founder’s page
JULY/AUGUST 2022 / DONNA MOFFLY
“Jack and I were savoring … being alone under the stars, when suddenly bearing down on us came a monster from Mars.”
… and sailboats. What else? It’s serious summer now, so I thought I’d muse on what happens when you marry a sailor—which is plenty. It started on our honeymoon when Jack chartered a sailboat out of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, complete with paid captain and first mate—to see how I liked it. Outside of the fact that he had me doing laps around the deck to get my sea legs, without stubbing my toes on those little brass cleats all over the place, I did like it. The captain was a real pro from Argentina, but his wife was a real bitch from the Bronx who kept yelling at him because he forgot the potatoes—a lesson for this new bride on how not to make for a happy marriage. So we sailed on, eventually in our own thirty-foot Nonsuch Purple Tiger out of Riverside Yacht Club. (Our partner Alec Robertson went to Williams with its purple cow and Jack to Princeton with its tiger—thus the sophomoric name.) But Jack was also an experienced deep-water sailor, and there were plenty of Bermuda Races. Usually, I flew down and sat around with the rest of the ladies waiting for our boats to cross the line at St. David’s. But once I agreed to sail back on Newbold Smith’s Reindeer. (He wanted to call her Dasher, Dancer, Prancer or etc., but all the names were taken.) It took six days, and everyone was sick except Newbold, Jack and me. We were trashing around in the Gulf Stream for forty-eight hours. It was raining like crazy above, super-hot below, and I was strapped to
the gimbled stove in my bathing suit trying to keep the three of us fed. Then it cleared and there we were, a little dot on an endless sea in all directions. One night on watch, Jack and I were savoring the incredible silence and romance of being alone under the stars, when suddenly bearing down on us came a monster from Mars. It was too high to be a boat and too low to be a plane, but it had port and starboard running lights. Turned out it was a blimp looking for a missing yacht—which later, tragically, made the back page of LIFE magazine going down in flames. By the way, Newbold would go on to receive the Bluewater Trophy from the Cruising Club of America for sailing closer to the North Pole than anybody since Erik the Red. (But in 982 A.D. Erik didn’t have a helicopter to come rescue him if he got stuck in the ice.) One thing about marrying a sailor: You never run out of stories. Yes, Siree, I remember helping Jack ferry a boat from Nova Scotia across the Bay of Fundy to Maine after a Marblehead-Halifax Race. I spent my entire time in the bow listening for fog horns, spotting lobster pots so we didn’t get snagged on them and getting seasick. (Jonathan Moffly was born eight months later.) Then when we landed, Wooly Henry, who used to live in Greenwich, panicked over a fire in the galley and threw the whole stove (or maybe just the oven) overboard. Sure was tricky finding someone in Northeast Harbor to custom-make a new one before the
VENTURE PHOTOGRAPHY, GREENWICH, CT
OF WIND AND WATER
greenwichmag.com
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6/14/22 10:24 AM
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