Sag Harbor, N.Y.
Michael “Bruce” Tait, who was a fixture for more than 40 years on Sag Harbor’s waterfront as a sailor, yacht broker, and longtime chairman of the Village Harbor Committee, died on July 29 at his home, just a stone’s throw away from the harbor he loved. Tait, who was 72, had quietly battled cancer for nearly three years, his family said.
Tait, who was born in Los Angeles in 1951, to Don Tait and the former Jean Parrish, lived a peripatetic lifestyle as a young man, traveling to Grenada in the Caribbean, spending time in Europe, and crisscrossing the United States by car, as a hitchhiker or hopping on freight trains. eventually returning home to graduate from North Hollywood High School and later earn his captain’s license.
Tait moved to Sag Harbor in the late 1970s. Shortly after arriving in the village, Tait, who first worked delivering boats, teamed up with his future wife, Barbara, and Jerome Toy, another newcomer, to open the Sag Harbor Sail and Pedal Company in a former gas station that stood where the building at 2 Main Street housing K Pasa restaurant is today. The business rented and sold windsurfing gear, bicycles and small boats.
In 1983, Tait became partners with Josh Slocum in McMichael’s Yacht Brokerage on Long Wharf. That eventually morphed into Tait Yachts, which sells, charters and manages construction of new boats and has offices in Sag Harbor and in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
It wasn’t all business. There was a clubhouse in a back room of his office with a pool table and a television, where he could watch westerns on rainy afternoons.
While he built his yacht brokerage business, Tait also became an indefatigable booster of sailing in Sag Harbor. A series of informal Wednesday night races held in the 1980s eventually led to the formation of the Breakwater Yacht Club in 1988, with Tait serving as its first commodore.
Tait was also a leader and supporter in developing Breakwater’s youth sailing summer program and fall and spring sailing for high school students, as well as establishing new programs for women sailors. Tait also enjoyed sailing his own boat, Baby, in Wednesday night races and other, more formal regattas in the region.
Tait was also aware of the potential of Sag Harbor. He was an early supporter of efforts to preserve the waterfront from an environmental standpoint, while at the same time encouraging waterfront businesses. He served on the committee that helped draft the Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan, a key planning document that allows for a partnership between New York State and the village to preserve the waterfront, and he was a longtime member of the Harbor Committee, serving for many years as its chairman.
Former Mayor Jim Larocca, who first met Tait in the 1980s as a client, said, “Pretty much from the time he came here and started his business on the beach, he interested himself in some of the larger questions about this very small village,” especially the need to convert the waterfront from an industrial base to one that would serve the modern village.
As an example, he said Tait was an early, if not the first, person to suggest that the village waterfront could be opened up for public use. “The first sketch I ever saw of an interconnected waterfront was shown to me by Bruce, and that has to be in the 1980s,” Larocca said.
