The Yacht Club

Situated on Unqua Point in the Nassau Shores neighborhood of Massapequa, Long Island, the yacht club provided berthing for a variety of small recreational sailboats and motorboats that spent their summers plying the protected and shallow waters of the Great South Bay.  Only one of these vessels could properly be called a yacht, though.  This was a broad-beamed, gaff-rigged, bowsprited New Englander, conspicuous for her size and design, and somewhat out of her element on the South Shore of Long Island.  We saw her frequently at the dock, but seldom underway.  At the time, I hardly gave it a thought, but my parents wondered about this boat as we sailed our diminutive Justine up and down the channel between Unqua Point and Karras Creek.

This channel was the thoroughfare that skirted the mud flats east of Massapequa and south of Amityville and led to comparatively deeper and more open water.  From Karras Creek, where my parents kept the Justine, it was a fairly short and easy sail to the open bay, if the wind was right.  When the wind didn’t work, we paddled.  Eventually, when my father got tired of paddling, he invested in a small outboard motor.  I was a small child then.  My father did not appreciate my powers of observation when one day I remarked that while the new motor broke down routinely, the old paddles always worked just fine.

We sailed on the Great South Bay from Karras Creek in the mid-1960s.  In the 1970s, my parents traded in their sailboat for a slightly larger Justine, and they berthed the new boat first in Lindenhurst and later in Babylon.  Aboard these vessels in my formative years, we sailed the bay from Massapequa to Heckscher State Park.  In my teen years, I decided that the bay was too small for me and yearned to sail on the open Atlantic.  Eventually I did this, but aboard vessels somewhat larger and more durable than the twenty-feet-long Justine.  In all my transoceanic travels, though, the memories of my childhood voyages remained with me, and I have returned to the Great South Bay many times.

On one such occasion, two of my sons accompanied me to Massapequa, and we visited both Karras Creek and Unqua Point.  This outing took place on Saturday, June 2, 2005.  Not surprisingly, forty years after my initial voyages aboard the Justine, many things had changed.  Karras Creek, Unqua Point, and the Great South Bay were of course all still there, but the neighborhood had been revamped.  Karras Creek abutted the Riviera, a waterfront party house used for weddings and other special occasions.  Back in the day, this was a large but humble and down-to-earth affair.  It has since been gentrified into a five-star, world-class venue complete with brick driveways, Belgian block curbing, and lavish landscaping.  Down the street at Unqua Point, the yacht club was completely gone.  In its place stood the new Nassau Shores Bayfront Park, a publicly owned facility with playground equipment, expansive lawns, and benches facing the water.  In its simplicity of design and with its expansive views of the bay, this new park was quite impressive.

My sons were not very impressed, though, either with the new facilities or the family’s connection with the old facilities.  I looked at it all philosophically.  In four decades, places and people do change. Just as the old waterfront neighborhood in Massapequa had undergone a metamorphosis, so had I.  Indulging my sons’ patience for a while, then, I gazed at the Great South Bay from the new park and found plenty of food for thought.

This was the place where my lifelong love of the sea had started.  I was six years old when my parents bought the Justine.  The bay was different then.  The water was cleaner and there was less traffic on it.  The mud and sand bottom teemed with clams ripe for the picking.  People were friendlier.  When boats sailed past each other, their crews waved and called out greetings.  If someone’s boat got in trouble, folks on other boats would come by and help.  It was all very neighborly, a microcosm of the universal brotherhood of the sea.

Since that time so long ago, many tides have come and gone, and the salt water that filled the bay then has since travelled around the world many times.  The same seawater that carried the tiny Justine on her intracoastal cruises also carried the great cargo ships of my subsequent career on their more ambitious voyages.  It was a big leap from the Justine to the Rigel and the Waccamaw and the Comet, but everything big originates as something small, just as the oak tree starts life as an acorn.  Holding the Justine on a steady course as the wind filled her sails later became bringing the Waccamaw alongside an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean for underway replenishment and maneuvering the Comet through the fishing fleets in the Sea of Japan.  Studying the chart of the Great South Bay and navigating by landmarks aboard the Justine became navigating by the sun, moon, and stars first on the New Jersey Sun and then aboard a host of subsequent ships.  And recreational sailing under the tutelage of kindly parents became important employment, often with roughneck crewmen and demanding if basically good-natured Captains.  The happy innocence of childhood was thus replaced by the serious responsibilities of an often difficult profession.

Indulging my sons’ patience just a little longer, I thought of what I had gained from going to sea.  The sea gave me tangible experiences and also taught me abstract qualities that in turn produced tangible results.  The sea taught me motivation, ambition, perseverance, and discipline.  It taught me to set priorities and distinguish between genuine needs and mere wants.   It taught me to do what must be done, to consider the next step, and to anticipate the likely consequences of decisions and actions.  It taught me to gauge other people and determine what qualities they possessed.  All this and more that I learned from the sea has accompanied me through life since.  The sea was one of the three things that shaped my character and made me the person that I am.  The other two influences were church and family, and while the three worked in harmony, I came of age at sea.

Like so many things in life, the yacht club had its moment in time and then passed into oblivion.  But the small inland sea beside which it stood remains, as does the larger sea that encircles the Earth.  The sea will continue long after I am gone, and it will teach future generations of young merchant seamen as it did me.  In some ways the sea was the best teacher I ever had.  And to think that it all started here, on the sheltered and shallow water of the Great South Bay!  This was indeed the cradle of my craft, and for that I will always be profoundly thankful.

Now let’s look at some photographs of the old waterfront neighborhood:

This is Karras Creek in Massapequa, Long Island, in the summer of 1967, in one of my very early attempts at photography.  The sailboat in the left foreground is the Justine.

A much better view of Karras Creek and the Justine in the summer of 1967 taken by my father.

Yours truly at the helm of the Justine, underway on the Great South Bay in 1967.

Returning after many years and many voyages, we see Karras Creek on Saturday, June 2, 2005.

The entrance to the new park on the site of the old yacht club on the same day in 2005.  Steven and Michael pose by the sign.

Unqua Point and the Great South Bay on the same day with the same sons.  Usually a very pacific body of water, the bay was an excellent place to begin a career at sea.  Decades later, this small stretch of salt water holds a flood tide of memories.

Calculating Mecca

The freighter Rigel had left Norfolk on Tuesday. May 22, 1979, bound for ports in the Mediterranean.  Toward the end of the second full day at sea, one of the unlicensed crewmen called the bridge with an urgent request.  Speaking to James James, the second mate, he explained that he was a Muslim and needed to face in the direction of Mecca when he said his prayers.  So could the mate please provide him with the compass bearing of Mecca?  James James responded that he would be happy to do it, but he needed some time to work out the calculations, and so he asked the fellow to call back in fifteen or twenty minutes.

Seeing a teaching opportunity in this request, James James explained to Schnickelfritz, the cadet on his watch, what needed to be done.  They of course knew the latitude and longitude of the Rigel’s location, so they looked up the coordinates of Mecca, plugged this data into the great circle sailing formulas, and worked out both the direction of and the distance to Mecca.  James James did it the old fashioned way by using the trig tables in Bowditch and crunching the numbers with pencil and paper.  Schnickelfritz did it the new fashioned way with his calculator.  Both methods produced the same compass bearing and distance.  It proved to be a wonderful practice exercise in spherical trigonometry.  When the devout crewman who requested this information called the bridge again, he thanked James James profusely and expressed great appreciation for his efforts.

At the 8:00pm change of the watch, James James related this experience to me, one of the third mates.  All the mates and the cadet reasoned that as the Rigel crossed the Atlantic, the bearing of and distance to Mecca would necessarily change, and we foresaw the need to provide our Muslim shipmate with updated information.  Furthermore, as we would all eventually take the exams to upgrade our licenses, we saw this as an opportunity to increase our proficiency in the great circle sailings.  This was important material.  Praying toward Mecca notwithstanding, the great circle formulas figured into every transatlantic and transpacific voyage.  So it became the daily drill to practice for both future voyages and future license exams by calculating Mecca.

As it turned out, the request for the compass bearing of Mecca was a joke.  There was no Muslim crewman aboard the Rigel after all.  Some of the fellows below decks thought up this scheme to have some fun at James James’ expense.  They had their laugh, which was harmless, and they unwittingly provided a few young and ambitious officers with a useful study tool.  I certainly appreciated it, for by the time the Rigel reached Gibralter, I had become much more comfortable with the great circle sailings.  I subsequently used this newly developed expertise many times aboard several ships, and I had no difficulty with this material on the license exams for second mate and chief mate.  Many years later, I recall these formulas with fondness.  No doubt these calculations are all done by computers now.  I suppose that’s fast and accurate, but having gone to sea in the old school, I think I would find computerized navigation to be professionally and intellectually unsatisfying.  Sometimes the old ways really are the best ways.

When the Rigel was making this voyage back in 1979, few of us in the West gave much thought to the holy city of Mecca or to the Islamic faith and its adherents.  Furthermore, none of us could have foreseen the bad press that Islam would receive in recent years, or the vituperation that would be cast upon Muslims generally.  It’s very sad when an entire population is blamed for the crimes of a tiny minority.  Popular misconceptions notwithstanding, Islam has a number of uplifting characteristics.

As a belief system, Islam is a large and complex subject with a long and sometimes stellar and sometimes checkered history.  For Muslims who take their religion seriously, Islam is a way of life, a rigorous faith with high moral standards that seeks to uplift its members and bring them closer to God.  In these respects, Islam is not unlike Christianity and Judaism.

A well-composed and ideologically neutral capsule summary of Islam[1] includes a discussion of the faith’s moral precepts.  Some of these are fairly well-known, such as the prohibitions on eating pork and drinking alcohol, the period of fasting during Ramadan, and the five-times-daily call to prayer.  Above and beyond these outward practices, however, Islam requires its members more broadly to lead lives filled with charity, humility, modesty, and reverence; to acquire and value an education; to contribute to the relief of the sick and the poor; to ensure the rights of women and children; to respect the religious beliefs of Christians and Jews; and in general to extend love, kindness, and forgiveness to all people.

My personal experience with Islam has been minimal.  Three of my children, however, have enjoyed some very positive contact with it.  A few examples stand out.

As a teenager, my daughter attended the Academy of Notre Dame, an all-girls Catholic high school in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts.  One of her classmates, Salwa, came from a devout Muslim family.  Salwa was an excellent student who took her schoolwork seriously, got along well with everyone, and never caused any trouble.  She graduated as the valedictorian of her class and received a full scholarship to Boston University.  The latest report indicated that she is now married and studying toward a doctorate at Harvard.

My youngest son visited Israel during Holy Week and Passover in March of 2014.  In Jerusalem on Good Friday, he mingled with Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all of them visiting the holy sites and getting along very peacefully with one another.  Later, when my son was leaving Israel and entering Jordan, there was a mix-up concerning his visa at the border.  Without being asked, a Muslim fellow-traveller intervened and spoke to the border guard on my son’s behalf.  In a few minutes, the visa problem was resolved, and there were no further difficulties.

My oldest son and his wife visited the United Arab Emirates in November of 2014.  They found the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi spotlessly clean and their streets crime-free.  They saw that every train on the subway had a special car reserved for women and children, not as discrimination against women, but as a courtesy that provided greater comfort and privacy for them.  My son and daughter-in-law also visited the famous Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque.  Comparing it favorably to an LDS temple, they found a strong spiritual presence there and noted that proper dress, reverent behavior, and subdued speech were required of all visitors.

Muslims, Christians, and Jews all believe in a God who has certain expectations of his people, who has set specific moral precepts for them, and who seeks to raise them up to his standards. One of my favorite authors, Rabbi Harold Kushner, makes this point well.  In discussing human frailty, he asserts that when we reach “the limits of our own power, we need to turn to a Power greater than ourselves,”[2] and that “the worship of a God beyond ourselves can help us grow.”[3]  Such spiritual growth is important because “there are standards by which God summons us to live.”[4]  In short, “our behavior matters to God.”[5]  All three Abrahamic religions teach this, and it stands true for everyone everywhere, regardless of denominational affiliation.

These thoughts run a long way from the Rigel’s transatlantic voyage of 1979.  A request that started as a joke first became a training exercise for the license exams and then a springboard for considering the merits of a major religious tradition.  But life is like that, especially life at sea.  Very often when cargo ships leave port, their crews have only a vague idea of where they’re going.  Along the way, schedules change, itineraries are revised, and ships are rerouted.  A ship, like life, can take us just about anywhere.  But of all the voyages we make and of all the ports we visit, the most important ones are those that bring us closer to God 

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[1] Two good and readily available sources are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam and https://www.britannica.com/topics/Islam.

[2] Rabbi Dr. Harold Kushner, Who Needs God, New York: Summit Books, 1989, p. 59.

[3] Op. cit., p. 54.

[4] Op. cit., p. 79.

[5] Op. cit., p. 79.