching.

Spring 2023

By Patrick Brogan

My earliest boatyard memory was when Dad took me on the long car trip from South Attleboro, Mass., to a boatyard on City Island, N.Y., to look at a Herreshoff 23, named Flame, he had recently bought. We had graduated, as a family, from an Indian class, which we sailed in Narragansett Bay from 1956 through 1958, after a brief dalliance with an Amesbury sailing dory in the two years before that. We started sailing Flame in 1958. My dad said I was five years old at the time. The purpose of the trip was to prepare the boat for the sail back to Rhode Island, where we belonged to the Edgewood Yacht Club.

With the boat on the hard, with berths available, we slept aboard that night. That was my first sleepover on a boat. There was one pipe berth, but my dad figured that the little guy would be comfortable enough curled up on the anchor rode, arranged like a bird’s nest in the forepeak. I can say with authority that no amount of fluffing up can make a coiled anchor rode a comfortable bunk. My dad seemed mildly annoyed when I crawled into that narrow pipe berth with him. Nevertheless, we made it through the night.

That’s all I remember about that trip. I can’t say that the boat was at one of the famous yards, like Nevins Yacht Yard or Minneford’s, or where it was on City Island. And I don’t remember anything else about what we did when we got up in the morning. However, there’s photographic evidence that the boat was launched that day. That was my introduction to boatyard life, and I’m glad it happened.

We cruised aboard Flame for four seasons, taking trips to Cuttyhunk, Padanaram, Vineyard Haven and all-around Narragansett Bay. There were four little kids aboard, plus the parents. The kids slept in the cuddy cabin on pipe berths, and the parents were in the cockpit under a homemade boom tent.

Flame had a small pulpit but no stern rail or lifelines. Many pictures of our cruises show us kids not wearing life vests, with few exceptions. Flame was designed as a daysailer, and the cockpit was not self-bailing. Somehow, we survived offshore with only a compass as navigational equipment.

After Flame, we bought Tilly Twin, the Laurent Giles-designed, light-displacement ocean racer that spent its first six years sailing in England, where she was built in the early 1950s. She was used for racing and cruising in Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) events in the Solent, as well as in offshore races. She was sold to a man who lived in the U.S. but also raced and cruised on the other side of the pond, where he apparently found Tilly for sale.

The new owner brought the boat to the U.S., then raced and cruised in New England, out of Marblehead Harbor, until 1961. On this side of the pond, measurement ratings were governed according to the Cruising Club of America’s (CCA’s) rules, which were unfavorable to boats designed to the RORC formulas. Frustrated at having to give away time to bigger boats, Tilly’s new owner decided to sell her.

I was nine when Tilly Twin became the new Brogan family boat. The boat was a near-sister to the famous Myth of Malham – “… considered to be one of the most celebrated racing yachts of her day. . .,” wrote Lee and Philpott in their book “Laurent Giles and His Yacht Designs” – and my folks briefly considered changing her name to Flame of Bristol.

Then, a friend of my dad’s gave him a copy of a book entitled “An Eye for a Yacht” by D. Phillips-Birt, in which Tilly was featured on the front cover and in the book! Tilly Twin kept her name.

When we bought her, she was on the hard in Marblehead, inside a shed at Grave’s Yacht Yard. I spent many weekends with my dad, working on the boat in that shed and sleeping aboard.

The first assignment I got was to clean the bilge. It was not very glamorous, but I soon found the job well worth it when, under a pile of wet, blackened sawdust, I found a plastic sandwich bag filled with quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Dad claimed he did not put it there but said, “Finders, keepers.”

The boat had been launched nine years earlier, yet we found sawdust left over from its construction, all through the bilges, forepeak and lazarette. We spent almost every weekend in the fall, winter and early spring working in that shed. There were plenty of times when mom and my three sisters stayed overnight on the boat as well. That was a very special spring as we witnessed the building of Ted Hood’s 12 Meter Nefertiti in an adjacent shed, but securely under wraps (or so they thought). This happened when we kids’ modus operandi was to do some work for a while to earn an opportunity to explore and play. There were only three rules: stay together, don’t fight, and don’t get hurt.

We explored the boatyard, the shores of Marblehead Harbor, the surrounding neighborhoods and nearby cemeteries. We even found what we considered to be a haunted house that was decaying on a small island that could be reached on foot at low tide. The Nefertiti shed was not secure enough to prevent us from sneaking in from time to time to check progress when the work crew was not there. It was high adventure. We were actually present at the yard to witness Nefertiti’s launch on Saturday, May 19, 1962; I know the exact date because I recently read Ted Hood’s autobiography. We were there because I clearly remember watching her go down the ways.

Furthermore, it was the weekend, and the Brogans were there every weekend that spring. I watched as Dad volunteered his shoulder to carry out Nefertiti’s aluminum mast from the shed with Ted Hood and the boatyard crew. Tilly Twin must have launched not much more than a week after Nefertiti went in because I was aboard for the sail from Marblehead to Bristol, R.I., through the Cape Cod Canal, and the weather was definitely not June-like.

After we got Tilly back to R.I., we usually hauled her out in late fall at Unk Allen’s boatyard. This was adjacent to the Narragansett Terrace Yacht Club, also founded by Unk, in Bullock Cove, in Riverside, R.I. It was a typical small boatyard in that day, with a marine railway and no travel lift. We had been regular customers there ever since Flame.

With Tilly being one of the last few boats to be hauled each year, we’d spend our time on the hard, sitting on the rails, just outside the shed. The early boats to be hauled out were slid over greased timbers in their cradles to their wintering spots. I think they used vegetable shortening, or maybe lard, for that grease; it was awful if you stepped on one of those timbers by mistake.

It may have been the second, or perhaps the third, year that we owned Tilly that Dad decided to “wood” the topsides. We built a staging around the port side of the boat, high enough to easily apply serious muscle to the paint-scraping task. I must have been about 11 years old, and I put in a fair share of the effort. Drawing just over seven feet and with pretty high freeboard, we were working quite high off the ground. I got comfortable at that height, and we got all the paint off the port side with fairly good productivity.

Dad did the heavy lifting, but my help was not insignificant. He had a good process and developed a consistent rhythm. He’d scrape a patch of several square feet, then stop to quickly sharpen the steel paint-scraper blade with a file, holding the scraper on the edge of the staging plank. Then he’d go back to scraping with impressive gusto. We got the port side done on the first day.

When we started scraping the starboard side, things proceeded as they had on the port side, but only for a while. Before we got very far along, Dad started muttering under his breath about something being different and wrong compared with our experience on the other side. We kept working, but our progress was much slower for some reason. It was as if there was something abrasive about the paint, or maybe it was the wood? It seemed to be the same mahogany grade and color we saw after we’d denuded the port side, but Dad had to stop much more often to sharpen his scraper; thus, his scraped patch size was much smaller than what he typically accomplished on the port side.

Our scrapers required resharpening far more often. Dad’s frustration was palpable, and I can still hear him musing about what could possibly be the explanation for the difference between the port and starboard sides. He kept saying that it seemed there was sand or something embedded in the wood. We were mystified, as we couldn’t come up with an explanation for why that would be the case. It was a real whodunit or, from our perspective, a whatdunit.

We got the topsides wooded and began doing remedial work where we found problems, especially around fastenings where, to our disappointment, the builder had used steel screws in some places that were well-rusted and surrounded by somewhat punky wood. We used “Git”-Rot epoxy and replaced some of the fastenings before caulking, repriming and repainting.

I remember Dad shushing me if I said “Git”-Rot too loudly while we were working up on that staging. He didn’t want anyone in the yard to hear that our boat’s health was challenged. But anyone walking by probably could have seen what we were up to.

I estimate that the paint-scraping effort was done in the spring of 1964, so it was at least four years before we finally had an answer to the mystery of the abrasive wood on the starboard side. Some other friend of Dad’s had given him a copy of K. Adlard Coles’ book, “Heavy Weather Sailing,” suggesting that, “You might enjoy reading about your boat; it’s in the book.”

The book, first published in the U.S. in 1968, included an account of the infamous Channel Race of 1956. Coles was not aboard Tilly Twin for that race, but he got a firsthand account of what Tilly experienced from the original owner, who decided to retire from that race, just off the coast of France, as the weather report began to sound ominous.

They made it back across the English Channel in impressive time, averaging over seven knots, even though, once the storm hit, they were under bare poles, and streaming warps at times. They even towed the CQR anchor on 150 feet of nylon rode to keep the boat under control in the steep following and breaking seas. Eventually, as they approached the shore on the English side, the anchor caught just before they went onto a dangerous rocky reef.

However, the steep breaking waves were beginning to fill the cockpit repeatedly and would likely have sunk the boat. One of the crew had suffered a severely broken wrist during an earlier knockdown and urgently needed hospital care. Rather than trying to save the boat, the owner decided to sacrifice it to save their lives and ordered the anchor rode to be cut.

They surfed sideways over the entire reef, with the keel acting as a brake, bumping over rocks as it went in, but the topsides never actually touched bottom. They stepped off the boat onto the beach in a few feet of water, helped by some people who had watched them approaching the shore, including a policeman. They sent the injured crewman to the hospital and then secured the boat, lying on its starboard side, well up on the beach.

Tilly lay there for a couple of days, with, I imagine, some rocking and rolling on the beach with the incoming surf, through several changes of tides, grinding sand into the topsides. She was picked up with a crane and placed on a truck (OK, “lorry,” over there) and brought to a boatyard, where it was found that no serious damage had been sustained.

Looking back over the years, I recall the multitude of things to do in and around the boatyards we frequented, the surrounding shores, and adjacent neighborhoods, and these included horsing around with other kids I met. But the time spent at Unk Allen’s boatyard in Riverside, R.I., revealed the solution to the what-done-it mystery that plagued us those days spent wooding on the scaffolding.

Pat sails his 1984 Stellar 30 Lapwing mostly in Narragansett Bay. He probably has a few more Tilly Twin and boatyard stories to tell – if he’s given the chance.