Those sweet waters of the Adirondacks.
When I was young, my parents took us to upstate NY in the Adirondacks each summer for a two week vacation. In all the years we visited, and it was for as many summers as I can remember, it was always to the same spot, Lake Clear, just north of Saranac Lake.
I have wonderful vivid memories of those summer breaks, fishing, sailing on an old Sunfish and time spent watersking for hours each day. I also remember the daily trips to a local gas station with my dad to fill up the fuel tanks for the boat. Wow, but that boat, that we dubbed the “super pig” used gas.
When Brenda and I were newly married, we too took our time at Lake Clear and even considered buying a cottage, balking at what seemed like an unfathomably high cost of $50,000 for lakefront property in the late 70s.
While we had not yet begun to focus on sailing, I felt a strong pull to the water.
The cottage that we rented belonged to the Lathrops who were second generation owners of the property. The cottage was impossibly quaint if a bit rough around the edges. I seem to recall bringing our own vacuum to tidy up a bit when we arrived. During those years, Brenda played the guitar. Sadly, not these days but she has recently taken up the ukulele. Fingers crossed that she will catch that bug again. 
I fell in love with the traditional boats of the area. Perhaps the most iconic boat design of the region is the Guide Boat, so named because it was used for hunting and fishing by “sports” who visited the region by train from NYC to “rusticate”, beginning in the years after the close of the Civil War. These boats were crewed by the builders themselves, who spent winters building the boats and summers taking visitors on guided hunting and fishing trips. Guide boats are known for being easy to row and for being able to carry a lot of gear and as they had to as often it was a hunter, guide and any game that they may have bagged.
Windslow Homer spent time in the area too and painted this iconic image of a guide and his “sport”. However, this may not actually be a guideboat but you get the general idea.
I got the bug to have one of these beautiful boats but couldn’t afford to buy a “real” one. Instead, I found someone who was offering a “bare hull” in Kevlar which I finished with walnut decks and cane seats. I even carved out oars to pretty exact specs. This is one sweet boat to row and very light. 
The hull and fitting design were taken off of the lines of a particular boat “Ghost”, built by H.D Grant. The original boat is now in the collection of the Adirondack Museum, renamed the Adirondack Experience.
Plans for the boat, which I purchased from the museum, are now available from, oddly, Mystic Seaport. The 16′ boat has beautiful lines and with her 8′ overlapping oars, is a dream to row. It is said that a traditional guide boat is the fastest rowing boat you can find without a sliding seat. The boat Ghost itself and museum are located on Blue Mountain Lake. It’s a really great place to visit and has examples of many boats that plied the waters of the many lakes that dot the area.
Here’s are some of the sheets of the plans that I purchased. 
The plans even specify details down to the oarlocks which I was able to purchase from a foundry that had duplicated the design to be true to the original. 
This design of boats has been remarkably popular for over 100 years and there are still boats being constructed using the exact same techniques and materials. These boats are very tough to make as the materials are impossibly thin to keep the weight of the boats to a minimum given the need to portage, or hand carry, from one lake to the next. 
There were many hotels dotting the lakes that featured guideboats for hire, complete with guides.
We had many wonderful times heading out on picnics on the lake and nearby St Regis Lake. Wow, what a dish. Nice boat too. 
St Regis Lake was and is still today, home to many of the “Great Camps” where wealthy city dwellers would spend time “rusticating” in somewhat less than rustic conditions.
One of the most famous is the camp, Top Ridge, was built by Marjorie Merriweather Post, which she called a “rustic retreat”. While the lake is home to many “camps”, hers was the most lavish, featuring nearly 70 buildings, including a Russian dacha. She collected Russian art and her connection to the country was her third husband that served as the ambassador to the Soviet Union for a time.
I can still vividly recall seeing a plane at the nearby Adirondack Airport that my dad, an airplane buff, told me was hers as she still used the camp for vacationing and lavish entertaining when my family visited Lake Clear in the early years. This is a photo of what was probably the plane I saw so many years ago as it’s the one that she used traveled in when she visited Top Ridge. I’d guess that my father knew it was her plane because her name was right on the bow, “Merriweather.”
While there was eventually there was a service road to the estate, during Post’s ownership all materials and visitors arrived by water, landing at this magnificent boathouse. The largest building for the estate, above the boathouse, featured what was, at the time, the largest piece of plate glass in the area, offering a beautiful view of the lake. 
Following her death in 1973, she willed the compound to NY State that used it as a retreat for a number of years. During that period it was open to the public so Brenda and I visited. The state eventually sold the property to the flamboyant Roger Jakubowski, who had made millions selling hotdogs in the NY City area.
This article in Adirondack Life gives some interesting information about him, the property and it’s furnishings. When we visited the estate, prior to his ownership, the main cabin was open for visitors and I recall many of the furnishings mentioned in the article. This photo of the great room in the main building, is out of a wonderful book, Great Camps of the Adirondacks, that chronicles the history of these remarkable “camps”, er, estates. It’s no longer in print but used copies are available at a very reasonable price on Amazon. 
Anyway, the estate is now owned by Hartlan Crow, a developer from Texas, who has substantially restored the camp.
Marjorie wealth was as a result of being the owner of General Foods and she was for a long time, the wealthiest women in the country. She became wealthy the old fashioned way, at the tender age of 27 she inherited the Postum Cereal Company, the predecessor to the company we’ve all heard of today.
The lake is also the home of a class of a very unique gaff rigged sloops, the Idem class. Originally designed for the St Regis Yacht Club in 1899, the fleet consisted of a dozen boats. How about this for a serious looking group of owners?
Here’s a shot of them racing in 1900. 
Those same boats racing 100 years later. 
This is one we saw when Brenda and I visited the lake in our guideboat. 
One of the original dozen that were built is now on display in the Adirondack Museum with all of the others lovingly maintained and still kept on the lake. In 2004 a new boat was built to the class so that now, once again, there are a dozen boats on the lake that race together.
As you can imagine, a great deal of work and care goes into keeping these boats in top shape more than 100 years after they were launched. There is one shop in particular, Nik and Sons, that specializes in keeping these beauties on the water. Here’s a shot of Idem Elfmere getting all new fastenings, 3000 in all. 
When Post married for the second time, it was to E.F. Hutton and subsequently she and Hutton were the owners of Sea Cloud, built in Germany and launched in 1931. When launched she was the largest privately owned yacht in the world. We spied Sea Cloud in Bequia last winter, now a boutique cruise ship, having many lives since being sold by Post in 1955,
Post was also the builder and first owner of Mar-a-Lago, now owned by our current president, Trump, if somehow you missed his tweet reminding you.
Anyway, back to Lake Clear. We took our guideboat up to St Regis and passed Topridge but by that time it was in private hands. We portaged to nearby ponds and often stopped for a break at this spot, a huge rock just breaking the surface of Bear Pond. This shot must have been from when we only had little Rob. I recall that the water had a strange blue-green color and was impossibly clear. 
Anyway, visiting Lake Clear was a big part of my early years as well as when Brenda and I were newly married. We spent many hours around the proverbial campfire at the Lathrop’s cabin nearby, first with just Rob and then Chris too. 
The four of us went on outings in the Guideboat. 
And sat on the dock. 
In our early years together, we rented a cabin with my parents. This is them on the top of Whiteface mountain. My mom is now nearly 90 and my dad’s been gone for about 5 years. He was a great guy and I think about him every day and still miss him terribly. Personally, I think he should have been given more time for “good behavior”. 
Not sure what this was all about but there were lots of shenanigans while the Osborn clan was visiting.
These days I am still very much a boat lover and spend as much time afloat as I can but then you already know that. Today we spend more of our time on salt water with the sweet kind which is limited to our time on the CT River near our home.
However, is was those early days spending time on the sweet waters of the lakes of the Adirondacks and Lake Clear that ingrained, in me, a love of being on the water.
I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if Brenda and I had taken the plunge and purchased a camp. While it would surely not have been a “great camp” it would have been terrific, never the less, all those years ago.
Who knows. But, either way, it’s worked out pretty well. Sweet, I’d say. Yes, very sweet.
We had many fun weekends aboard and some still involved sake. 
So, after perhaps one too many nights afloat, perhaps with more sake, somehow Brenda began to change shape, especially in one particular spot. How’d that happen?
Suddenly, we had babies on board. Both Rob and Chris were aboard by 3 months old, 25 months apart, of course.
And bigger still. 
And then even a bit bigger. 
We fed ducks. Isn’t that what all kids do? And always with the most nutritious white Wonder Bread, of course.
Along the way we joined in on a big celebration of 
There were many catboats, a lot of catboats. These photos were taken from high up in the rigging of the 
Those were great times. Then we were “post-catboat” and onto our much larger at 38′ long, a Pearson Invicta yawl Artemis. The boys were getting bigger too. 
Along the way, Chris and Pat decided to get in on the action and had one of their own, Travers, the first of two for them. 
The too got a bigger boat. a 
Always a bit of a daredevel, Rob always wanted to go aloft. This time on a friends boat, a lovely
Frank spent time with Rob teaching him some knots. And yes, Rob was bigger then as well. 
His brother Christopher wasn’t going to be left out from all that fun up the mast. Both Chris and Rob were relentless in wanting to be aloft, sometimes when we were underway, to the constant torment of their Mother. 
I recall a particularly fun time aloft for the boys as I put them each up the mast while we were sailing near Martha’s Vineyard West Chop, a particularly bumpy piece of water. As we bucked along each boy was repeatedly yanked up from the water, by the motion of the boat, and dramatically dumped into the next wave. They just loved it.
There was even some time for homework, or was it just coloring?
Sure enough, summer turned to fall but that didn’t keep us from the water. And yes, you can see, if you look closely, that Christopher is wearing a safety harness under his winter coat, attached to a lifeline, to keep him safe, of course.
As you can tell, I’ve been digging again through old photos and it’s been a lot of fun thinking back on all those years sailing weekends and on summer vacations aboard a series of increasingly bigger and unfortunately, more complicated and way more expensive boats.
I am particularly focused on this because Brenda was diagnosed with melanoma three years ago after we got back from Cuba. She had noticed a small spot on her arm some months earlier,when we were in the Bahamas, that looked a lot like the spot in the photo above but it wasn’t until we returned home in May that she had a dermatologist at Yale Medicine check it out. Fortunately for Brenda, hers had only progressed slightly beyond stage one, but that diagnosis was upsetting in itself as she was told that a recurrence was perhaps 1 in four, not great odds.
As an aside, you may be wondering if being enclosed all the time is too hot in the tropics, it isn’t. Actually, the full enclosure has proven to be particularly helpful at keeping the relentless trade winds to a manageable level. However, up in the NE, where the winds are often light, we need to open things up much more.
And speaking of queasy, the muscular build of this Canadian cost guard boat gives a pretty good feel for how rough it can get out on the water there. 
We brought along our car on the ferry, then a tiny diesel VW Rabbit. Remember them? That car got AMAZING mileage, about 50 mpg, on average. And, I remember that diesel was $.47 a gallon. And, during the oil embargo I sometimes bought fuel oil from a place in Bridgeport CT. I’d pull up to the heating oil place and they’d snake a hose out from the shop and fill me up. Totally illegal. Ah, those were the days. I won’t talk about my income in those years. About as low, or perhaps lower than the price of fuel. I was selling advertising for a local free newspaper. 
We have always loved lighthouses and to this day go out of my way to visit them when we travel. This one, in Yarmouth is on Cape Forchu is well known and often photographed. We climbed up to the top to take in the view. The light went round and round and as it passed, you could feel the heat of the bulb as it passed, like a rotisserie. Brenda thought it was great too until the foghorn went off. It was so loud that it made us weak in the knees. To this day it still takes some coaxing to get her up in an active lighthouse. 
We have only camped in a tent twice together, the first time was while we were in college, near Niagara Falls. It rained the whole time and we quickly learned that the tent was not waterproof and that didn’t even include the fact that there was no bottom to the tent, waterproof or not. Water coming in from above and below.
Not a great shot but I include this as it features our wok, perched over an open fire. We filled it with seaweed and added two lobsters. That wok has served us faithfully for all these years. We still use it nearly every day. After that trip it was really well seasoned. 
One evening, or was it the only evening we camped there?, we heard someone playing bagpipes in the waning twilight. It was a remarkable moment with the forlorn music and fog wafting over the campsite.
To this day I still get a thrill when I see a schooner. On this trip we went out for a day sail on the schooner 
Brenda is a prolific fiber artist, graduating from her early focus on knitting. I believe that this may have been her first sweater knitted with “real” yarn. This particular photo is one of my all time favorites. 
When she was younger, but not a lot younger than she is in this photo, she didn’t have access to good yarn, or any, for that matter, and had to knit a single ball of red yarn, probably (gasp) acrylic, rip it out and knit it up again. She still has to rip things out but not because of a lack of good yarn. Quite the contrary, her “stash” is prodigious.
Pride was quite authentic down to her beautiful gig. 
In the “they don’t make them like they used to” category, how about the hull of this fishing boat? Not a lot made these days of planked wood. She’s a beauty, or at least once one as she’s certainly long gone. 
The tides in the Bay of Fundy are known as being among the highest in the world, as high as 40′. That’s a lot of water moving in and out of the huge Bay of Fundy, twice a day. As the tide floods the water surges in, moving a small wave ahead of it. This is referred to as a “bore” and is pretty impressive to see as the ridge of white water rolling inland across any inlet or bay. 
Perhaps the most photographed harbor in Nova Scotia is 
Charming fishing boats at every turn. 
Where there is “quaint”, there are artists capturing the view. Peggy’s Cove is no different. 
With big tides, all you have to do to haul a boat is to pull it up at high tide and let the receding tide do the rest. 
Just about all of the boats we saw were still built of wood and the cottages surrounding the harbor, oh so quaint. I expect that many of these have been sold, over the years, to summer residents, known in Maine as “from away”. 
We visited, of course, the local lighthouse. Looks like Brenda’s waiting for the wind to blow up her skirt. Me too…
And, speaking of breezy, the coastline here is quite rugged and windswept. I can only imagine what it is like in the dead of winter. 
With the constant wind not a lot grows higher than knee high.
We went out on a day fishing boat, jigging for squid and even caught some cod.
Ready to head out to sea. 
We even caught a flounder, sole, fluke, something like that. It’s flat anyway. Not sure she’d “soil” her hands on an icky fish these days. 
It was on this very trip that we talked about buying a boat for the first time. There was a small boat show in Yarmouth, If I recall. I expect that this photo was taken when I said “Hey, let’s buy a boat”. “Very funny Bob, perhaps not.” 
The coastline is so spectacular. Maine is very similar so we’ll see this sort of view next summer which will mark our 15th time to visit Maine aboard our own boat. I went to Maine briefly a few years ago but Brenda hasn’t been there since I retired over six years ago. 
Lovely views. I wonder if it looks the same nearly 40 years later. 
Ok, how about a photo of me for balance? Funny, seems that I had more hair then. 
Well, it’s getting late and I need to pack for our trip to MD tomorrow to celebrate our grandaughter Tori’s birthday. She’s a real cutie.
A lot of water has gone under our keel since this photo was taken but it’s nice to know that we will soon be making memories again in Canada this coming summer.
We headed out, aboard Tao, with our friends, Chris and Pat for the run back to Bridgeport where we planned to keep her. I was a happy guy. Happy to have a boat that was better looking than my hat. Well, this shot wasn’t taken on that exact day, but it illustrates my point. 
Brenda, perhaps happy as well but only until she discovered, to her extreme distress, that she was prone to nausea when things got bumpy. Which on a small boat, is nearly all of the time. I wish I could say that she eventually got over it, but not completely, even to this day, 40 years later.
Well, we finally made it to Bridgeport where I had arranged for a mooring to be installed off of the beach, down the street from the duplex apartment that we were renting at the time.
We hung out with our friends Chris and Pat along with others, nearly every weekend. No outboard engines on our dinks in those days. Chris and Garrett with me in the bow. Good thing it was a calm anchorage. Rub a dub, dub…
We joined the Catboat Association and were members for many years. Eventually, Brenda and I ended up on the board, or “steering committee”. Get it “steering” the association, like a boat? Clever? We thought so.
And anchor we did. I particularly like this shot of Brenda. What a dish. I’d totally date that girl. To starboard, a mop, or some bleach blond chick. No, a mop, really. 
However, anchoring alone was rare for us as we nearly always rafted up with other small boats. Somehow three tiny boats tied up together don’t seem, well, so tiny. That became even more important when we all started popping out kiddos. However, we weren’t in a rush, as while we were “yacht owners” we didn’t want to bring kids into the world until we were really settled.
This is where Toby and Martha lived, in the main house. It was built by 
I was a really charming little cottage, once the home of the estate gardener and also built by Remington. 
It was a great spot and the deck, nearly as large as our cottage, provided a spectacular view. 
I loved working out in the yard, or should I say, the South 40, clearing brush and cutting dead wood for the wood stove. Toby and Martha were very happy to have the help, I think. I am not absolutely positive about that, but they were always very gracious. They left us pretty much alone and it wasn’t until years later that we really became good friends. We all wished we had spent more time together when we lived in the cottage.
It was a lovely cottage. I believe this is a shot of the living room. Want to guess what time of the year it is? That’s right Christmas. Gold star for you.
It was aboard Tao that we learned to enjoy gin and tonics, perhaps from Toby and Martha. It must have been too early in the day for that when this shot was taken. We are still in regular touch with Chris and Pat, to this day. Our youngest is named for Chris, actually.
We fished but once caught, we had no idea what to do with our catch on on such a small boat. Besides, who actually eats bluefish?
In those days, no protection from the weather so foul weather gear was in use nearly all of the time. Brenda just loved being coated with salt, even on a sunny day. Tao was a wet boat and to make matters worse, no shower. There’s that hat again. I guess it was on sale. I can’t think of any other reason I’d buy it. Heck, perhaps it was free. Had to be…
Not sure about how this shot fits in. I just like it. 
We sailed as late into the season as we could and I can still remember the one Memorial Day Weekend when I couldn’t get the boat ready in time. I wasn’t happy at all about that. Mechanical problems, I recall. Isn’t that always the reason?
I guess Brenda hadn’t yet seen “Jaws”. Thanks Stephen, I never really got over that, myself. DUH DUH…DUH DUH…DUH DUH DHU…
We sailed Tao, far and wide, farther and wider than was reasonable, in such a tiny boat. Oh, did I mention that it had an even tinier 5hp one cylinder diesel? When it was running, it sounded like someone rattling a stone in a coffee can. Bang, bang, bang… I still have the prop on my desk as a paper weight.
Remember Buzzards bay Light near Martha’s Vineyard? It’s now a tall flasher but no longer manned or with a chopper deck for switching crew.
We passed the light on our way to the Vineyard and Nantucket. It was a really long way to go in a 20′ boat. Perhaps easy to get there, with the SW prevailing winds but tough to get back in time to go to work after our two week holiday. And, when it got foggy, no radar, GPS, just dead-reckoning in pea soup, not sure what was coming our way.
Our one trip to Nantucket aboard Tao was to visit the Opera House Cup, an annual gathering of classic yachts. This is the original Malabar class schooner, by the same name, designed by John Alden . I tried my best to get a spot on this boat for one of the races. No luck. 
Back in the early 80s, there we still a lot of older fishing boats out on Block Island Sound. That was before the modern draggers that decimated the fish population.
And, there was no fishing village more charming than Menemsha, Martha’s Vineyard. This is an old style sword fishing boat. A spotter would stand on the cross tree on the mast, supported by the hoops. When they saw a fish swimming along the surface, they’d go up on a long bowsprit and harpoon the fish. A lot of swordfish were landed at these docks.
However, adventures aside, and there were plenty of them aboard Tao, we had some of our best times just lazing along on a calm summer evening, G&T in hand.
And it was on this very evening, when this shot was taken by our artist friend Chris, while aboard his own boat, that he immortalized Tao and her crew in the painting that he did for me as a gift on my 25th birthday. For me, that painting immortalizes those wonderful times along with those famous words, “hey honey, let’s buy a boat”. 
I’m pretty sure that sometimes Brenda still wishes she had said, “let me think about that for a while”.