More "My First Boats"
A few readers share their stories...
In our My First Boats feature we asked readers to submit their own stories and photos of their first watercraft. Here are a couple of responses (feel free to submit your own…)—Eds
From Dale Kidd: My parents were not "water" people, so I arrived late to the boating scene. We seldom went to the beach, lake or river. My uncle had a runabout and we went fishing on it once. My best friend's family had an old cabin cruiser on the Rappahanock River and I went for a weekend or two with them.
It wasn't until I married and moved to Maryland that I acquired a fascination with sailboats that resulted from trips to the Baltimore Inner Harbor where I would see those lovely vessels docked by the pavilions.
In 1998 we moved to North Carolina near a beautiful recreational lake. One day I was reading a trader newspaper and noticed a sailboat for sale for $3000. Somewhere I had gotten the notion that sailing was for the rich (which I wasn't). It had never occurred to me that you could buy a smaller, older boat for such a price. I bought that 1978 Kells Coaster for $2500, read Sailing for Dummies and I was on the water.
The learning curve was steep and I "wrote" many stories, but I fell in love with sailing. Flying Lady gave us many nice day sails on Lake Gaston, some overnighters with my younger daughter and even a memorable family vacation on the Chesapeake Bay. I've owned two fiberglass sailboats since Flying Lady and have even built four wooden boats, the last being a Clint Chase Calendar Islands Yawl 16 which I hope to sail for many years.
From George Corrigan: It came as a kit in a box one Christmas, an 8 ft. wooden pram. We built it over the winter in our basement. Dad, the most patient man that ever lived, put up with myself and my older brother, the most over-enthusiastic and hyper 10 and 12 year olds that ever lived, plus an assortment of siblings, uncles, cousins, neighbors and assorted know-it-alls who visited the basement and pontificated on how to properly build a boat. But Dad took it all in stride and the next spring we strapped it to the roof of the family 57' Chevy station wagon and launched it at the Jersey Shore. After the seams swelled up and it stopped leaking we were a bonified boating family. Mom never warmed up to it but everyone else did. Thus was born "Corrigan's Navy".
In this picture I am the one with the captain's hat. My brother Johnny and younger sisters, Courtenay and Theresa are on board. Dad took the picture standing in waist high water with his very expensive German made single lens reflex camera ( quite the thing in those days). My cousin Elizabeth had painted the name on the the transom. The first season we just rowed it , but for the next season Dad purchased a small outboard motor: in the hands of by then an 11 year old and a 13 year old pure magic and rather frightening.
Over the years I never gave up boating , still own sailboats, still sail and still employ the skills Dad taught us in the basement that winter in the 1950s.
We also got a note from Ken White who said: Interesting article on first boats. Mine was a Minmax too, fast but impractical built when I was 17 or 18. •SCA•
My first sailboat was purchased from the Spiegel's catalog for a whopping $75.00. It was a "board boat that had a very very shallow cockpit. It was made of Styrofoam with red plastic lateen sails. It weighed 45 lbs so I could throw it on top of my car when I wanted to go sailing. I sailed it in Silery Bay off the Magothy River in Anne Arundel County MD. It would go like the wind on a reach and about an inch an hour up wind! My biggest thrill was sailing to a point I determined and then back to shore again! I named it Patty Ann after my then girl friend. It was touted in the catalog as being unsinkable which it was. However, capsizing was high up on its sailing attributes. Alas, I had it for less than a year and went on Active Duty with the Navy and while I was gone both the boat and girlfriend were stolen from me. I don't know what was the bigger loss!
A comparable boat today is sold as the Sun Flower and cost around $2000.00
At about age 9 I was in the habit of reading through my granddads collection of Popular Mechanics, which back then was a really good magazine. To be honest I was mostly looking at the pictures, but in one of them there was an article on how to make a canoe from corrugated iron roofing. Being as we were farmers, and that there was a pretty decent creek on our boundary, I was able to find a piece of that iron, a couple of chunks of wood and some nails, and managed to bend up a very rough canoe. It kept me afloat, for a while anyway, and was the first of probably a dozen or so that I built over the next three or four years, each one more sophisticated than the one before. Good times.