FBYC History....

Jere Dennison

In the October Log, I related to you the surprising circumstance of receiving a tattered FBYC burgee from Dave Ransom of Falls Church, Virginia with a note attached identifying the owner as his Father, who had died in a nursing home at age 91 and had been a loyal long time member of our yacht club . The burgee attached to a varnished pigstick was subsequently hung in the flag gallery on the second floor of the clubhouse. Nonetheless, there remained a mystery: no one here remembered Will Ransom. Research indicated that he was an absentee member of some 40 years from 1949-1989. Except for some possible early visits during the construction of our first clubhouse on Fishing Bay, he and his family had moved from Richmond, never to return during those 40 years. Just who was Will Ransom and why had he maintained his membership without out availing himself of our facilities for those many years? His son Dave agreed to provide us with a written account of his Dad and his love affair with sailing on domestic and international waters, all the while flying FBYC colors.

Who was Will Ransom ? (From a Sailing Point of View): A Son Explains

Dave Ransom

 

My sailing life with my mother and father began on a “Tangier Island Road Cart,” a small, wooden day-sailor, out of Weems, Va., probably about 1947. That would have made me six and my brother, Tim, about three. Other than falling off the dock, what I remember most about that trip was sailing alone with Dad while Tim took his nap.

It must have been pretty tame for Dad, who had learned to sail on boyhood vacations to Nantucket and then cruised with a group of grad-school buddies in New England waters.

Mom had sailed as a girl, too, given friends and relatives on Narragansett and Buzzard Bays and vacations in Quissett, a little harbor around the corner from Woods Hole. The two of them sailed while courting.

As a family, we never really sailed the Chesapeake after that one summer in Weems, though Mom and Dad later brought boats up and down the Inland Waterway. Instead, we spent two summers sailing a small gaff-rigged wooden sloop, the “Susan,” out of Quissett, then started cruising in various “Amanthas,” broad, family-friendly cutters, chartered from a boat yard in New Bedford, Mass.

As we grew older, we graduated to larger, more challenging boats, usually yawls. During those times, we flew the Fishing Bay burgee. We’d joined the yacht club some time after the summer at Weems. I remember the dock, the club house abuilding, and swimming on a beach around behind. By then, we were used to summing in the Tidewater and watching out for the stinging nettles, usually without much luck.

At various times, my brother and I were Southerners in New England, so the burgee said something about us. And even when we lived in Buffalo, we weren’t New Englanders. Folks often inquired about the burgee and were amazed. “Virginia? You came all that way?” Well, no, the stern usually bore the name of a harbor in Rhode Island or Massachusetts.

The banter was one use for the burgee. The other was to get us yacht-club privileges. We could blow for the launch in Newport, Edgartown, or Nantucket, for instance, use the showers, do our laundry, eat at the yacht-club restaurant

We were on the water two or three weeks every summer from the time we were small fry in Weems through high school, and then Tim and I cruised with folks individually in college and grad school. Tim and I both came aboard one year in Sweden, a cruise on which we met lifelong Swedish friends our age and which Mom and Dad wrote up for “Yachting.” They also sailed the Greek islands one summer, flying the burgee in both Sweden and Greece.

Dad took early retirement at 58. He and Mom began taking care of charter boats in Florida, then crewed for people who needed an extra hand, most of them less experienced sailors. They brought a newly made bark out of a boat yard near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. When the owner proved unable, Dad was the one who threw the Coast Guard a line after the steering gear carried away in a storm. They also sometimes chartered on their own and brought along crew or went aboard boats as paying guests of the owners, sailing a good deal of the Caribbean that way.

Finally they found a Rhode Island man who wanted his yawl taken south to the Bahamas in the fall and brought north again in the spring. He used it for a month or two in the summer, less in the winter, and Mom and Dad stayed aboard most of the rest of the time. Tim and I spent one Christmas aboard in Florida. I spent another in Man-o-War Key, in the Bahamas.

Though Dad’s great love was varnishing decks, he had made a specialty of repairing marine toilets. The Man-o-War boatyard employed him at that valuable task, though he had no work papers for the Bahamas. That connection got him an invitation to help build the wooden boat Man-o-War entered in the inter-island race one year.

With a few exceptions, my Ransom sailing stories come from my sailing years only, including the time when, as a small boy, I let the leeward stay go on the “Susan” and we banged into a small Herreshoff. The strongest memories are of “lee-rail-under” tacks with a stiff breeze on a good sunny day, followed by legs of surprisingly stable – and much hotter – running before the wind.

For me, probably the most significant time was a turn at the wheel in a heavy sea, rounding from Buzzards Bay to Narragansett Bay late one afternoon in the open ocean, tacking with a strong breeze blowing – and enjoying it with a sudden exhilaration that came as a surprise. Sailing every summer when it’s your Dad’s idea does not go over well, sometimes, when you are a teenager.

There were other such fine moments. Once, in a thunder storm sailing north from Boston, navigating by compass and trying to find the buoy that marks some very low islands (rocks), we hit our marker on the nose! Great shouting and big smiles.

Another time the engine conked out as we were crossing from Quissett to Marion in a good, stiff wind, and I was at the wheel while Dad was below trying to fix the engine. Comes a major gust! Lee rail under! Throw her up into the wind! Dad rushes up from the cabin. “What’s happening?” Mom: “It’s okay. Davies’s got it under control.”

There was a similar moment for my brother. Tacking out of the narrow opening to Edgartown Harbor one bright morning Tim at the wheel, Dad and I were putting up the jib so we could climb up the wind and get out cleanly. Oops, over goes the winch handle. “What do I do!” yells my brother. “Sail!” yells my Dad. So Tim got us across the bar.

Once, when I was older, with visiting Swedes aboard, we came back to Edgartown from Nantucket in heavy weather. It was probably not something that they had experienced before, since the waters in the Swedish archipelagos are well sheltered. Dad and I reefed the main while slamming up and down on short, shallow-water waves. The Swedes were amazed. We just had fun.

Not everything always went as planned, of course. There was the time in Maine when, sailing through a fog with a big genny flying and using a chart that seemed to cover a whole lot more waters than it actually did, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a small-boat race. “Looks mighty pretty,” we heard from the committee boat. “But, if I were you, I’d get the genny down and go five degrees to starboard.”

“Do it!” Dad yelled. Tim and I got the genny down lickety split while he veered to starboard. As the fog opened, we found ourselves coming through the opening to a jetty into the inner harbor. Dad bought the man from the committee boat a drink.

Then there was the mutiny. Tacking up Maine’s narrow Eggemogan Reach against the tide, Tim and I were working the winches, alternately loosing and strapping in a big genny each time we came about and getting exhausted in the process. Finally, I turned and told Dad, “This is a mutiny! Pay off and go down wind! Mom, make lunch!” And surprise, surprise, they did! That was the same cruise that he and I got up early one fresh morning, and with the lightest hint of a breeze, quietly sailed off the anchor and out of the harbor while the others slept.

On our cruises, we generally carried a sailing dingy, a “Puddle Duck” made by faculty from St. George’s School in Middletown, R. I. It was great for after-dinner sailing, something I enjoyed immensely, if only to get off by myself for awhile. But on one trip to Nantucket, Dad wanted to show me the harbor where he’d learned to sail, so we both took off in the “Puddle Duck,” down wind. Then tacked back. And tacked. And tacked. And tacked. “Tide’s coming in,” said Dad in disgust. “we’re not getting anywhere.”

I’d learned to be a long sufferer in such matters. We’d just tack all day until we got back to the boat. But suddenly we were heading for shore! And he was jumping out of the boat! And disappearing behind a bollard! Once he was zipped up, we walked the dingy up the shoreline until we could take a broad reach to the boat. Dads get human bit by bit as you get older.

But they stay “Dad.” One year in his 80s, I booked us an afternoon on a long, sleek, owner-operated sloop in Puget Sound, and after they realized we knew what we were doing, they put Dad at the wheel – and were surprised at his on-the-nose sailing. I wasn’t surprised. This was Will Ransom, in his 80s or not!

Dad’s granddaughter, my brother’s daughter, Cordy, learned to sail in college, then crewed for some years on one of the great old schooners that take kids for six weeks or more in the Caribbean and up and down the East Coasts. Got her second-mate’s ticket. Met her husband, Mike, aboard. For her birthday one summer, I gave us all an afternoon’s sail on a rented sloop, and before we were out of the harbor, tacking in a still breeze, she already had her younger brother, Lucas, first time out, at the tiller.

Coming back, I made an offhand remark to Mike, that, if Dad were along, he’d sail in without using the engine. As we came in, waiting to be told to drop the sails, I realized the order wasn’t going to come. By this time, the rental agent is on the dock worriedly pacing back and forth. Mike rounds up cleanly alongside Cordy and I step ashore with our dock lines. No problem.

Which is how I told the story to Dad in the nursing home shortly before he died at almost 91. We went to see “Master and Commander” on that trip. He’d read all the O’Briens many times over. It was the first movie he’d been to in 20 years or more. He enjoyed it. I did, too. I enjoyed it all.

Accompanying Dave Ransom’s story about his Dad was a photocopy of a seven page article that appeared in the June, 1968 Yachting Magazine. It was written by Will Ransom and his wife Allie and titled “A Smorgasbord of Islands,” about their family vacation on a chartered wooden ketch amongst Sweden’s Baltic archipelagoes. The first page of the article pictures the ketch at anchor in a peaceful cove with the FBYC burgee flying proudly at the truck of the mainmast. A certain paragraph within the story even cites our burgee by name: Departure under sail the next morning, headed generally east, was under blue skies and a fresh wind from the northeast. In accord with local custom, the Swedish flag was at the mizzen truck, the U.S. ensign at the starboard spreader, and our Fishing Bay (Va.) YC burgee at the mainmast truck. While the magazine article is too lengthy to reprint in the Log, it will be available in the Austin Library for those interested in reading an excellent article on cruising in Scandinavia that is still relevant almost 40 years later!