Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

oat went broadside to the wind, and he laid her over on her beam
ends aa that the mast was almost parallel to the water. . . and I
should say that there was a guy who, incidently, was my cousin's
son-in-law. . . was up on the bow, and he was calling "trimtt on
the spinnaker, in other words, he sat up there and called back to
the guy who was trimming the spinnaker, what. . . to pull her in
or to let her out. He did not have a life jacket on and he
didn't have a life line, and most everybody else was sailing in
this heavy breeze without a life jacket except me, and I had my
life jacket.
Well, the guy up on the bow when the boat went on herd beam
ends slid down side of the deck and he reached up and just cbught
the line of the wheel, and saved himself. If he hadn't caught
that, he would have gone into the water and, at that time of
night, we never would have gotten around in time to find him, and
he would have been lost, because that cold water up there in Lake
Michigan, you've got about eight or ten minutes before
hypothermia sets in. And we wouldn't have gotten that boat in a
mile, and we'd have gotten back there and we would have had no
way to find him, and so we finally did, with a couple of guys on
the helm, we got the boat straightened around, going back down
wind, but we over compensated, and she went broadside the other
way, and we later got her up, and 1 can still remember thk guy
who was washing dishes, poking his head up out of the commnion
way, hi= arms loaded with life jackets, and finally we got the
boat under control, and it was dark, and we really didn't know
where we were, and the squall dissipated, and we had a fairly
good breeze, but we didn't know where we were. There were lights
over on the mainland on Michigan which was there about Traverse
City, and we could see the lights on Manitou Islands. We triad, I
remember, to look at the maps and read the lights, the blipking
lights to see if we could identify any of them, to see where we
were, and we never did, and we almost did run aground op one
island, and we finally saw shore before we did run aground.
And then, I remember, we almost round another boat tha was
sailing without any lights, which was against the rule. I ried
to get the skipper of this boat to protest him, but he wou dn't
protest. We could have thrown him out for that, but we fi ally
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got up to the straits, to the bridge, the straits of Mack'nac,
and we went under the bridge and the wind had died, and we' just
got under the bridge and the wind went dead, and everybody was
sitting there. As we sat there, the boats behind us still had
breeze, and they had enough breeze to get under the bridge, and
then they died too, so everybody was just sitting there, sails
flapping, not able to move a bit, and waiting for a breeze to
carry us all in. I remember Harry N e was in a small boat, and he
was along side of us with his sails flapping, and finally he got
a little bit of a breeze, and he headed off for Mackinac Island
to try to get some off shore breeze, and he did and he fin'shed
ahead of us. But we finally finished, and we got acros the
finish line, and, wanting to get into the harbor, and we de ided
that the way to do that was to pull dawn the sails and st t up
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