Summer's Bonus: The Last Sail

By Bruce Hammatt

       We each have reasons why living on or near the Bay means so much to us.  For some it is the chance to develop a relationship with nature, or engage in particular activities, or enjoy a favorite view. In the case of my wife and I, there is one day each year on which all of these reasons come together to forge a powerful, binding force that makes our being here a certainty.

     Alicia and I love to sail, and the last sail of the season is to us the very best day of the year.  Some sailors might find this strange and suppose it would be the first sail of the year or the beautiful hot July day with a fresh Southwest wind.

     It is the last sail before the boat comes out that is our special day and why we're here. That day is usually in September -- the wind comes around to the Northwest and the sky is crystal clear. It is still warm, but cool enough to wear a chamois shirt when you are out on the boat. It is the time of the full moon, and the mid-day spring tide lets us sail over sand bars we avoided all summer. A few years ago I took the time to record one such sail.

     "Yesterday was our last sail of the year.  Let me paint a bit of a picture: clear blue sky, cobalt water, bright sun, and a light northwest wind, shifting west.

       Just zephyrs as we left the mooring and headed into Big Bay, only one other sail in sight, the Bay almost to ourselves. As we reached the middle of the Bay the wind died out and tried to come southwest, but to no avail. The gentlest of waves were rounded and dappled with pools of

     As we crept slowly through the Narrows against the ebbing tide we tried to catch up with a few swimming cormorants but they always dove out of reach.  By then the breeze had filled and we were able to make several tacks across Little Bay just soaking up the quietness and peacefulness of the day before picking up the mooring. Comfortable that we will be able to recreate the day again next year and the year after that."

         Each year that last sail overwhelms me with joy, and contentment with my place in life. My sense is that each of us is here on the Cape because being here allows us, in our own individual ways, to find such a sense of joy and contentment. And this is what binds us together.

Spaulding Dunbar
And His Old Ghost

     A note about Old Ghost, Alan McClennen, Jr.'s Monomoy sloop, tacking through The River in the photograph on Page 4, and, below, in Big Bay. She is one of just seven of these Spaulding Dunbar-designed boats ever built - all in the winter of 1937-38 in Dunbar's Chatham boatyard on Eliphamet's Lane (where Pease Boat Works is now). Only two survive.

     Born around 1900, and an MIT-trained naval architect, F. Spaulding Dunbar was the creator of  some of the best-known wooden class boats that raced in Pleasant Bay and Stage Harbor in the 1940s and '50s, including Catabouts, Corsairs and Whistlers, and then saw fiberglass take over, starting with the O'Day Daysailer fleet of the early '60s. Alan found Old Ghost, after much searching, in Virginia, and she was restored over a period of several years at Tony Davis's Arey's Pond Boat Yard in Orleans. She was launched in 1998.

     Her name was bestowed on her by Tom Ennis and the other boatbuilders at Dunbar's yard, and Alan saw no reason to change it. It seems that six of the seven were built on commission for customers, and were painted various colors and generally gussied up. But one was built on speculation, and sat alone in a corner of the yard, white as a ghost, or rather, white as an Old Ghost to Ennis and the others, and now to Alan.

     -- Jeff McLaughlin

reflected light. Every so often they sparkled as if Tinker Bell was there.

      The northwesterly picked up again, ever so gently.  Because of the high tide we were able sail close to land past the closed-up Brooks house near the Narrows.  So close and so quiet that we could hear the cricket chorus in the field. A flock of twenty yellowlegs banked and landed on the spit of Sipson's Island, joining a group of terns. A kingfisher was diving after some baitfish.