"Any Port in a Storm": Schooner Days DCCIX (709)

by C. H. J. Snider

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ONE Dominion Day holiday before you were hatched five newspaper cubs started on a cruise from Toronto. They all would have resented loftily being called cubs, for the youngest of them had had a whole year's experience in what we called the "metropolitan field," and the oldest had graduated from "doing City Hall," that is, the responsible position of municipal reporter.

This was Roland Wolsey, descendant of a British family so old Caesar mentioned them, and they accused the Great Cardinal of stealing their name. He died full of years and deserved honors not long since, secretary of the Engineers' Club of Toronto.

Others were Frank King, an English free-lance, and Victor Cook, who has since survived two wars as Chichester editor of the West Sussex Gazette. He was then on the old Toronto News. The fifth was Kenneth McKay, then with The Telegram and long afterwards with the Star. He, wrote his final "30" not long ago. The writer owned half of the noble craft thus freighted with a galaxy of talent. He was the only one who had ever been on the lake out of sight of land. Lou Marsh, sporting editor of the Star, was his co-owner. Their ownership and their assignments neither clashed nor coincided. Lou owned her half the week and the writer the other half—and this weekend came in the writer's half.

THE YAWL'S THE THING

The craft was a skimming-dish named Frou Frou, which had once been a fast centreboard sloop in the RCYC's 21-foot class. She had been re-rigged by Beaumont Jarvis as a yawl and her very low sides had been raised ten inches until her bow deck was a good foot and a half out of the water. Amidships she wasn't quite that high, but a three-inch coaming ran all around her large open cockpit. She was 28 feet long and 8 feet beam and her saucer-shaped hull sat about 6 inches deep in the water. But her rudder was immersed a foot more and she had a steel centreboard which went down three feet. She had no cabin.

A light wind floated us cubs up to Port Credit after we got off our respective assignment books that Saturday night. We landed by running Frou Frou's long nose on the grassy bank, and cooked sausages in emptied pie tins for supper and had one of the pies for dessert. That was the state of luxury to which we were all then accustomed. We tried to sleep on the floorboards on either side of the centreboard box, with sailcovers for mattresses. But the mosquitos were harder to bear with than the floorboards and we had no peace until we lighted a series of the smudges on the beach and got to sleep in the sand.

VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

Next morning we started for Niagara. Two of the Englishmen had never seen the great cataract and were hopeful of sailing up to it if not over it. The skipper did not know the compass course from Port Credit, but that didn't matter, because we had neither chart nor compass. The day was bright, Brock's Monument was sure to show up some place in the southern sky if we could get across the lake. So off we went.

Hours later we had sunk the north shore and the south one was coming up in blobs of blue which slowly merged and changed to green and brown. We kept looking for Brock's Monument but it was nine miles inshore, and we saw Niagara itself before we found the signpost leading to it. When we did see the monument it was dim, as though the sky was greasing up.

The white gleam of the century old buildings of Fort Niagara were our landfall. A golden sail detached itself from the background of the escarpment and we identified the big new Canada's Cup cutter Strathcona, coming out of the river. She crossed us a mile away, five miles offshore. We noted, with scorn, that she had only her jib set and a single reef in her mainsail. It looked like a loafing rig. If we had had a barometer like Strathcona had we would have been busy reefing right then, for Norman Macrae said afterwards that his glass had dropped ten one-hundredths in an hour and he had his halliard coils on deck, ready to let everything go by the run, knowing something pretty bad was in store.

BOREAS SAID NO

We dashed along merrily, with a little more wind after the Strathcona passed, and we expected to be in the river in an hour. But the current was against us and the wind backed to the southward, coming strong out. of the gorge, and we gained on the lighthouse slowly. Two or three strong puffs put us on our ear and we lowered our mainsail. Frou Frou sailed well under the two end sails, jib and mizzen, and made good weather of it for a while, but the puffs grew heavier and heavier and the sea made up quickly. We had to let the jibsheet fly again and again to ease the pressure, and the spray was shooting in showers over the furled mainsail. Rainbows flashed and vanished in it while the sun shone. We were not taking solid water on deck, for we were light and buoyant, but much of the spray fell into the open cockpit and lake water began to shoot up through the slot of the centreboard box so fast that our floorboards started to float up to leeward.

We bailed with pail and dipper. It was hard to get at the water, for as the Frou Frou was on one runner it sloshed away down to leeward until sometimes it was splashing the underside of the deck. The biggest of the Englishmen gave up the bailing job and his breakfast sausages at the same time. I couldn't blame him, for he was a green lad who had never sailed and must have felt that the whole boat was going to fall over on him every time she rolled down. As, indeed, she might.

Wolsey, who had had a varnished sailboat of his own, was handling the jib sheets. The skipper put Victor Cook at the tiller and bailed the ship clear himself not liking the job a little.

RIGHT ON EDGE

When coming up for air with the last bucketful a puff hit her, the jib-sheets were not eased soon enough and she whirled over so far that the bucket carried him down to the lee bilge and she almost capsized.

"Sorry," said the Cardinal. "My fault. Fingers too stiff for these ropes. You take the jibsheets and let me bail."

That was Wolsey. Pure gold all through. The Englishman at his best, which is very good indeed. He knew the chances of being caught in a capsize, and took them. Somebody had to if we were to keep afloat. He generously added to the skipper, "There's less chance of her capsizing with you on the jibsheets than with you down in the lee bilge."

The other Englishman at the tiller was guinea gold too. He had never sailed more than a dinghy but he was sound as the wheat. Luffed when told but never panicky, always keeping her moving, so as to be answer-able in the next puff. Oh what a treasure a Limey is!

DOWN COMES THE DELUGE

By this time the sun and the shore had vanished in grease. Lightning flashed. Thunders rolled. Rain slanted across with the spray, not enough to cut the sea down, but we were all soaked through and through. The water was very rough. Continuous bailing was necessary and so was continuous easing and hauling on the jibsheets. Fish stakes loomed up ahead, these stout piles Americans use for pound nets, so we knew we were in U.S. waters. We had to fall to leeward to clear them. Instead of nearing shelter we were being blown away from it.

"Can't we run her up on the beach?" asked Ken McKay hopeully, spitting out spray and rain.

Hated to tell him no, that to run her on the beach would wreck her unless we had rollers and a team of horses handy to drag her up above the breakers.

"I only wanted to know," grinned dear old Ken. He always had a sustaining sense of humor.

A SPRAY HOOD

Came a whooping gust and for the 'teenth time we were saved from capsize by letting fly the jibsheets, and thereby almost lost control of her. It was blowing too hard to carry even this much canvas. So we lowered the jib altogether, being almost washed overboard doing it, and got the sail into and over the cockpit, where it kept the spray out. Meantime we rode like a duck, head to wind, held there by our noble mizzen sheeted home and kept full by manipulating the rudder so that we were backing off a little sideways, "quartering" the snarling seas. Another o the great beauties of the yawl rig. We bailed her out in safety and comfort and then hauled out the last reef in the mainsail, a balance reef, high up from just below the throat to six feet down the leach from the peak. When we had the reduced mainsail set again we lowered the faithful mizzen and let her fall off. She began to make steerage way and we were no longer simply drifting to leeward. We were no better than holding our own, perhaps, for there was not enough drive in that patch of sail to counteract the current, if it could do that. But the little ship was again making good weather of it, wherever she was going.

LIFEBOAT TO THE RESCUE

Another golden spark shone through the murk of rain and spray and roaring whitecaps. It was the storm sprit-sail of the Niagara lifeboat, not much bigger than the white hull below it, which it drove towards the Frou Frou. This was in the days before twin engines of many cylinders and many more horsepower pushed life-savers to their job without soiling their hands. Oars were the sole motive power except a small sail useful only with the wind astern. The wind was as much astern of these lads as it was ahead for us and hurled the lifeboat along fast. Under the yellow sail a dozen yellow sou'westers showed. It was the U.S. Coastguards from the Fort Niagara station.

"Are y'in trouble?" hailed the cox-wain.

"No!" yelled the skipper truthfully, for we were riding like a duck."

"Can you give us a pluck into the river?"

"Not with this wind, but I can tow you to shelter."

He stood up and hove a new one-inch line, with a purple strand in it to keep the rescued from snitching it. Then he headed southeast, with the wind about abeam, and Frou Frou ran after, going almost as fast as the lifeboat could sail.

In half an hour the squall let go and the sun came out. Niagara County, N.Y., showed rich and green, fresh-washed by the rain, and a little white lighthouse gleamed in the low rays. We were riding up on the lifeboat and the yellow oil-skinned Coastguards were getting out their oars.

"That's your place," hailed the coxwain, "you can't miss it—right in past the lighthouse. We have twelve miles to row back to the river."

Taking the hint we cleaned out the United Nations entire resources as of that date and gave him three Canadian $1 bills. Asked the name of the port, and heard something like ETAOINSHRDLU. Then we shook out our reef, added jib and mizzen and sailed into the unknown bourne as excitedly as Columbus entering the western hemisphere.

Here was the port. Have you ever seen it?

THIS WAS THE SHIP—a couple of years later, when a cabin trunk had been added to cover the open cockpit which caught so much spray. FROU FROU here shown under double reefed mainsail and squatted mizzen, on a 65-mile dash from Oak Orchard to Hamilton, which she made in 9 hours, ye Twelfth of July, Nineteen Hundred and Six.

"HARBOR OF REFUGE," 1904 - WHERE IS IT?

This was the unknown port towards which U.S. coastguards towed a Toronto yacht in a storm 40 years ago. Identification claims will be considered next week.