Goodby, Old Timer: Schooner Days DCCXII (712)

by C. H. J. Snider

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SEPTEMBER'S last week-end saw the last trip of the season for many of the butterfly fleet of yachts that has replaced the hundreds of workhorse schooners whose gafftopsails used to pepper the horizon of Lake Ontario. But some of the boys are planning Thanksgiving Day sails or cruises.

Saturday was certainly the last trip forever for one of the butterflies that came straight out of Schooner Days—meaning the yacht Aggie, pride of Oakville for fifty-eight years.

We saw her from Bronte a few hours before her back was broken in the breakers of Burlington Beach.

The Aggie plunged past the pierheads, two miles out in the lake, when we came up from supper, in the last rays of the September sun, her jib and mizzen straining ahead in half moons, her mainsail lowered beyond the last reef and spread out on the cabin top as if to dry, or for repairs. It had been miragy all day and in the evening light everything was distorted so that the seas seemed very high as she reared over them, and sometimes she looked small enough to justify the childish description of two of the papers—"15-foot ketch." The Aggie was 60 or 65 feet long.

She disappeared towards the sunset, beyond the willows on Bronte beach, and we supposed she was going for Hamilton. Someone said "She looks a wreck," referring to the outspread mainsail, distorted in the shimmering mirage and the sunset, but she was steering straight and strong and we only wondered if she would have trouble negotiating the two bridges that cross the Burlington Canal. We had no foreboding that in two hours she would be in the grip of the sand, that ere September went out she would be scattered on the beach.

LIGHTS ALONG THE SHORE

The Aggie's skipper has our sympathy for what happened, and so, too, his passengers. The entrance to Burlington Bay is one of the most difficult and dangerous in the Great Lakes, for in spite of the thousands spent on it, it is badly lighted and it is crossed by two hurdles, a swing bridge for the railway and a jackknife bridge for the highway. The bridge tenders are efficient and do their best, but a thousand honking motor cars, or one whistling train, are hard to hold up for a single craft under sail. And with wind and sea heaving through those piers a craft under sail may not be able to wait or turn back until the bridge moves.

These are the Burlington Bay entrance channel lights, and unless you get them lined up properly and keep them on your port hand going in, you are sunk:

Main light, on south pier about midway of the channel, fixed green visible 17 miles. Electric fog signal.

Fixed green light on lakeward end of south pier, visible 13 miles.

Fixed red light on inner or bay end of south pier, visible 5 miles from inside to guide outboard bound shipping. Hand horn to answer ships' signals.

Red lights on the railway bridge which crosses the channel beside the bascule bridge for the highway.

There used to be one or more green lights on the north pier, but it is understood that they were only temporary markers used during dredging or pier reconstruction.

The tall lighthouse amidships of the south pier is a good one, but its light has been changed from white to green to give a range. The changes in the lights and the green light on the pier end is meant to give a good range, the fore drop of bridge lights, highway lights, beach lights, headlights and tail lights, and the background of illuminated signs and street lights three miles away in Hamilton make a bewildering maze for the stranger. And few know that the entrance piers run northeast and southwest, and the northerly one is not lighted for navigation purposes, although there are lights on it. So that anyone approaching from the east in the twilight or after dark, as the Aggie's skipper was, might not be able to sort out the two sides of the channel or to steer a course which would bring him in between the piers instead of into them or on to the beach.

Floodlighting a mark board on the end of each pier would not be expensive and might save lives. There is one for the north pier now. The Aggie man was steering "between two green lights" according to the story told—which was a natural thing to try, but fatal for his ship. All seven aboard might have been drowned. Even if they were able to wade ashore in four feet of water, on a lifeline, the billows which broke the stout old craft in two were high enough to drown strong swimmers in their backwash. The women passengers who uncomplainingly clung to the wreck for an hour, awaiting rescue, deserve credit for their pluck and good sportsmanship.

Gordon Burnside of the Hamilton Harbor Patrol made a good effort with his little launch work but nothing but a powerful tug could have got the poor Aggie off the sand once she struck in that sea.

Aggie was a true schooner days product, designed and built by Capt. Jim Andrew, who had hitherto sailed and built comely cargo vessels at "$30 a ton or $1 a bushel," referring to carrying capacity. Aggie was a more refined product and cost more, but she had schooner days written all over her when she first came out to battle the Clyde designed cutters then becoming fashionable — a schooner's transom stern, a schooner-centreboard amidst a schooner's catheads on either side of her schooner's clipper bow.

She was all "schooner" except in rig, for she was only one-masted. Her original mainmast has long decorated the lawn of the junior club at the R.C.Y.C. Capt. Andrew moved with the world and when the Fife designed Zelma revolutionized Ontario racing craft in 1893 he took off the Aggie's clipper bow and gave her the newfangled spoon, carried her transom stern out into an overhanging featheredge, removed her centreboard and gave her a new midship section, lowering her keel

When Fife's Canada, first of the semi-fins, outdid Zelma, three years later Andrew redesigned Aggie's underpinning into a slim wooden fin, with seven tons of moulded lead below it, recast from the forms used for the Canada.

Aggie always was fast, and especially so in light airs. She put up a good show as trial horse for the conquering Canada and for her successor, the cutter Strathcona, and queened it out of Oakville at every LYRA meet. She won many cups and season's championships, and had eighty-six winning flags to prove it.

Years ago, she was sold to be "broken up." And so she was, to the extent of being stripped of everything above deck and below, including her plumbing and ballast. Her gutted hull was obtained by an ingenious sailor who made a fresh ship of her, although this to years to accomplish but he could not replace her tail clubtopsail cutter rig. Instead he gave her a shorter mainmast and a still shorter mizzen and she became a ketch.

She missed stays in the Burlington piers once after this and knocked her tapered tail off against the concrete. But still she floated. Her tailfeathers were replaced and again she went up and down the lake with varnished spars and cabin top, sleek black arrow-decorated sides and attenuated rig, somehow suggesting a maiden lady of uncertain age and wealth of memories. And now she is no more.

CHAMPION SHOWS HER TROPHIES—Aggie hoists eighty-six red-yellow-wite and blue flags she has won, after leading the R.C.Y.C. fleet into Oakville, is again champion of her division for the year.

AGGIE, rejuvenated after 1896, leading the Scotch and English cutters Zelma, Strathcona et al. in an Ontario championship race off Toronto Island.

"AGGIE" on the beach at Burlington Piers, a few hours after the glimpse caught of her passing Bronte.