The Oceanic EGRET
Dear Editors,
My 4′-long shelf of WoodenBoat magazines will attest to my being an avid reader. I’ve devoured every word, and my skin-on-frame canoe was recognized in Launchings and Relaunchings in WB No. 281. I’m a big fan of sharpie designs, so the Norwalk Islands Sharpie article in WB No. 297 got my attention. I liked the design concept, ease of construction, and general simplicity but was completely unaware of their speed and sea-keeping ability. I bought plans for the NIS 18 but never built it. Instead, I bought a nice new 18′ fiberglass (gasp) sloop that my wife and I happily sailed for 20 years. It sounds as if we missed the boat. Randall Peffer’s article about NIS boats was a wonderful read.
As I began reading Bill Schwicker’s article about his EGRET (WB No. 297), another favorite design of mine, I thought, “Oh no, another travel piece.” I’m glad I read every word, because it was a great historical piece about a real adventure. It was made even more interesting because I’d been to a few of the places he visited and knew about others. And I had the same feelings Bill did. Thanks again for producing such a great magazine, and for keeping it real.
Mike Effinger
Grafton, Wisconsin
Dear Editors,
I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed Bill Schwicker’s story, “The Oceanic EGRET.” I sailed a small, engineless, partly rebuilt old wooden boat around the Bahamas and across the Gulf Stream several times, in 1979–81. I later crossed the Atlantic in the boat, several times, sometimes alone. Bill’s story took me viscerally back to those days and nights in which I discovered what he discovered in his story: the experience of being in a very small simple boat at sea, being afraid, exhilarated—both in the space of minutes—and finding in yourself what is required for the moment. You don’t have to go far, ’round the Horn, to the South Pacific, to find this. The Bahamas—then anyway—were among the wildest, remotest, most beautiful places I’ve ever sailed, and navigating through them in a small, engineless boat remains one of the great experiences of my life. This is what the best sea stories are all about. This is a great one. Thank you.
Peter Nichols
Camden, Maine
Ancestral Whalers
To the Editor:
Tom Jackson’s review of A Whaler at Twilight, by Alexander R. Brash (WB No. 297), really resonated with me. Like Brash, I had a direct ancestor who served as a greenhand on a whaler. As a boy in the late 1960s, my great-grandmother fascinated me with stories of her grandfather, who, as a 21-year-old, traveled from his family’s farm near Lake Ontario in New York State to New London, Connecticut. There, he signed on for a whaling voyage that lasted from 1845 to 1848, and sailed the waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. My great-grandmother had her grandfather’s sea chest, still sporting much of its pea-green paint and intact, fancy rope handles. She also had the journal he kept, with its fading brown ink and occasional idiosyncratic spellings. (These were eventually donated to the collection at Mystic Seaport Museum). Seeing these, I was hooked on almost anything having to do with ships, the sea, and whaling.
In fifth grade, I tried reading Moby Dick, tried again in eighth grade, and finally managed it in high school. In the years following, I collected a number of books on whaling, many of them out of print. My own ancestor’s journal was not quite so detailed or literate as Brash’s apparently was, but it occasionally had lengthy entries that added color, and sometimes humor, to the more terse entries. With more research, I was able to add a lot of flesh to the bones of the journal. I traced its voyage and annotated the text for others in the family with maps and graphics, and details about the places, types of whales, and other ships that are mentioned.
Like Jackson, I came of age in the 1970s and was inspired as a teenager to a lifelong devotion to environmental awareness and activism. I followed and supported the exploits and work of Greenpeace. I still remember the first “Earth Day.” Naturally, this caused some cognitive dissonance with the fascination I’d developed earlier with the cruel business of 19th-century whaling. As I learned more, and grew older, I eventually found a perspective that allowed me to appreciate the culture, social and economic context, and the adventurous nature of 19th-century whaling, while abhorring the senseless continued hunting of these highly intelligent cousins in contemporary times.
I look forward to adding A Whaler at Twilight to my collection.
Patrick Dengate
Saint Paul, Minnesota