Engine(less)

December 2024

By Craig Moodie

That’s the operative word: engine. But, without wind, propulsion for my wife Ellen and me means paddling, or sculling with the rudder, or both. Why would we venture anywhere, let alone the open bay, without a motor?

You’d think we wouldn’t, given the calms, contrary winds, unstemmable tides, broken gear, and other small calamities that have plagued us over the years. Even the flimsiest eggbeater could have saved us effort and angst many times over.

I’m no purist. I grew up on boats with engines. Every sailboat my family chartered or owned (except our Dyer Dhow) had an inboard. As a commercial fisherman, I depended on an outboard to get me out where I could rake for quahogs. I banked on the sound of a 6-71 diesel producing a grumbling roar that meant you’d get home from the codfish grounds 60 miles or more offshore. I have the tinnitus to prove it.

But when the catboat in question, our beloved Finn, came into our lives almost 20 years ago, I went Luddite. Or, put another way, I became entranced with elemental sailing. Translation: Sailing with as few encumbrances as possible. Even Sam Llewellyn’s Cornish Shrimper Daisy, in “The Minimum Boat,” had an outboard.

Not so Finn.

I wanted to sail free. I wanted to heed Thoreau’s exhortation to simplify.

With no engine to deal with, I have only my sailing skills (such as they are) and the boat to rely on.

Depending only on the wind and yourself focuses the mind. My pulse still quickens when I sail back to the mooring in anything but a stark calm. I’ve done so hundreds of times, but not all always goes as planned. I can still miss the mooring, foul the sheet, back the sail. Which is why, whenever I execute a flawless return, I give myself a mental slap on the back and heave a sigh of relief. An outboard would reduce the experience to a kind of watery commute.

Sometimes returning the boat to our mooring becomes even more elemental and simple. Our mooring lies 500 feet off the beach. If I’ve dropped crew or gear on the beach and the tide is right – a moon or spring tide at low water – I can indulge my inner lazy sailor, drop the sail, and walk the boat out. She scrapes off the beach and floats into the shallows, bobbing along behind me, nodding like a waterborne pony. Gripping the forestay, I lead her out through clear knee-high water. The silky sand caresses my bare feet, though I keep a weather-eye out for blue claws and green crabs and stones and shells that can inflict knee-buckling pain. The sunlight-squiggled hull makes only the softest slaps, the sound of contentment after a day’s sail.

Now, if sailing to the mooring is a kind of art-slash-sport – a balance of experience, calculation, timing, agility, and luck – you could argue that running, caring for, and fixing an internal-combustion engine is a form of art, too. But I was born without a single mechanical gene.

Oh, I’ve worked on engines – fetched tools and helped change the oil in cramped bilges, mostly – under the scowls of skippers who’ve known they were dealing with a mechanical nincompoop. Maybe that’s why I became so averse to putting an outboard on Finn. Maybe I became a snob (am I a purist, or a crank, after all?) because motors are beyond my ken.

Sailing without auxiliary power connects me down the ages to the first mariners who dared hoist a scrap of hide to capture a breeze, some newly minted sailor of a millennium past fed up, perhaps, with endless paddling in a leaky dugout. In the same way, sailing engineless links me to the 19th-century catboats that fished the same waters on which we sail for pleasure. I feel a small pulse of pride when I think that our little craft, with her workboat heritage, carries in her lines a part of quintessential New England history.

Those comely lines are another reason we’re engineless. Look at her: whaleboat bluffness wedded to gullwing grace. Wouldn’t a chunk of plastic and metal burdening mar the symmetry and grace of her design? Let’s not even talk about having to affix registration numbers to her bow.

I might take a measure of pride in relying on sailing, paddling or sculling with the rudder for locomotion. But I stand in awe of other sailors who have taken this ethos to a grand scale, especially Don Street, who was still sailing up to his death this year at 93.

According to Andy Schell, in a 2017 “Sail” magazine article entitled “Don Street Is Not Dead,” Street “may be the only skipper to achieve nine transatlantics purely under sail.” Street won fame for opening the Caribbean to cruising and chartering. As Schell writes, “What makes him all the more legendary is that he did most of this aboard his iconic, antique, engineless wooden yawl Iolaire.”

I have more modest aims, though I’m sure the inimitable Street could identify: I adore the ritual of preparing the boat to sail off the mooring, the comfort of sailing familiar waters, and the all-absorbing sensations of sailing.

This is the magic of elemental sailing: Every element has its moment. The rattle of rigging as you hoist the sail. The thump of the sail bellying in the breeze. The gurgle of the rudder as you gain way. The cluck and hiss of wavelets on the hull. A cloud puff soaring in silence above the masthead. The spearing chitter of a passing tern. The squawk and shriek and cheer of gulls working a scrum of baitfish.

And no oil or sparkplug to change, or droplets of petroleum to befoul the water in an iridescent blossom.

I realize that the bigger the boat, the bigger the need for a motor. Still, I’ve motored aboard many sailboats, and the best moment was always when we hoisted the sails, cut the engine, and levitated in the elemental sounds of the boat and the sea and the wind as if a helmet of hellish decibels had been removed.

Having an engineless boat does have its drawbacks. An outboard might have saved me the indignity of Sea Tow rescuing me on a sporty October haulout day. After I dropped off the mooring, I discovered that the centerboard was broken. Finn weathercocked and refused to come about. I ended up paddling downwind several miles to shore to avoid drifting into the boisterous open bay. Sea Tow zipped me back to the harbor in a fraction of the time I spent flailing in the cold, gray chop and contrary gusts.

One September, my brother-in-law Tommy and I retrieved Finn from a hurricane hole in Squeteague Harbor, where we’d tucked her to weather in what turned out to be a near-miss of a tropical storm. We faced a tide running so hard that we couldn’t make headway, even with the sail pulling in a 10-knot breeze. Tommy paddled while I sculled. We crept through the serpentine tidal creek and finally clawed around Lawrence Island as the sun set.

You learn how fast darkness falls at that time of the year, especially when the trip you thought would take an hour took three times longer. We got to the mooring and buttoned her up in darkness. I still had my car keys because of some convoluted ride logistics, and we had to swim ashore. I did a one-armed sidestroke, holding the keys over my head in my other hand, until I touched bottom and plunged the fob into the water. The sailing muses smiled on me: A saltwater dip didn’t keep the contraption from working.

But the primary reason I’m engineless might have its roots in our first season’s haulout. I intended to sail Finn from our mooring in the outer Megansett Harbor to the landing in the inner harbor. But that October day snarled with shiver-inducing 20-knot gusts under a tin-can ceiling.

I hung the 2.5-horsepower Mercury outboard on her; this was a motor we had bought years before for Ringy Dinghy, our eight-foot pram. We motored around the breakwater (the mercurial outboard stalling three times), got her on the trailer, and pulled into the parking lot to unstep the mast. But gusts kicking up sand devils from the macadam convinced me to trailer the boat the half-mile up the road to the family cottage, to finish the job in a lee.

All went well until we reached the turn on the hill. In the rearview mirror, I thought I saw an optical illusion: our boat fresh from her first season sliding off the trailer. I saw her bow rise. The ba-boom of her hull hitting the road behind the trailer proved the vision was no illusion. A low-looping telephone wire had snagged the mast.

That I had not lashed her down probably saved her; otherwise, her mast could have snapped. All she suffered was a gouged skeg. Landscapers from the next-door yard helped hoist the boat back on her trailer. The pounding blood of embarrassment in my ears probably deafened me to their snickers.

The outboard, its prop only dinged, went into the dank recesses of the garage, where it sits rusting on its stand to this day. Our little Mercury was blameless, but we’ve never used it, or any other engine, since. Is this a case of guilt by association?

No doubt elemental sailing has its shortcomings. But if I always relied on an engine, I would have been denied chances to prove my abilities – and make me aware of my lack of them. Keep learning, keep living.

On another early fall day, I performed some tricky tacking in the inner Megansett Harbor, facing a northerly wind gusting to 15 knots and a crowded mooring field. I managed to luff at just the right moment and lay her soft as a feather against the dock. I stepped out, line in hand, a picture of nonchalance. Only I knew that my heart ricocheted around my chest. A woman who had been watching tossed me a compliment. “That was a nice bit of sailing.”

Not motoring. Sailing.

Craig Moodie lives with his wife Ellen in Massachusetts. His work includes “A Sailor’s Valentine and Other Stories,” and, under the name John Macfarlane, the middle-grade novel “Stormstruck!”, a Kirkus Best Book.

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