by Noel Stanton

1956. My generous parents gave me a 12-foot rowboat for high school graduation. It was a Penn Yann Cartop, a beautiful, somewhat fragile-looking craft with delicate ribs and thin planking of varnished cedar covered by sea-green watertight canvas. Three seats, two sets of oarlocks; weight without oars only 60 pounds.

Our family had been camping since I was 10. Every year we spent two summer weeks at lakeside sites in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York, a cool respite from the clammy heat and chemical-tainted air of central New Jersey. We had always rented our fishing rowboats, ponderous wooden craft built to take years of heavy abuse. Compared to these scows, the beauty and agility of the Cartop were striking.

1958. On this trip to the lake, I improvised a sail. A trimmed pine sapling was the mast, an aluminum tent pole was the boom, and the sail was a small brown tarpaulin square-rigged like a Viking longship. A leeboard made of pieces of orange crate and other scrounged bits of wood kept the boat from slipping sideways. A volunteer first mate from the next campsite operated this splintery hand-held leeboard while I steered and tended the sail. Although we had a lot of fun with the ugly, bizarre rig, we always needed an outboard motor to get us home against the wind.

1962. I met Marie, the love of my life, on a blind date in 1959 and we married three years later. Our first home was a cozy attic apartment (reached by fire escape) in a policeman’s house in Ithaca, NY. Since there was absolutely no place to store a boat, the Penn Yann had to live on the roof of our Volkswagen to allow us some occasional fishing. This odd pairing reminded people of a bug crawling out from under a log.

1983. For the last several years, Marie and I had spent one summer week with our two young sons at a cottage on Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks, making the long trek from our Columbus home with the Penn Yann atop our Plymouth Valiant. The family really enjoyed fishing from the boat, but the sailing bug bit me again and over the next year I built a rig that I hoped would make the Penn Yann perform like a real sailboat. 

I bought a pair of sails (main and jib) made for a commercial 11-foot sailboat. That was the easy part. Using the sails with the fragile Penn Yann was a challenging design and construction problem. Most important was preventing damage to the hull from the new mast and leeboards. Also, switching between sailboat and mast-less fishing skiff needed to be quick and easy. Finally, the homemade additions should please the eye and be in harmony with the varnished wood interior.

I laminated the two-piece mast and the boom from strips of cedar, lovingly planed, sanded, and varnished. The twin redwood leeboards mounted to a cedar crosspiece that bolted to the oarlocks added strength and rigidity to the boat. A redwood rudder assembly clamped like an outboard motor to the rear transom. It all came together in our backyard days before we left on our trip, and the neighbors cheered loudly as the sails were raised for the first time.

Marie rode along on the maiden voyage at Schroon. (I hadn’t told her that my only sailing experience involved a pine sapling and a tarpaulin.) Using only the mainsail, we cruised downwind for a pleasant quarter mile, then tried to turn into the wind. The boat turned halfway around and stalled. Then the leeboard mounts started to fail, one of the leeboards fell off, and I had to row us home. As the rocketry folks say as debris rains from the sky, I learned a lot from that test. Unfortunately, what Marie learned was that sailing wasn’t really her cup of tea.

After crude repairs were made with scrap lumber and borrowed tools, the second try was with both sails and teenage son David as crew. Once we got the hang of things, the boat moved briskly in only a light breeze and could indeed tack upwind; we never needed to row home again. David and I sailed it on Schroon the next two summers, and on a reservoir near Columbus, and even on a saltwater bay in Virginia.

2000. Marie and I, longtime empty-nesters and Kansans since 1993, now lived in a hilltop house overlooking Tuttle Creek Reservoir. The Penn Yann in the garage was used only for fishing. I got a sturdy one-person sailboat for the big gusty lake; maybe not as fast as the modified Penn Yann, but a lot safer. The homemade mast and boom were still in the basement—I couldn’t bear to scrap them.

2006. We drove east for my 50th high school reunion, and then north to a B&B on lovely little Kiwassa Lake (formerly Lonesome Pond) in the Adirondacks. The Penn Yann rode along; it hadn’t bathed in Northwoods waters for 20-odd years.

On a rainy day, we visited the wonderful Adirondack Experience Museum, 120 acres and 20 buildings devoted to the history and life of the region. In the large Boats and Boating exhibit, among the guideboats, ultralight canoes, and a racing yacht, was a twin of my old friend, the now "historic” Penn Yann Cartop. I felt quite proud, and a bit antiquated too.

2025. In 2019, Marie wisely persuaded me to downsize to a duplex in Meadowlark Valley. The boat came along and now rests compactly on its side in a special cradle that keeps its delicate frame from warping.

There was no way to foresee in 2019 that in a year Meadowlark would be a safe harbor to ride out a pandemic, or that in two years I would be learning to live without Marie. But I’m muddling through, and the Penn Yann in its cradle still looks almost new, eager for its next adventure. I guess some things are just made to last.