For the past five years my wife and I have camped in February in the Florida Keys in an effort to a) have a good time; b) warm our bones from the Maine winters; c) find good sailing waters to launch a small boat into. As to the last point, we had in mind "Heron", the Caledonia Yawl I have just built and which has been "almost ready to launch" for about three years now! "Heron" finally reached sailing status this winter, and so I was determined to try trailering her all the way from Yarmouth, Maine to Key Largo to launch her and see how she would sail. The questions I had in mind were: was trailering a small boat such a great distance (1800 miles each way) really feasible? Was the pleasure-to-pain ratio high enough that it would be worthwhile taking "Heron" to Florida on an annual basis? Was the Caledonia Yawl really the boat to do this with?
"Heron", designed by Iain Oughtred, is of Norwegian/Scottish ancestry. It is double-ended, open, about 20' long, and has a centerboard. With the board up it draws about 12"; with the board down about 3'6". It fits vaguely into the category of a "cruiser/camper" or "beach/cruiser", although it is capable of many other things. It is a yawl (it has a mizzen in the very stern) and the main sail is lug-rigged. What-rigged? LUG-rigged, which means the mainsail is roughly rectangular (or trapezoidal) in shape and is laced only to the yard up on top and to the boom at the bottom. It is not laced or attached to the mast at all, and what that means is that the sail can be raised or lowered like a venetian blind - very quickly up, and even more quickly, down. The rig is therefore very transportable because when the sail, yard, and boom are lowered they can all be quickly unhooked from the rest of the rigging. The mast can then be lowered by one person, and the same with the mizzenmast. Sails and spars can be left right there in the boat, the boat covered, and then driven away on a trailer. From "ready-to-sail" to "ready-to-trailer" can take as little as ten minutes.
After two nights en route to Florida, I arrived in Key Largo after an otherwise uneventful trip down from Maine. The boat and trailer added only slightly to the gas consumption, and were never a problem to pull, even in heavy traffic. I found, in fact, that the boat kept trucks and cars from riding on my bumper. Who wants the pointy rear end of a boat smashing through their windshield, anyway? So the boat became my steady companion in my rear view mirror and the trip went off without a hitch (no pun intended). I concluded that trailering a boat under 500 lbs. did not have to be an ordeal at all, provided the trailer was right for the boat and the car was right for the trailer!
"Heron" had never been in the water before this trip, nor had I even rigged the boat before. All six spars (boom, yard, mast, mizzenmast, mizzen boom, and bumpkin) were therefore somewhat of a mystery when I unpacked them at Key Largo Kampground and spread them out on the ground. A crowd of "experts" quickly gathered offering advice about everything: add a block here; tie a knot there, they said. The hole through the hull in the stern for the bumpkin to pass through prompted the most comments: it was for sculling; no, it was a "head" for direct overboard discharge; no, it allowed cigar smoke to escape so it wouldn't bother the ladies. Such chitchat was occasionally beneficial: one elderly gent in the crowd smiled knowingly as I laced the mizzen sail to the mast incorrectly, and then showed me the proper way to do it. On balance, we all had fun rigging the boat. After a few more days of tweaking and adjusting, I finally pushed "Heron" into the lagoon and someone brought forth a bottle of champagne.
Ballast is a murky detail in the designer's plans, and I had put none in the boat before the launching. I had some concerns that the first zephyr of air might roll the boat over completely, but I had developed a lot of doomsday thoughts zooming down Rt. 95 at eighty miles per hour and being passed by 16-wheelers driving even faster. "Heron" stood up well to the breeze. As a matter of fact, on the second day of sailing I found myself in 20-mph winds without any means of reefing. "Heron" surfed on with nary a complaint, although a friend watching this from shore later asked if the mast was meant to be that "bendy".
I had decided to use the "Norwegian-style" tiller on "Heron" rather than the more conventional centerline tiller we see on most boats. The Norwegian style attaches a long tiller to a two-foot "arm" which comes off the rudder at right angles, so that turning the rudder is accomplished by pushing the tiller forward (toward the bow) or back. No more torso-cranking contortions for me, this arrangement proved to be one of the most satisfactory discoveries I made about "Heron"! Standing, sitting, it doesn't matter - I could curl myself into a corner of the seat facing forward and steer by a twitch of the wrist. I wonder why this isn't a more common arrangement!
At the end of February my wife had to return to Portland, the weather got bad, and I left the Keys to visit my brother and his wife in Sarasota. Sailing in Sarasota Bay was a little more complicated as there was only one municipal ramp in the heart of downtown and no one had figured out how to manage the crowds of cars, boats, and trailers that converged there in the morning for launching, and again late in the afternoon to pull the boats out. Sarasota Bay is about two miles wide and many miles long, so the sailing was open and exciting. It was especially fun to cruise ten yards away from the manicured lawns of some palatial houses, where people slumbered in chaise longues and looked startled to see a boat come by so close.
One part of Sarasota bay was quite wild, and some of the mangrove islands supported a large population of spoonbills, herons, and egrets. We became "entrapped" by surrounding shoals of white sand, so we searched for some portion of the bar where the depth looked more than a foot, raised the centerboard, and scooted into deep water. It sounds so simple, but keelboat sailors too easily forget what a pleasure it is to be free of concern about running into the bottom!
Except for the mess at the launch site, the Sarasota experience confirmed that trailering a boat was no problem, even in city traffic, and that an afternoon sail was an uncomplicated thing to do for those who had a boat on a trailer. After a few days I said goodbye to my brother and his wife and headed for St. Augustine where Steve, a friend I had sailed with last year, came up from Daytona to sail with me for the day. He sails a Seapearl, a Francis Herreshoff design under another name, I believe. The Seapearl is also an open, double-ended boat of about 21' length, but a few inches narrower than the Caledonia Yawl. It would be fun to compare the boats, wouldn't it, we thought.
I met Steve at the boat ramp near St. Augustine Light, a beautiful area overlooking Conch Island to the east. The anchorage there - not the principal one for the city of St. Augustine - is small, quiet, and relatively backwater, yet it attracts some sailboats that aren't fooling around. I met three circumnavigators, a Russian, a Scotsman, and an American and their families. Everyone looked appropriately weather-beaten, and they were all interested in "Heron", picking her out in the parking lot as being a noteworthy and distinctive-looking boat.
St. Augustine harbor is best sailed when the wind blows from the east and it is a broad reach sailing up and down the Tolomato and Matanzas Rivers. This was just such a day; sunny, with the temperature in the mid-'70's and the wind a moderate 10-15 miles per hour. We sailed under the Bridge of Lions and well past the city anchorage, then north past the old Castillo and well up into the Tolomato River. Steve remarked that this was about as good as it gets sailing in Florida! Then we spent some time specifically analyzing the sailing characteristics of the Caledonia Yawl.
The lug rig is not well understood in this country despite the fact that in colonial times most small craft in Boston Harbor were rigged in this manner. I had expected the Caledonia Yawl's lug rig would not sail close to the wind, perhaps more like a gaff-rigged cat boat, where you can seldom pull the boom in closer than the coaming of the cockpit. Yet, from my earliest sail in "Heron" I had noticed that I could pull the boom in almost to the centerline before luffing the mainsail. Steve and I checked this with compass and GPS and found that "Heron" was tacking consistently through 90-95 degrees, which is about as good or better than most sloops can do! "Heron", we also found, was fast, touching 5 1/2 knots on a beam reach in a moderate breeze. Steve thought the Seapearl might be a bit faster, but that remains to be seen. Steve, a big man, also noted that "Heron" had more initial and secondary stability than his 'pearl, and wondered whether ballast for "Heron" would even be necessary. I departed St. Augustine feeling proud of my boat!
In all three locations where I sailed during this Florida trip "Heron" was almost the only small sailboat to be seen out on the water. I don't understand this! A small boat is ideal for such semi-protected waters!. In February and early March the bay side of the Florida Keys is probably where the sailing is best. You can sail and camp among islands (mostly within the borders of Everglades National Park) and cruise from Biscayne Bay within sight of Miami, to the Dry Tortugas, almost 150 miles down the Keys. Weather permitting, both coasts of Florida offer wonderful small-boat sailing. With a nimble, small boat you can land on a beach, dart among clusters of mangrove, and find solace in wilderness among uninhabited islands. A centerboard boat makes it possible to sail over shallows yet face more open waters with safety and confidence. At the end of the day load it back on the trailer and head back to camp…or back to Maine: it's only 1800 miles up the pike!
Bill Boyd bnboyd@maine.rr.com
Uploaded 12th June, 2002.