In Search of Frenchman's Bay II: Schooner Days DCLX (660)

by C. H. J. Snider

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IN a 16-foot skimmingdish—painted scarlet, with mainsail to match and christened Chicago Girl—this yarn-spinner floated into Frenchman's Bay a long, long time ago. It was on a singlehanded relief expedition for a stonehooker which was windbound there and out of grub—and cash, which was a chronic condition. We drifted down from Toronto all night on the current, with a boiled ham, two loaves of bread and a pound of butter, price 15 cents and considered dear. It was for we working men then got 15 cents an hour. We met the schooner Trade Wind in the dark. Capt. Wilson said, as we floated by, that he had been sailing all night past the Highlands, and was farther astern than when he started.

His loss by the current was our gain for the green light at Frenchman's Bay came nearer although neither the Trade Wind nor the Chicago Girl appeared to be moving. In the morning we paddled the Girl (not metaphorically) past the grey shingled lighthouse which was propped up with shores, like an old man on crutches, and in between two decayed timber piers, towards what appeared to be a harbor as big as Toronto Bay.

We had barely passed the inner end of the east pier, when the centreboard scraped on a tongue of submarine sand. Heaving up the board and turning to starboard, a beautiful sheet of water was spread out before us covered with lily pads amid which gold and silver chalices rosily reflected the red rim of the sun coming up behind Sparks Point. Among the waterlilies swam a lovely large fore-and-after of 400 tons, the Winnie Wing of Chicago, newly come to Lake Ontario, a novelty to us with her raffee and squaresail yard, her quick sheer, clipper bow and graceful overhanging stern. She lay just inside a single crib from which a single spile protruded, a relic of the timber days, when raft booms used to be so moored. It now evidently served as a sort of halfway house in crossing the harbor. Vessels which had got past the sandspit could run a long line to the timber crib, heave over that far by capstan, and then run another line to wharfage on the east side of the bay. There lay another tall two-master, the Annandale, then newly become the property of Capt. George Irvine. She was a fine schooner of the plumb-stemmed type developed by canal locks and not as pretty as the Wing.

She lay beside a large dark red grain elevator, with plank sides. Behind it were coal sheds and icehouses, around it were fish boats and net reels. Half a dozen scattered houses and a tiny store and post office completed the metropolis of Fairport, the settlement in the east side of the Bay. Northwesterly were Dunbarton and Liverpool Market, northeasterly Pickering village, a mile and a half away. At anchor between the Wing and the Annandale swung Matt Thomas' square built hooker Hope and our own hungry White Wings, loaded coveringboard to, but unable to leave port because she hadn't the necessary 15 cents to pay Harbormaster Sparks his just harbor dues, or get coal-oil for her side lights from the store; and besides there wasn't wind enough for her to make a getaway.

THAT was Frenchman's Bay forty odd years ago. When we hove to abreast of it this month and went ashore in Kingarvie's longboat, it was, well, very different. Elevator, storehouse, lighthouse and piers all vanished, leaving no trace but the granite hardheads which had once filled the channel cribs. Robbing the piers of their ballast was one of the nefarious practices of the more ungodly among the stonehooker men. They had left a lot at Frenchman's Bay, thanks to the harbormaster's vigilance or shotgun, but some of these had tumbled into the 80-foot (channel, and it was further choked with sand and silt until even with this season's "high" water four or five feet draught was the maximum possible.

There used to be ten feet, and sometimes schooners drawing more than that were hove out by kedge and windlass and capstan to the three-fathom line just outside the piers.

Capt. John Williams got the big threemaster Sir C. T. Van Straubenzee out of Frenchman's Bay with 9,000 bushels in her. Breaking around the corner at the sandspit he struck a dredge, inconveniently moored at the piers, and punched a hole in the bluff of his bow close to the waterline. He stuffed it with old clothes and got into Oshawa, where he had to finish loading, and before attempting that he cut out the damaged plank and put in a new one, caulked and payed it, and so delivered his whole load undamaged at Oswego.

Not a schooner's fly fluttered above the treetops this September day, of 1944, not a topmast speared the cloudless sky. But there were rows and rows of summer cottages and bungalows — and a clubhouse, if you please, inside the bay, with its own boat landing, as many yachts—seemingly—as disport themselves at the L.Y.R.A., and more moths than ever harbored in a Scotsman's sporran.

A moth, ye dunderheads, is a little flat pancake of a boat only eleven feet long, with an 18-foot beanpole for a mast lifting a marconi mainsail like a church spire towards the sky. The 16-foot skimming dish mentioned at the top was shaped like a moth, but rigged like a cat, which may be mystery in zoology too complicated for exposition in one issue.

Moths were the foundation of the Frenchman's Bay Yacht Club whose final 1944 regatta was in progress what time we last entered the old port. The club started off with eighteen of them, and added ten more, and then went into sunrays, snipes, dinghies and national one-designs. Nationals are very pretty sloops 17 feet 6 inches long, fast on a wind with that narrow Marconi sail but slower running than the old style 16-foot dinghy, which for general cruising and racing seems to have the heels of everything yet tried in Frenchman's Bay. Lily pads and weeds have so spread in the harbor, with the silting up of the channel from the lake and the absence of big anchor flukes and heavy traffic, that an outboard rudder is as essential for sailing as it is for easy hauling out.

FRENCHMAN'S BAY PIER FORTY YEARS AGO, after the light tower had been straightened up and the stilts and props supporting it had been removed. The "BROTHERS", "LILLIAN" and "ISLAND QUEEN" were stonehookers. "OAK LEAF" was a little yacht, originally a converted fish-boat named and nicknamed "TOUGH DICK" by the late Richard Tinning, who used her for duck shooting with many congenial spirits. Ald. Wm. Stewart of Ward One, civic solon forty years ago, had the happy hunting boat rebuilt as a schooner yacht and continued her hospitable career.

FRENCHMAN'S BAY MOTHS

In their native lair and at the Canadian National Exhibition before the war where their "aquabatics" thrilled the waterfront crowds.