FOUNDER’S LETTER

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.” OF WIND AND WATER

… 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

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owner showed up to claim his yacht.

There were other more serious neardisasters, too. Jack Moffly made headlines in the Greenwich Time when he went for a Sunday sail by himself, fell off the boat (the lifeline parted) and, with halyard wrapped around his ankle, was towed feet first toward Long Island with Purple Tiger on autopilot clocking four knots. Blessedly he managed to kick off a shoe, and the line released. Of course, he had to replace his hearing aids, glasses and wallet, but I didn’t have to replace a husband.

In truth, Jack had done this before. In the middle of the North Atlantic in 1989 he was swept off Bob Hart’s forty-four-foot ketch Athene in a Force 9 gale. The skipper was white-knuckled at the wheel; and the story goes that as Jack was being dragged through the water by his lifeline, he looked up at Bob and said: “Would you mind giving me a hand?” Ever the gentleman. But they lived to tell the tale and arrived safely in Cork, Ireland, at the world’s oldest yacht club.

After all this, it certainly made sense one summer for me to join a bunch of us first mates who took a course at the yacht club titled “Suddenly Alone.” The question was: What’s the first thing you do if your husband has a heart attack or (ahem) falls overboard? Whereupon somebody quipped: “Get help selling the boat!”

Well, maybe. I come from Cleveland where there’s somewhat limited (and treacherous) sailing on Lake Erie. But I married a man who liked to sail. So I sailed, be it in Narragansett Bay or the Swedish archipelagos or the Bahamas. He married a woman who liked to sing. So he joined me at Spring Sings all over the country. What makes marriage work? Like I’ve said before—supporting each other’s interests, for one thing. When Jack talked about selling the boat he loved so much, I told him I didn’t want him without Purple Tiger. It was both of us or neither of us.

But as our ages advanced, the day came when we had to drop the sails. It’s some sort of consolation that she is now in the hands of an experienced one-design sailor with a young family who just loves to mess about in boats— like we did. And fairly recently, somebody spotted her anchored in Stonington, still bearing the funky name Purple Tiger on her transom. G

As Jack was being dragged through the water by his lifeline, he looked up at Bob and said: “Would you mind giving me a hand?”

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