I and my two sons got home Sunday from a two-day sailing trip down to Menemsha and back. The original destination for the trip had been Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon Island in the Elizabeth chain, across Vineyard Sound, but the size of the flotilla required a large anchorage, the wind was light and useless a lot of the time on Saturday, so we targeted Menemsha. It took all of a west-going current and a little bit more before we anchored late Saturday. The flock of small craft making the trip paid their respects to Shenandoah, now under the command of Captain Ian Ridgeway, circling the schooner when they anchored all around her.
Menemsha Bight is spacious, and it needed to be, because the boys and I, aboard our own boat, were only three of dozens of friends, admirers and, well, disciples who chose to take one final sail with Capt. Robert Douglas, speaking metaphorically of course. There were 30-plus participants who sailed their own boats, large and small, on this memorial trip. Bob was a summer kid on West Chop who learned to sail in Vineyard Haven Harbor, and grew up to be a devoted student of maritime history. He designed the stunning topsail schooner Shenandoah, built her and sailed her for nearly 60 years out of Vineyard Haven, carrying passengers of all sorts, and hundreds of Vineyard children on weeklong voyages over southern New England’s tricky waters and snug harbors. No small feat for the master of an engineless, complicated hand-puller whose sparred length was 152 feet, crewed by young men and women who were drawn to the adventure and who first learned sailing and seamanship from their Shenandoah experience, and were consequently imbued by Douglas with the lasting notion that they were signing on to something unique and historic in its own way. Many of their lives were indelibly marked by the experience.
The mark Bob made on the lives of so many extended to the folks who sailed with him, of course, but also to the many Vineyarders of all sorts who became acquainted with the unusual prominence of Douglas’s one-of-a-kind enterprise.
The sail followed Friday evening’s memorial gathering on Bob’s Coastwise Packet Co. wharf, when hundreds remembered him and the ways in which his single-minded effort to carry on the flavorful seagoing history of the town and the Island had captured the enduring attention of so many. There were thundering cannon, bagpipes, fly-by salutes in vintage aircraft, happy and funny recollections, many tears and many smiles.
And to cap it off, on Sunday’s trip home the weather struck up a breezy sail in a building easterly and a lumpy sea state that, for some, warranted a pause to tuck in a reef. But, really, that’s just what happens sailing around in these Vineyard waters, where Bob, who died on April 23 this year at 93, sails on.
Doug Cabral is the former editor and publisher of The MV Times, and the author of “My Shenandoah: The Story of Captain Robert S. Douglas and His Schooner.”
