From Shore to Shore
The secret is out. In a former life, I raced sailboats…reluctantly of course. It was a rite of passage that came with marriage. Racing a Snipe-class boat (13 ft.) in the Atlantic Ocean seemed the least I could do for a future husband who loved to sail. Weaker hearts might have remained single. As it turned out, racing was only the tip of the iceberg. This union called for preparing the vessel for racing including such details as barnacle removal, sanding and painting the boat’s bottom, fixing sails and installing race-light fittings. We tried anything that would make the boat lighter and faster.
Sadly, our wooden boat – The Love Child – slowly became obsolete being out-classed by fiberglass models that were lighter and faster. While fiberglass boats were first produced sometime in the thirties, they became cheaper to fabricate in the sixties and thus more affordable and popular with our peers. We resisted buying a “synthetic” boat, believing instead that the hand-crafted version was superior, and that boat building was an art. We tried hard to compete, throwing our weight further and further out of the boat when racing, but in the end, we succumbed to a fiberglass boat along with the birth of our first child.
The story of what happened to the boating industry when hand-built wooden vessels were replaced by sleek, silicon ones will be told this month at an exhibition at ArtsWestchester. Here in Westchester and Long Island many of the old traditions of boat building continue, albeit with the use of modern technologies. From Shore to Shore, an exhibition curated by Nancy Solomon and Tom Van Buren explores the culture of maritime trade, taking us into the worlds of the boat builders and the historic locations where boats and ships are built and/or maintained today. It opens at ArtsWestchester on January 17, with an opening reception that evening from 6-8:30pm. If you have a boat story, share it in the comments below, or at our boat building conversation events – one with boat craftsmen on February 2, and another with maritime historians and waterfront preservation specialists on February 9.
Dear Janet, Your wonderful story about fiberglass boats replacing wooden boats brought to mind a sailing vacation my husband, myself & our little daughter took in the summer of 1966. We learned through a sailing magazine of a boat for rent in Copenhagen which in the Mag. looked trim with a large wooden hull, and a cabin which slept 3. When we arrived and viewed it we realized that the photo of the boat we admired was probably taken circa1940. Sadly it was no longer the bathing beauty of its youth. After some tinkering we did motor out of the harbor & we three set sail in the Øresund a body of water which separates the Danish island of Sjaelland from Sweden. However we soon found to our dismay, that we couldn’t raise the canvas mainsail due to the combined weight of it and a thick wooden boom. Unfortunately all of our previous sailing experiences had been with fiberglass boats & modern fabric sails. We finally safely sailed into the harbor of Kyrkbacken on the island of Hven, which we learned had been used as a stepping stone to neutral Sweden by Danish Jews fleeing Nazi occupation during WW11. The weather was idyllic & we spent 10 days exploring the island and it’s landmarks. We were berthed beside a swedish family whose young son was fluent in English and became our daughter’s friend. Our return to Copenhagen was made easy by the kindness of a Dane named Troel Smith who when he had tied up next to us recognized our plight. Somedays after he left he sailed back for the express purpose of towing us back to our Marina in Copenhagen.This speaks wonderfully of the Danes. Recently I found my old travel diary of 1966. After rereading it on impulse I googled the young boy Tuve, and to my pleasant surprise was able to contacted him on Facebook. He suggested that we use Skype to communicate & it has brought me face to face with a mature man who has recently become a grandfather.
Berenice Pliskin
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Dear Janet, I thoroughly enjoyed your story and decided to share this sailing story with you.