Overdue: Max Ebb and Lee Helm Visit a Yacht Club Library

There’s something about growing up within commuting distance of New York City that I can never grow out of: I’m always early for meetings. And when the meeting is on the other side of the Bay, I allow enough extra time for slow traffic on the bridge.

“Research shows that commuters allow a margin of two standard deviations when there’s variation in travel time getting to work,” Lee Helm once asserted. But she could not cite the actual study, so I suspect that she just made it up; I don’t think it applies to Californians, based on my observations.

Traffic was light one evening on the bridges over the Bay, so there I was, 45 minutes early, at the yacht club that was hosting the YRA delegates’ meeting. I decided to pursue one of my favorite activities when I find myself in an unfamiliar club with time to kill: check out their library.

Everything about the room was optimized for reading old books: the comfy leather chairs, the good lighting, and even the “old yacht club” smell, although it had probably been decades since anyone was allowed to smoke a cigar in that space. I browsed some eye-level shelves, then picked up a big book that was displayed upright on an antique side table, full of photos of local racing from the turn of the last century. Most of the photos were new to me — not the usual fare found in photo collections from that era. I was absorbed in the book and did not hear the door open, and was surprised by a stern voice from behind:

“Excuse me. Sir, this room is for MEMBERS ONLY!”

There was an instant of embarrassment until I identified the voice: It was Lee Helm, grad student in naval architecture, performing a very bad voice impression of a yacht club official enforcing the rules. Evidently Lee was choosing to kill time the same way that I was.

“Oh, that sign’s not really meant for us,” I pointed out. “What brings you to this side of the Bay?”

“Tokenism,” she explained. “I’m like, the ‘student member’ of the YRA Board.”

“Good for you,” I said. “If any organization needs some young blood, it’s this one. I’m just here to make sure some of my club’s special events get on the calendar.”

“Finding anything interesting to read?” she asked.

“I just look at the pictures,” I joked, gesturing at the book of old photos. “Some really good stuff from 100 years ago, never published anywhere else. But these shelves are not nearly as organized as I’d expect: There’s a little bit of sorting according to topic, but I suppose with no labels on the shelves, books rarely get put back where they belong.”

“A little random serendipity is cool,” she said as she walked over to a shelf that looked especially dark and moldy, suggesting older volumes.

I followed her there, and pulled out the oldest and moldiest-looking book, a copy of Seamanship, by Luce, published in 1866.

“A great work, in its day,” Lee remarked. “Admiral Luce was the founder of the Naval War College. It’s got one of my favorite diagrams about handling sailing ships.”

Lee quickly found a page showing how to con a full-rigged frigate down a river or channel, with no wind. Only the tide, the anchor and the rudder to keep the ship clear of the shoals.

“It probably belongs over here,” she said as she walked over to the bookcase with the glass doors.

Surprisingly, the glass doors were not locked, so we put the book back with some other relics from the 19th century.

“Look at this!” I exclaimed as I picked up another very old volume. “It’s a copy of The Lawson History of the America’s Cup. From 1902! They shouldn’t leave this one unlocked, it’s a first edition and probably worth a fortune!”

I had always wanted a copy of this rare book; it could be the centerpiece of my America’s Cup collection. I carefully thumbed through the club’s copy.

“Max, you can buy one on eBay for just 150 dineros,” Lee said as she scrolled through the offers on her tablet.

“Really? Is that all?”

I put the book back, making a note to myself to add it to my wish list well in advance of the holidays. Then I followed Lee over to the shelves dealing with yacht design and other technical subjects, and pulled out a book by C.A. Marchaj, Sailing Theory and Practice. I opened it up to show Lee one of my favorite illustrations, a chart showing the relative gain or loss depending on the position of one boat sailing close-hauled in very close proximity to an identical boat. It clearly shows the calculated loss in the bad-air positions, and the gain in the safe leeward position.

“Shows what you can do with a little upwash,” Lee allowed. “Marchaj did great work back in 1964 compiling nearly everything known about sailing technology back then. A lot’s been learned in 60 years.”

“And think what we could add to Seamanship,” I surmised, “after 160 years.”

I looked around for a copy of Knight’s or Bowditch, but there was no obvious section on seamanship or navigation. The organization of the books really left much to be desired.

“The problem is, like, no labels on the shelves,” Lee concluded. “Just some numbers, as if some club member once tried to implement the Dewey Decimal System. No way; the categories just don’t fit. I went through this with the university sailing club’s library. The club gets space for a few bookshelves in the student union building, and I get to sort the incoming bags of sailing-related books.”

“I would think college students would be building their libraries, not giving them away,” I said.

“They downsize when they graduate and move away,” Lee explained. “And we have old members too. They die on a regular basis, despite, like, the longevity-enhancing value of sailing, and of course their sailing library ends up with the sailing club. Mostly the same books we already have, so we have a big shelf of duplicates for sale down at the club shack. We can’t give them away for free, but they move out faster priced at 25 cents each.”

“Good marketing strategy,” I said mindlessly as my scan moved over to a shelf devoted to nautical dictionaries and books on nautical etiquette.

Lee’s attention moved with my gaze, following the imaginary dotted lines from my eyes to a book called Nautical Etiquette and Customs.

“It’s by Lindsay Lord!” she exclaimed with delight. “A naval architect from M.I.T. He’s like, best known for his book Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls.” A definitive work on the subject, in its day. Didn’t know he wrote outside his field, but it’s about time someone took a more rational approach to flags and blazer patches.

Leafing through the pages of this small book, I saw that Lee was right. Lindsay Lord gets under the hood with this subject, explaining the reasons for what always seemed to me like a lot of arbitrary nonsense.

“But like, there are still a lot of modern situations not covered, even by Lindsay Lord,” Lee added. “What do you do when you drop a winch handle overboard while crewing on someone else’s boat?”

“Well, the right thing,” I suggested, “is to offer to replace it.”

“For sure. But the right thing for the skipper is to refuse that offer, explaining that it’s part of the normal and expected cost of racing and the crew are not responsible for lost winch handles, short of deliberately tossing them overboard.”

“Then what happens next?” I asked.

“The crew should buy the new handle anyway, and quietly add it to the boat’s collection.”

“But then the skipper never knows it was replaced,” I said. “Somehow that seems wrong.”

“Ah, there’s a fine point to it,” Lee explained. “The replacement handle should be a different model, so the skipper can tell.”

“Good strategy,” I added. “And there’s flexibility there: Impoverished students could select something cheaper than what the boat has in the gear box, while someone who can afford it can add a fancy new carbon model to the boat’s collection.”

“Someone should write all this up some day,” Lee proposed. “There’s more. Like, what’s the polite way to tell another boat that their fenders are still hanging over the rail?”

Not wishing to grapple with that question, I told Lee that my own yacht club has a small library too. “And it’s also an organizational mess,” I admitted. “Can you send me the topic list you use for sorting?”

“For sure, Max. It’s not a trivial exercise. For example, there are a number of authors who combine a voyage narrative with a cruising tutorial, and some design commentary and seamanship advice. These are best classified by author. Anthologies need their own section, and coffee table books comprise another genre that’s hard to classify any other way.”

“Is there a category for maritime disasters?” I asked.

“Natch,” she confirmed. “Also a whole shelf for historic voyages. We have Kon Tiki, Hokule’a, Magellan, Anson and Cook.”

Just then the door to the room flew open again, and a club member, one I recognized from my racing fleet, stumbled in holding a carton of books that almost blocked her forward vision.

“Incoming!” Lee warned.

“Another old club member is downsizing,” she explained, almost out of breath, while setting the heavy carton down on a table with a thump. “If you see anything you want, feel free.”

We both found a few unappreciated gems in that box. But I could not help thinking about where my own book collection will go when they finally ship me off to assisted living. Lee will need space for a few more bookcases in the student union building.

Read Max Ebb and a boatload of other sailing stories in Latitude 38‘s August issue.