JUNE 2, 2025 – One aspect of aging I’ve observed is the increase in vicarious living. Back at the other end of my personal time scale, whatever was vicarious in reality remained theoretically possible within my imagination. Olympic gold, for example; becoming president of the United States, for another; or . . . sailing the ocean blue and circumnavigating the globe.
I’d always been enamored of boats. As a kid living along the Mississippi River, I was charmed by all the “speedboats” that plied the summer waters, often with a water skier in tow, but always on the Champlin side of the river where the channel was.
Up at the lake, wooden rowboats were mostly the only kind we saw—our 12-foot Alumcraft being a rare exception. You could tell which resort the boats came from by their age and color. Each had a small outboard hanging off the transom, and in those days, Wisconsin didn’t allow motor trolling, so I’d watch the fishermen troll with their oars. From our vantage point at the top of the steep esker where our cabin was perched, the rowing seemed terribly lame, as if the guy hunched at the oars was merely dipping them in and out of the water, not pulling hard as Dad did when he took us for a hard row along our lakeshore—after dinner, never before.
Once in a great while we’d see on Grindstone Lake the oversized wooden runabout with an inboard engine. The vessel carried high-end guests from the high-end Williams Resort tucked away in Williams Bay at the west end of the lake. It wasn’t a fancy boat, but compared to the tired old rowboats, it was a veritable Cadillac—before I’d even heard of a Rolls Royce.
When we went out East to visit our maternal grandparents, we’d travel to their weekend retreat on intimate Hamburg Cove just above Old Saybrook, Connecticut and Long Island Sound. Moored at the small marina on the cove and puttering slowly in and out of the well-protected waters were a modest fleet of beautiful yachts. Those fine watercraft made the boats at home and up at the lake seem like so much flotsam. Even the “Cadillac” of Williams Resort was by comparison, nothing more than a floating Popsicle stick.
Grandpa Holman loved fine boats. In fact, in his prime, Grandpa owned a beautiful inboard Chris Craft, which he skippered from Passaic, New Jersey next to Rutherford, down the Passaic River and all the way into Long Island Sound and up the Connecticut River to Hamburg Cove. By the time I was old enough to be aware of things, the only record of the boat was an ancient black and white photo. I remember poring over the image, amazed that Grandpa, who seemed to be 100% engrossed in business, would’ve engage in something as whimsical and adventurous as piloting his own boat such a long distance—and on “ocean water,” no less.
What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that Grandpa’s affinity for boats was shared by Mother. In her youth she’d spent many happy hours with her cousin, Robert Holman, motoring, kayaking and sailing up and down the Connecticut River. Bob himself was an accomplished mariner and under his guidance, Mother learned the ropes of operating a variety of small vessels. I think Bob’s untimely death aboard a B-17 over the English Channel in 1943 hit Mother particularly hard. Over the rest of her life, the occasional return visits to the cove were reminders of what she’d lost.
Dad was an inveterate land lubber, though he did take Mother on a trip with another couple to the Boundary Waters when I was two. Up at the lake, I had to pester him all summer long to take me out in the boat “with the motor”—a four-horse Blue Ribbon Champion manufactured in Minneapolis that Grandpa Nilsson had purchased in 1941. As I mentioned, the rest of the time he was good only for a brisk row along our shoreline after dinner. His focus was on the trees back on land. Mine was on the kidney-shaped swirls in the water created by Dad’s even and powerful oar strokes.
Every once in a while, however, Dad showed another side; a surprisingly whimsical side filled with possibilities, No, I’m not only thinking of our week-long canoe trip to the Boundary Waters when I was 10 or our family road trip through the Old South during Christmas vacation the year I was in kindergarten, when Dad bought a few hundred red and blue firecrackers at some Confederate souvenir shop in Georgia. At the time pyro-technical devices were contraband back in the Union state of Minnesota, but as I would learn at various times over subsequent years around the Fourth of July, Dad’s curriculum vitae included a fair amount of “hands on”—or more precisely (thankfully), “hands-off-barely-in-time”—experience with firecrackers.
In any event , , , Where was I? Oh yeah, up at the lake. The two of us were there alone for a week after my freshman year of high school. Dad was deep into one of his cabin projects, and outside of practicing my violin, I was pretty much bored to tears until the third day of our stay when a big breeze blew straight at us out of the south. Over the two-mile fetch across the lake, the wind stirred up huge white caps, and for fun I rowed the Alumacraft out as far as I could, then turned around and let the boat surf its way back to shore. After a few rounds of this I developed the idea of scaring up a couple of windbreakers from the cabin and pulling them over the oar shafts—after rowing way back out into the waves. The makeshift sail worked—kinda, sorta—but more important, it gave me an even better idea: jerryrigging a bigger, better sail.
When I described my Kon Tiki-like design to Dad over lunch, he took it to the next level. He ditched his project and unleashed his inner child . . . and his inner design engineer.
First, he led me to the basement and pulled the 10-foot-long wooden handle to an old pole saw from its 20-year-long resting place between the joists. “This will be our mast,” he announced.
Next he combed through old linens in one of the bedroom closets—bedsheets that my late grandmother had saved from who knows when, possibly the 1940s. What bowled me over was Dad’s next step: pulling out my grandmother’s antique sewing machine and setting up shop on the dining room table. I’d never before seen Dad touch a sewing machine, let alone operate one. As I watched in amazement, he threaded the needle with extra-strength line, and with the skill of a vintage sailmaker, he fed a couple of sheets into the machine. Pressing his foot down on the pedal, Dad made the needle go up and down so fast it reminded me of a pileated woodpecker attacking a tree trunk. After sewing the two bedsheets together, he folded them into a large triangle and stitched the edges together. In no time flat we had our mainsail and a mast. But how to connect the two?
Dad requisitioned a bunch of wire clothes hangers from the guestroom, closet. With pliers and a wire cutter, he made 15 or 20 rings out of the hangers and fitted the rings over the pole saw handle. I can’t remember how he then attached the sail to the rings (without tearing the sheets), but somehow he managed.
Inside the cabin living room with its high ceiling Dad hoisted the sail and lashed the head to the top of the mast. “Now we have our mast and sail,” said Dad with the glee of a kid. “But next we have to figure out how to set the mast into the rowboat. We also need o come up with a rudder.”
To accomplish these tasks, Dad turned to his tool inventory and supply of hardware and lumber. With a power drill, a brace and bit, Skilsaw, enormous carriage bolts and a creative combination of dimensional lumber, Dad constructed a sturdy brace that would rest on the gunwales and be held in place by carriage bolts slightly smaller in diameter than the oarlocks. The mast would fit through the hole in the middle of the brace and rest on the bottom of the rowboat. Finally, Dad drilled a large hole in the side of a 2 x 6. With strong C-clamps, he would attach the 2 x 6 to the transom. We could then convert one of the aluminum oars into a rudder by sticking the oar pin into the hole on the side of the 2 x 6 facing upward.
We packed up sail, mast and brace, rudder-holder and C-clamps and headed down to the dock for a maiden voyage of the rowboat transmuted into a sailboat. What we lacked was a centerboard or sideboards. This deficiency meant we’d be limited to running with the wind, but neither of us at this stage knew enough about sailing to understand this shortcoming.
We didn’t care. The wind was still out of the south, and our anticipated passage would involve rowing straight into the wind and as far out on the lake as possible, then turning around, hoisting the sail and running with the wind back to the dock. Our plan worked perfectly—so much according to plan, we repeated the course until we were exhausted from all the rowing into wind and waves for another rocket-ride back to shore. I don’t know what was my bigger delight—surf-sailing our rowboat faster than it had ever traveled powered by the Blue Ribbon Champion . . . or watching Dad have the time of his life at something other than listening to great music or completing a cabin project. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
