Port Townsend, WA 14-MAR-2023 – What was unsaid, of course, was that Dennis Conner was the first American to lose the America’s Cup. It was said that the head of the first skipper to lose the Americ’s Cup Trophy would take its place at the New York Yacht Club.
Boat Haven is changing, faster, I think, than Port Townsend.
Six or seven or eight years ago Seattle started to change.
Previously, as new people moved to Seattle they became enculturated and the personality of the population stayed ‘‘Seattle:’’ Cars would stop if you looked like you were about to cross the road in the middle of the block. When I was riding a bicycle motorists were unfailingly protective of me: drivers were very polite and never aggressive.
There were buckets of very accessible culture. I never felt any age discrimination: there is a tendency in the US to stratify by age, and to treat people over a certain age as if they have lost all rights to be an adult. Seattle was never like that, it had quasi-European feelings in interpersonal interactions.
Eventually, the pace of growth became such that newcomers were not, and could not be enculturated and so the city changed. Faster than it is happening to Port Townsend, Boat Haven is beginning to change. I’ve never seen it as crowded as it is, and at times when I visit the boat yard I am definitely treated as an outsider, a tourist. This never happened to me before.
If I do show up wearing Dickie coveralls, I get asked what vessel I am working on.
Yesterday I rode my bike down as part of the alternate-day bicycle ride I do. It’s two miles each way, fairly flat, and once I am up to strength, I’ll start riding over the tall hill into downtown Port Townsend.
The three large schooners that had been there nine days earlier were all gone, a schooner in the water was now in the yard, and there was a gorgeous traditional sailing yacht in the second row of boats.
I wanted to get a picture of it. While I was standing near it with my bicycle facing the roadway that runs between the roads, a pickup truck stopped and seemed to be waiting for me to cross the road. I shook my head no, indicating that I was not crossing the road, and he started to drive the pickup truck to where I was standing. Of course he had been waiting for me to cross the road: he wanted to park the pickup truck where I was standing.
I know there are dad jokes, but I have started to enter into the world of old man bantering. There is an ease in this type of bantering, we’re all practiced and we have our favorite lines, and we’re able to play… not verbal jujitsu, but perhaps tai chi.
I moved out of the way. Once he parked, I walked over to the pickup truck. The man rolled down his window. I said, ‘‘I’m sorry I thought you were waiting for me to cross the road.’’ He said something gentle and funny, followed by asking where my boat was. I told him it was in Homer. He told me he fished out of Craig, a town Jennifer and I know fairly well.
I’d been wandering around the yard a bit getting unwelcoming looks from some of the owners and some of the workers. It’s never been like this before.
The man in the pickup truck had a younger man with him, who generally just listened to and occasionally made comments or acknowledged the veracity of what we were saying. The driver told me it was a long distance to bring his boat down from Craig to have work done on it here. I told him I thought Northern Enterprises in Homer would start picking up vessel that normally came to Puget Sound for work because Northern Enterprises now has a 300-ton lift as Boat Haven does. We engaged in a little badinage (a word I think I have waited my entire life to use). I told him I was trying to get a picture of the beautiful traditional yacht behind them. He told me it was for sale, implying that I should buy it. I told him I already had a boat. He replied that if I had a boat and a wife then I had no money. I just laughed.
The For Sale sign was gone.
He told me it was listed for $98,000. I offered that someone perhaps had bought it. I somehow tied together the fact that his boat was plastic, as was mine, and unlike the new owner of this yacht, I wanted to sail my boat. We laughed. He asked me again where I kept my boat. I told him and continued on my way. When I passed by 10 minutes later, he was still in the cab of the truck.
I rode to the end of the roadway, looped left then rode between the final row of boats and the center double row with the pickup truck and the traditional yacht.
Second to last in that row against the fence was one of the more beautiful sailing schooner yachts that I have seen. On Tuesday, I spent a fair amount of time in the Zingaro saloon call focusing on that yacht. (Every so often I take the callers on a tour around Boat Haven. There is no yard in the world quite like this one when the wooden boats are in.)
On the call, we made guesses about the boat: but I didn’t know the owner and had never seen anyone around her. This time a very thin man with a Sam Elliott mustache was walking on the far side of the boat towards the roadway I was on. I stopped and asked him if he was the owner of the boat. He responded, ‘‘Well, I’m responsible for it.’’ I took that to mean that he did in fact own the boat and because of what I assumed was its age, he had a responsibility to it. It’s not uncommon to find owners speak in terms of belonging to the boat, or the boat owning them, or in the case of special wooden boats of the boat being a responsibility one preserves for future generations.
The man was smoking a cigarette and had the body of someone who smokes a terrific number of cigarettes. It is the body of a 15-year-old boy.
The man is my age give or take five years, probably add 10, although I’ve gotten very bad at this.
I asked him to tell me about the boat and he responded by asking me how much I knew about schooners, I responded, ‘‘a bit.’’ He asked me what I knew about American history. I responded, ‘‘a bit.’’ He looked at me skeptically and I said, ‘‘it depends on who I’m standing next to’’ – an old man line. In that interchange, we learned all we needed to know about each other.
This is what he told me, the hull was built in 1910 by a yard in East Boothbay Maine in seven days.† It was designed by the B.B. Crowninshield (MIT class of 1889) as his personal yacht.
He told me the Crowninshields were the first millionaires in America because they designed and built the ships for the Americans in the revolution. The were fast boats, unlike the very slow British vessels.††
“We saw this boat on the back page of Wooden Boat Magazine, and we weren’t doing anything, and me and Dennis decided that we would pick it up for free and rebuild it.… Me and Dennis figured it would take about $150,000.”
“We had about 35 boats then, I had five, Dennis had the rest. We weren’t doing anything and thought this would be a fun project.”
I asked, ‘‘Did you bring it in for 150.’’ He looked at me, and without laughing, as people normally do when this question is asked, said, “No, we put about 250 into it.”
He told me it was much rougher than expected, which doesn’t really surprise anyone, especially as regards a wooden boat.
He told me what he and Dennis had done. I asked him if I ever heard of their company, was it a name I should know? He paused and said no, I wouldn’t know of their company.
He continued on a little more. He talked about “me and Dennis,” and I asked who Dennis was. I don’t know whether he was setting me up to ask this question so he could impress me, whether he expected me to know who Dennis was, or was just used to talking about projects he and Dennis had worked on, the way I will mention Jennifer without mentioning who she is.
But I did ask who Dennis was, and he told me Dennis Conner.
The anecdotes continued, and I got the impression that Dennis looks for excuses to have parties and get drunk, really drunk. I asked this man his name and he told me Patrick and paused expecting me to say my name, and when I didn’t he filled in the rest of his name, Langley, his name is Patrick Langley, which, other than the man with Air Force Base named after him, meant nothing to me. As a sailor, should it have?
I can’t remember whether it was before or after he told me his name, I mentioned that I didn’t like meeting famous people if I knew who they were, it was much better to meet them and not know who they were and to learn afterwards. I wonder now, if I told him this afterward he told me his name did he thought I was implying that he was famous, or if I told it to him before he told me who he was, did he figure I would know who he was once I knew his name.
We continued talking about the boat. I’m unclear whether B.B. Crowninshield kept it at the Hyde Yacht Club in Chicago, or whether it was the follow-on owners who did that. A successive owner had taken possession and put it into a yard to be worked on and sank her when she went back into the water. I asked if the planking was that open, implying that she had been re-caulked and the planking had not yet swelled.
One of the things that drew my attention, and the attention of the people in the saloon was how absolutely gorgeous her topsides were (topsides are the vertical sides of the boat above the water, not the deck as very bad Hollywood movies would lead you to believe). From Google, I learned that Patrick is known for this.
Patrick said something related to why she sank, which I did not catch, because he then told me a diver went down to find her and there she was upright with all sails up. People often times laugh a hard laugh when they tell stories like this as a cue to a listener that this is funny and you should laugh. Patrick did none of that, he just told this story and allowed me to react however I might.
Once the boat was done, he told me Dennis thought this would be a great excuse for a very large party, and so they had one with over 250 guests. He told me a story about Dennis’s behavior at the party and his wife’s reaction to it, which I won’t repeat here. He did let me know where all of Dennis’s large wealth came from, and it came the same way that John McCain got his money: he married it.
Patrick told me stories about Dennis’s largesse as a winning sailor accused of cheating: giving up his first-place spot and allowing everyone else to move forward, and how Dennis once bought the boat that came in last in a race, fixed it as it should be for racing and then sailed it coming in first the next year, implying but never saying to me because it didn’t need to be said, that it is about prep and talent, not the boat.
We talked a bit about Dorade, the very early Olin Stevens design that upset the design of racing yachts, and how the real reason they won was because they did not follow the rhumb line, and instead followed the great circle sailing hundreds of miles less than their competitors. The Wikipedia article doesn’t mention that.
I suppose part of this interchange was presenting our bona fides. I don’t race. I once did and found I didn’t like it. Patrick was polite, and agreed that he didn’t like course racing, but he did like ocean racing but not all the bitching and moaning that competitors who don’t win do. Though he never expressed it, it was clear he did not understand how I could not like racing.
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation he mentioned ‘‘Fame’’ I asked if that was the name of the boat, he said yes. We’d been talking quite a while, and he told more stories than I will repeat here.
I thanked him for telling me all of this and for his time. I suggested he’d told the story of Fame before and he allowed how he’d told it a time or two.
I googled Patrick Langley, and couldn’t find anything about him, but then there is a very famous author by that name, so I googled Dennis Conner together with Patrick Langley, and there Patrick is: never in a picture that I could find, but always given great credit by Dennis, and mentioned in all of the articles about boat restorations that involve Dennis Conner. By this time it was late in the evening. I was only looking for the name of the family that had Fame built, and the name of the boat yard where it was built in Maine. (It was built in East Boothbay by the Rice Brothers in a yard owned by another company.)
So that’s it. Boat Haven is very busy, and like Port Townsend and Seattle is changing. Northern Enterprises is trying to keep the very large vessels from returning to Seattle, and with a quarter million dollars, which I am told that Dennis considered too little to actually worry about, one can have a wonderful time restoring a beautiful 40-foot racing yacht, which was also a financially-inconsequential plaything for its original owners.*
Patrick pointed out that while at the Hyde Yacht Club, Fame sailed in 67 Mackinaw races and its owner filmed all 67 starts.
In the next few weeks I’ll start spending money on Caro Babbo again. She’ll come to dominate my thoughts, and by proxy I will feel the physical tension drop out of my body as I think about being aboard her, generally, alone with Jennifer, and the four or five months we’ll spend sailing around Alaska.
As always, thank you for sticking with me and reading what I write.
*Crowninshield built a larger vessel also called Fame in 1920.
†Seven days! Patrick explained that there were probably twenty workers working on it. This was all they did as a profession and it wast just the hull they were building.
††He also told me this family and the DuPonts were the first millionaires in America. The DuPonts supplied all of the gunpowder for the munitions. (I thought of, but did not say anything, about Krups in World War I.)
Thanks John, another wonderful reminiscence – and re-telling of your journey.