INLAND VOYAGE ON A CATBOAT
A lifelong sailor looks back on his very first cruise
Bill Hickman remembers sailing as a youth from Detroit to Long Island in a small catboat
It was the summer of 1952. The Eisenhower/ Stevenson race was in full swing. I was in my junior year, studying naval architecture at the University of Michigan and had been offered a summer job at Jakobson Shipyard in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Practical experience is very useful to a designer. It helps prevent you from designing something that can’t be built.
decided to get there from Detroit by sea. My boat was the Owl, a Luedtke Interlake catboat, a 22ft-by-8ft marconirigged centerboarder designed by Charles D. Mower and built in 1918. Auxiliary power was a 7hp Scott-Atwater outboard, which never failed to start. This turned out to be fortunate. Cooking was on a charcoal grill in the cockpit, and berthing was on two Army-surplus canvas stretchers upon which you could sleep, so long as you also got up periodically to rest. Someone had appended a crackerbox cabin over the cockpit, which was awfully ugly but kept the water out. The same could not be said of the bottom planking. There was no icebox, but none of us had as yet discovered alcoholic beverages, an oversight that has subsequently been remedied.
My crew consisted of one of my college roommates, George, and two Princeton types. On a beautiful morning, we caught the ebb from our slip in Salt River at the north end of Lake St.