Generosity: The True Spirit of the Cruising Community
Puffin
Years ago, while in the middle of an epic Great Loop Cruise, a trawler skipper named Jim Bierer casually walked over to the bulkhead of his motoryacht Puffin, unscrewed a hefty hunk of precision clockwork, and gently placed it in the hands of a wide-eyed young man as a gift. The men, who couldn’t have been more different, hadn’t known each other for more than a couple of hours, and a genuine Chelsea eight-day ship strike clock was no dime store castoff. Puffin was a beefy sea boat, perfectly suitable for a leisurely summer long voyage from Pittsburgh via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers around the eastern third of the country and back. The younger man’s craft wasn’t much bigger than the trawler’s dinghy, yet the two boats were at that moment cruising in the same place at the same time, enjoying the same glorious sunsets and placid calms of the Rideau Canal, one of North America’s most historic and scenic freshwater cruising grounds. In that sense, they shared a common passion for cruising, but beyond that they were of different worlds.
A Gift & a Promise
To this day I don’t know what ever possessed him to just give away such a valuable ship’s instrument to me, a complete stranger. It had struck eight bells during our visit, and I expressed my fascination with it, having never seen or heard one before. Jim promptly produced it as quickly and nonchalantly as you would whip a dollar from your wallet in the act of tipping the doorman, but with heartfelt humility and a great wide smile. There was no great speech, no lecture honoring some obscure ritual of material exchange, and no expectation of compensation or even further correspondence. He only told me his name and that he was president of some company in Pittsburgh, which I entered in my log.Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. Thanking him profusely, I told Jim that as soon as I got a boat big enough, I’d mount it on my bulkhead, not knowing what else to say. I couldn’t have known it then, but a promise made that day would take 27 years to fulfill, and infuse me with a lifelong admiration for those who take to their boats and go forth and discover. That ship’s bell is one of my proudest possessions. It keeps perfect time, and it’s good to have it aboard for practical reasons, the best of which is I know what time it is without opening my eyes. It needs winding every week, but it emits a rich, deep bell tone on the half hour that only a handmade mechanical clock can deliver. Its chief purpose is for keeping watch of course, which traditionally is divided up in four hour segments.
Pie Dish
Bierer gave me the 1938 Chelsea ship strike clock on August 16, 1979 at Long Island Locks on the Rideau Canal, after he had invited me aboard while I was tent camping in a 12-foot aluminum fishing boat called Pie Dish. Borrowing from novelist and cruising guide author Kenneth McNeill Wells, Pie Dish was so named after he described his 12-foot aluminum cartopper as being “not much bigger than a pie dish,” a boat that went “anywhere the grass was wet.” It was in such a craft on the lovely Rideau that Wells perfected the fine art of gunkholing, of going off the beaten channel, poking his bow into little bays, shallow coves, and narrow creeks, places bigger boats couldn’t go. Following his philosophy of frugal simplicity in two end-to-end cruises of the canal in 1978 and 1979 in my little Pie Dish, the first seeds of cruising were sown that would last a lifetime. But first, my newly acquired precious cargo had to survive the rest of the cruise in an open boat 50 miles or so back to my base. It did, and for almost three decades the clock kept perfect time on my dresser. Without fanfare I proudly mounted it to the bulkhead of a new-to-me 26-foot sloop when she was commissioned in the spring of 2006. I wanted to reconnect with Jim and tell him that I had fulfilled my promise, but by then it was too late. An internet search revealed that James H. Bierer had passed away on Thanksgiving Day, 1998 at age 80. I also learned that he was former chairman and president of Pittsburgh Corning Corporation and had been involved in the initial marketing of Corning Ware, a material accidentally discovered that resulted in the invention of unbreakable dishware. I felt remorseful for not trying to contact him sooner, but I have never forgotten his generosity or the spirit in which it was given. Without words, I think he may have been trying to tell me something, or at least let me in on a little secret.
Paying it forward
One night this summer I rowed my wooden dinghy into Ego Alley from the mooring field in Annapolis in a foul mood. I was tired, hungry, and cranky that it had been a wind-challenged day of too much motoring and not enough sailing. Though I was with the cruising club, but not feeling particularly social, I needed to eat a hot meal. Skulking back to the dinghy dock after a brief downpour, I saw a young girl, just a kid, eying my pram from the seawall. She seemed enamored with it, and with her doting dad’s permission I let her take it for a spin. To see her eyes light up giddy with joy as she rowed it expertly in front of City Dock, all my troubles melted away. I had given her something, not a Chelsea bell to be sure, but nonetheless a memory that she might well have forever. I felt instantly happy, and happy for her and her dad. A boat and a kid with an appreciation for them isn’t something to be taken for granted. Whenever it tolls, I think about the clock, how much it means to me, and how I came to acquire it. Maybe it shouldn’t be mine to keep at all. If I’m going to call myself a cruiser in the time I have left, a new promise might be in order. Someday, in some port, some wide-eyed kid in a little boat is going to get a present. I won’t make any speeches, but I’ll know. We have something very special, but only for a while. We need to let the next generation in on our little secret, that special passion for our boats, each other and distant waters beyond our own universe of day to day life.
By Steve Allan
