So far, it's been a good year for ER, two of my sailor's profiles appeared in the January issue of a national yachting magazine (not a big one, but it is national!). Here is one of them. The gentleman being profiled is an old college chum of mine, so it was really a treat for me to put this together. It's is the first time I've written something like this for this rag, my earlier pieces were either sea stories (wind-and-wave stuff), boat reviews, or features about boat yards. About 80% of this got past the editors, but as you might expect, I prefer the original to what finally made it into print. This is my tribute to my friend, and to his half-century old sweetheart.

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A Wooden Beauty

The first time Bill Tait saw Sinisterre was in 1972 and it was love at first sight. She was in Bristol condition and her second owner had just brought her to the yacht club; but Bill asked him on the spot if she was for sale. The answer was no, her skipper had just bought her the day before.

The lovely yawl that had captured Tait's heart was a sister ship of the classic Sparkman and Stephens 40' wooden centerboarder Finisterre that had taken the sailing world by storm and dominated ocean racing in the late '50s and early '60s. Finisterre (S&S Design Number 1054) had been originally conceived by Carleton Mitchell, an American writer and sportsman, as a cruiser. Although an accomplished racer, Mitchell, (already a two-time Southern Ocean Racing Conference winner), was also a capable and experienced cruising sailor and had been mentally designing his dream boat as one that could be fully equipped, lived on comfortably and combined shallow draft with sea-keeping ability. Racing was not part of that conception and no effort was made to gain advantage of any rule while she was being planned and built. Finisterre was designed by Sparkman & Stephens under Olin Stephens' oversight and built by Seth Persson at his yard in Old Saybrook, Conn. in 1954 under the close supervision of Mitchell himself. By the standards of her day the yacht was considered short-keeled and beamy, "remarkably like a watermelon", as Mitchell himself commented. By today's standards, her hull lines are simply breathtaking. Finisterre caught everyone at the SORC by surprise, perhaps even her owner, and went on to a brilliant racing career, including winning a transatlantic race and an astonishing three consecutive victories in the Newport-Bermuda race, the only vessel to have won that event more than once.

While Finisterre was rampaging in the Atlantic, William W. Tait had been growing up in a Quaker village of about 300 people in southern New Jersey. There was a wide stream behind his house and he caught the sailing fever early; he built his first boat, a 10 foot dinghy, at age 12 and began his sailing career in Lightnings and Thistles. As a young man he answered an ad to help move a South American-built 42 foot ocean racing sloop from Painesville, Ohio to Buffalo, New York, then through the Erie Canal and the New York State canal system and then onto the Hudson River. He then helped sail the boat to Stanford, Conn. where he stayed aboard all summer as a liveaboard. To this day Bill has no idea why that South American-built sloop was in Ohio but he's been involved in sailing from that point on: in the early '70s he competed in MORC in the Tampa Bay area and sailed in Long Island Sound, New England, and as far away as Nova Scotia.

After finishing his chemistry degree at the University of South Florida in Tampa he moved to Hartford, Connecticut where he worked at GMAC for three years as a repo man. He eventually moved back to Florida in 1970 where he earned a Master's in geography at USF and worked for 3 and a half years at the Southwest Florida Water Management District as a director of long range planning. He rounded out his professional experience with jobs as a hydrologist and analyzing lab samples and installing water treatment plants and lift stations for local engineering firms. This experience guided him into the construction and utility inspection trades which evolved into a general contracting business. He got out of that line of work in 1983 and apprenticed with Frank Hamlin, NA as a marine surveyor, a profession which he continues to practice as a family business to this day. He still performs occasional construction forensic work as well, researching building problems such as leaks, failures, and other problems due to incompetence, poor design, material defects and so on. His job often requires him to testify as an expert witness, and has involved him in litigation on such jobs as the $180 million 1995 Los Angeles Subway collapse. But it is the marine survey work which attracts him most, especially since his son, Bill Tait, Jr., now works alongside him. Bill works on all types of vessels, sport fishermen, motor yachts, commercial vessels, and, of course, sailboats, wooden and otherwise. He loves the work and it allows him to meet a good cross-section of the Florida boating community, both buyers and sellers.

Bill joined the Davis Islands Yacht Club in Tampa shortly after his move to Florida, serving on both its Board and Executive Committee and participating in its events, racing at DIYC and MORC races offshore. He worked with Ron Holland to build two boats for the national Quarter Ton championships. One of them, Eighteen (pronounced Aye-teen, Ron was a Kiwi.), was the first of Holland's designs to be a winner. Both of the boats had been built to IOR's Rule 18, although they were not identical. The other, Genesis, ran aground and did not finish, but Bill found her 5 years later, neglected and falling apart. He rebuilt it from the sheer up and down, leaving only the hull intact. She won 17 consecutive races with Bill at the helm, including the 1978 Kahlua Cup.

He kept his eye on Sinisterre for 10 years, watching her slowly deteriorate and eventually stop sailing altogether as her new owner proved himself not quite up to the specialized skills required to maintain a genuine classic. The yacht (originally named Mai Tai) was constructed in 1957 in Miami by Warren Baily; Olin Stephens and Charley Morgan, one of his apprentices, oversaw the construction. She was not an exact duplicate of Finisterre, and there were some differences in construction methods, but the hull lines and interior layout were the same. Bill frequently renewed his offers to buy her, but the owner continued to refuse until he finally recognized he didn't know enough about wooden boats to keep her in repair. In 1983 they worked out a deal where the man got Genesis and Bill began the long ordeal of restoring Sinisterre.

The task was a daunting one. Sinisterre is constructed of one and a quarter inch mahogany strip planking over 2 inch mahogany laminated frames spaced 3 feet apart. The hull was in fairly good shape, except for two planks in the forward starboard hull and one rotted frame in the port wine glass under the cockpit seat below the waterline, and a small area of rot on the hull adjacent to it. The damaged area was small, but restoring it authentically required extensive work to properly interleave the existing planking with the replacement strips. The topsides also required major surgery: decks and deck beams were rotted, as was the entire port cabin side. The cockpit coamings were missing entirely and half the coach roof and all the hatches needed to be replaced. Also replaced were the mast, sails and rigging. The engine was completely seized up. It was nine months of hard work, most of it done with the boat still in the water, before Sinisterre was even able to sail again, but Bill sailed the boat for a year until he got around to rebuilding the engine. In 1987, after living aboard for four years and 3500 hours of work, Sinisterre placed second in the Florida Antique Boat Show.

Bill originally had no intention to race the boat, but in 1985, still without an engine, he entered her in the first Annual Bill Bogart Regatta held in honor of a deceased former club Commodore. Sinisterre took first place overall. Since then, she has been a familiar competitor in Florida Gulf Coast racing. Over the years, she won the Kahlua Cup twice, the Amigos race in Mexico five times, and the St. Petersburg-Mexico race twice; that last victory by a full thirteen hours over the next boat in her class. Only three 70 foot racing sleds got there first. In 1998, she was victorious in the St. Petersburg-Havana race, precisely forty years after Carleton Mitchell won the same event in Finisterre. Since her restoration she has been successfully raced and actively cruised throughout the Gulf and Caribbean and in numerous local events. This grand old lady still strikes the same fear into her rivals as her older sister did fifty years ago.

A wooden boat is never finished; the original engine, a Mercedes 37 hp diesel, was replaced by a marinized Kubota 22hp in 1992, and in 2001 it was time for Sinisterre's second major overhaul. This time, Bill was ready. He had built a 20' x 40' woodworking shop at his home on the Hillsborough River, so he unstepped the yacht's masts and motored her up to the dock behind his house. This time, it was the starboard cabin side's turn to be replaced, as well as the companionway trim, cockpit coamings and toe rails. Topside grab rails were replaced and additional interior grab rails on the cabin overhead were installed. The refit was completed in 2002. Today, Sinisterre is still seaworthy, although maintenance work, as always, continues: a new engine and batteries were recently installed. When I went aboard her while researching this article she was having her steering gear replaced and the topsides were being prepped for painting and varnishing; but she was still ready the next day for an afternoon sail in Tampa Bay.

In 2003 Bill joined the Sparkman and Stephens Association and was invited to attend their 10th anniversary meeting at Portsmouth, England. He was awarded, by Olin Stephens, the biannual World Challenge Mathiessen Cup, for the S&S design winning a major ocean race by the greatest margin over the second place boat. A highlight of the meeting was the opportunity to meet and speak with the dean of American naval architects and he found that at 95, he was alert, sharp as a tack, and still sailing.

Sinisterre is not the only S&S Number 1054 still around. The Sparkman and Stephens Association Members Yearbook for 2005/2006 lists four others, including the class prototype, Carleton Mitchell's old boat, which is still being proudly sailed by her new owner in the Adriatic under her original name. Another, Querencia, has been lovingly restored to mint condition by Tom and Myra Hudson in Washington state. Winifred, which Bill once crewed on a voyage to the Bahamas, is at last report a working boat, still carrying charter customers in the US Virgin Islands. There are reports that yet another 1054 is currently being built to the original specifications in South America.

This hull marked a watershed in yacht design and still fills a niche today, not just as a museum piece, but standing up favorably to fifty years of mass production, modern materials, and computer-aided design, a reminder of what Man can accomplish using his wit, intelligence, and collective experience. It is a product of the human mind and hands, fashioned from materials the Earth itself has provided. After a half-century of dash and grace, Finisterre and her sisters still go to sea, thanks to mariners like William Tait who made the committment to keep that legacy alive.