“I’ll be right up. Tell the gang to sway up.”
He drew on his slip-shods and came on deck. He took a look over at the yacht while we were swaying up. When we had everything good and 156 flat and trimmed sheets a bit, the skipper called out to take in the fore-topsail. “She hasn’t got hers set,” he explained.
Now, a fore-topsail does not help much––hauled up, as were the Johnnie Duncan and the yacht, it would be a hindrance to most vessels, and, perhaps, because it did not help her was why the yacht had not hers set. But it showed the skipper’s fairness. Ours had been left set, because we might need it in a hurry, and also because with the skipper below nobody could order it down. Now we clewed it up.
Clancy, standing aft, threw a look at our seine-boat, which of course we had in tow. “She’s quite a drag,” he suggested, “for a vessel that’s racing.”
“Yes,” said the skipper, “but wait a while. We won’t cast it off unless we have to.”
We did not have to. We soon had her in trim. For weeks the skipper and Clancy had been marking the Johnnie’s sheets so that in an emergency they could whip her into her best sailing in no time. With that, and with the shifting of some barrels of salt that we had on deck, we soon had her going. It is surprising what a lot of difference the shifting of a few barrels of salt will make in the trim of a vessel. We had not had a try with anything for two weeks or so and had become careless. The last thing we did was to take some barrels of fresh 157 water that happened to be standing forward of the windlass and shift them aft, and then the Johnnie began to go along for fair.
Coming up to Block Island Light things were pretty even. Then it came a question of who was to go to windward. The yacht hauled her mainsheet in to two blocks. So did we, and, further, ran a line from the cringle in her foresail to the weather rigging. She could not make it––we had her.
“Mind the time,” said the skipper, when at last we had her under our quarter––“mind the time, Tommie, when we used to do so much racing down on the Cape shore? There’s where we had plenty of time for racing and all sorts of foolishness. I was pretty young then, but I mind it well. A string of men on the rigging from the shear poles clear up to the mast-head––yes, and a man astraddle the main gaff once or twice, passing buckets of water to wet down the mains’l.”
“Yes, and barrels of water out toward the end of the main-boom keep the sail stretched. Man, but those were the days we paid attention to racing.”
“Those were the days,” asserted the skipper. “But we can do a little of it now, too.”