Of Sailboats and Stinkpots

by Calla Jones Corner

Of Sailboats and Stinkpots in Old Cape Cod

My mother, Betty, put it this way: “Your father never met a wooden boat he didn’t like.” I’ll add, “Unless it was a stinkpot.” A stinkpot is the not-so-affectionate name sailors give to any boat propelled by a motor rather than sail; they are noisy, dirty, and smells of oil.

That is, until my father realized that fiberglass hulls were a lot less work than wooden ones and his crew (daughters and grandchildren) had other things to do than annually sand boats and coat them with new varnish and paint during Chatham, Cape Cod summers. He’d also discovered a compact 2 hp outboard motor that got him and my mother out to Sea Ties, the 26-foot sloop he kept in Stage Harbor, and as it was too big to be moored with his fleet (at one time it numbered eight) on the Mill Pond in front of our house.

Sometimes, my father would sell a boat and my mother would sigh, mistakenly, “One less boat in Bob’s fleet,” only to watch my father fall for another orphaned hull. She loved to quote, “A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money.”

There was a large stinkpot in the harbor, named “My Mink” and my mother would point to it to remind my father that she should christen his next boat purchase, “My Trip To Europe.”

The fleet’s names told a lot about my father. His first boat, named “Freelance,” was a 22-foot sloop that he bought shortly after my parents were married in 1936. He paid for it with the freelance graphic work he did for the Madison Avenue ad agency where he was an Art Director.

That’s not to say my father’s first mate didn’t like sailing, although she had good reason not to. When my father chartered a small sloop in Rye, New York to take her to Block Island on their honeymoon, the bride got so seasick, the groom had to leave her off in Westport, Connecticut to take the train back to Manhattan.

The Best of Both

My father bought “Freelance” to help my mother get sea legs. She eventually succumbed to my father’s salty charm offensive, learned the difference between starboard and port, how to trim a jib, even cook gourmet meals in a galley. Some of my parents’ best vacations, were sailing off the Maine coast, in the Aegean, Caribbean, and Bahamas.

Occasionally, my mother threatened mutiny when they were day sailing and becalmed on Long Island and Nantucket Sounds, waiting hours for a breeze. She could take strong winds and rough seas, even in life, but calm waters and rocking back and forth were not why she married my father. When she promised “for better or for worse” she might have included “but not becalmed.”

Ten years into my parent’s marriage, my father discovered Seagull Motors. The Seagull was a 2 to 5 hp outboard motor, invented by a British sailor and made in Poole Dorset, England. The compact motor could be stowed easily aft or under athwart, didn’t leak or smell of oil and wasn’t noisy—it sounded more like popping popcorn than an outboard. It was beloved by small boat sailors world-wide to get their dinghies to their yachts, out of harbors or moving on still waters, in a pinch. Although technically an outboard, the Seagull hung on any transom and did not make that vessel a stinkpot ; nor did it make its captain a stinkpotter. A Seagull motor was more a badge of honor a hull wore for not polluting sea and air with noxious elements, smells, and noise.

About a year after my father bought his first Seagull, he decided to throw Madison Avenue overboard and become a Ship’s Chandler and the U.S. importer for the British motor. This seemingly rash career change in midlife was the right course at the right time for my parents; for my father to be surrounded by marine gear and gadgets all year long was nautical Nirvana. For my mother, accompanying my father yearly to Poole Dorset, London (staying at Brown's hotel), Stockholm, Paris, and way beyond, sometimes with a Seagull in tow, for a client in an exotic port, was Heaven.

One of my fondest summer memories is of my parents puttputting out of Chatham's Mill Pond, in the late afternoon in their last boat, the B & B, (a ten foot wooden skiff) , waving to us on our front porch, my father in his Greek sailor’s cap, my mother in her Hermes scarf, off to dig for clams in Stage Harbor. The B & B (for Bob and Betty) could have stood for Best of Both.