... THE BOY ...
Our delight in the discovery that the Mascot, again given up for lost, was, like Daddy Warbucks, still leading a useful life, was exceeded only by our pleasure in the discovery of the whereabouts of “the Boy.”
We tracked him down to a hospital bed where he was recovering from a coronary. He was able to clear up one point, which completely mystified us on our initial reading.
It seems that some of the fowl which provided the succulent meals which are described in the log were not always in season. For this reason their demise was coded into a reference to some domestic animal on which there was no season.
With this mystery cleared up, we are now happy to bring you direct from the pen of Henry M. Plummer, Jr. his recollections and impression of the trip.
For several years the idea of publishing The Boy, Me and the Cat has been in my mind, but until the present publishers undertook the project the idea was more or less nebulous. Now with the project under way I feel that many people who are interested in cruising will not only find in this book a new impetus to their hobby, but will also find many new ideas to increase their pleasure.
Let me begin by saying that I was not a sailor. Most of my youth had been spent in the mountains away from the seashore, to which I had made only short visits, because of asthma which was aggravated by the salt air. Thus, although I had learned to sail, my knowledge of cruising was practically nil.
The art of cruising is quite different from just plain sailing as I was soon to find out. Three months of steady and hard preparation went into the start. My father and I built into the old Mascot all the things that we thought might make the trip more pleasure than work. A small bookcase for fifteen or twenty books, a kitchen cabinet for all dishes and pots and pans, a galley with a coal stove, and a primus for warm weather. Ice, coal and wood were kept in the cockpit in special boxes lashed to each side and used as seats. As we intended to live off the land, or perhaps I should say the sea, we carried fish poles, harpoon and other long items of this nature in specially built “cow horns” located on the forward deck and the end of the short bowsprit. These, by the way, were never used owing to the actual work of getting South. A rather large poop deck, which carried all extra impedimenta, was constructed hanging over the stern.