Being raised unchurched had its advantages for the Herbert kids, and one was that we got to spend our Sunday mornings worshipping water and praying for wind to power our family’s sailboats. As soon as the weather started to warm on the Jersey shore, we knew that we would be spending every possible hour we could at the Shark River Hills Yacht Club. The phrase “yacht club” was actually a misnomer: There were no yachts there, and the members were not yachting types. Just middle-class school teachers and electricians and insurance brokers with a common interest in boats, mostly boats with sails.
The yacht club sat on a big hill about halfway between the Cracker Barrel general store and the “flats,” a large expanse of marshland that was being reclaimed for future home construction. It must have once been a grand old mansion, but it had seen its better days. It had a large dance floor inside and a snackbar and a big wraparound veranda where we spent a lot of our time when we weren’t boating. It also had lots of nooks and crannies, dusty little rooms that were treasure troves to kids—full of old photos and trophies and other sailing memorabilia. These rooms were a great source of entertainment when storms kept us off the water.
But it took a really bad storm to keep us off the water, because sailors like it blowy. There were several “classes” of boats that sailed out of this yacht club, and these boating classes had a way to dividing people into classes as well. People forged their identities with their boat class, so there
were “Jet people” and “Comet people” and so forth. When Dad was contemplating buying his first sailboat, the logical choice for him would have been to buy one of these popular sailing dinghies, like a Comet or a Jet 14. Jets had only been around for a few years, and a lot of our friends had them, and competed in organized races during the season. Comets had been around longer, and had a bit more sail. Both were simple boats, mainsail and jib, and not too tippy, good beginner boats for families.
But Dad surprised everyone and did not buy a Jet or a Comet. He bought a Gunderdink.
This boat was as silly as the name makes it sound, and I remember being really disappointed when Dad made this choice. Some of his friends, the Jet and Comet devotees, were actually miffed at Dad for breaking ranks. But Dad had a secret motive: fear of water. We had moved to the shore from Pennsylvania only a few years before because Dad had been offered his first position as a school principal, but (as I learned slowly) he was never really attracted by the ocean or the river. He really dreaded the water, and especially the idea of raising his kids near this hazard. But in Shark River Hills, people bought boats before they bought cars; it was nearly impossible to resist the boating culture.
So he bought a Gunderdink because they didn’t capsize. Gunderdinks weren’t a real boating class. They were the invention of John Gunderson, a physician who lived over in Wall Township. There were lots of Gunderson kids, of all ages, and they also belonged to the yacht club. John Gunderson had invented the Gunderdink as a safe family boat and was trying to market it through the yacht club. It was a faux catamaran, two hulls but not sleek like a HobieCat and other real cats. The two V-shaped hulls came together to form the middle of the boat, so it looked like the letter W from behind. This made them very stable—“untippable,” according to the marketing speil, and that appealed to Dad.
Only they did tip. That is, if you really wanted to make them tip. One day, Ted and I were out sailing late in the afternoon, after the races were over and the parents had retired to the veranda or dock for a drink. Our friends were sailing their boats around, too, mostly prams, and we all decided to tip our boats. It took some effort, but we did manage to capsize it, and because the Gunderdinks had metal masts, it went completely topsy-turvy. The mast was pointing straight down and the two hulls straight up, so that there was an airspace between the water surface and the boat’s interior. We thought this was pretty cool, like a fort, so we hid in there for a few minutes.
What we did not know is that Dad was watching from the dock, about 50 yards away, and he was terrorized by our disappearance. We were both pretty good swimmers, and we were fine under the boat, but Dad did not know that and couldn’t see us, and he panicked. He was about to jump in the water when we poked our heads out, laughing. He wasn’t laughing. He was screaming at us from shore to bring the boat in, which we did, and when we did he screamed some more. He was furious and remained furious for weeks. But he was really scared to death of our drowning, and he couldn’t stop being scared. He told me many years later that he had recurring nightmares about this incident for years, and it made me feel real bad.
Surprisingly, given his fear, he did eventually cave to social pressure and buy single-hulled boats. We first got a pram, which was the kids’ sailing class, and we learned all about rigging and tacking and jibing and tillers and booms and travelers. Then we did finally get a Jet 14. We built both the pram and the Jet in our basement from kits during the winter months. I have fond memories of evenings spent down there fitting mortises and tenons and sanding and painting. We also bought an old Moth, which was a precursor of the sailfish, so at one point we had four sailboats, plus a motorboat with an outboard Evinrude, which sailors called “stinkpots.”
Ted ended up being the real sailor in the family. He took to it intuitively. I remember him dominating the pram tournaments, and he had a special knack for prerace timing. All the sailors had to sail around for a bit, every which way, as the clock ticked down to the starting gun, and the trick was to be as close to the starting line as possible when the gun was shot. Ted was somehow really good at this, so good that one day Tommy Nay decided to just follow him wherever he sailed. If Ted tacked away, so did Tommy, and if Ted came about, so did Tommy. And it worked, at least that day. He was right out front with Ted at the start of the race, but he was outmaneuvered at several markers and ended by finishing way back in the pack.
I became more of a recreational sailor, or crew on the Jet, but I loved watching the races when I wasn’t sailing. I especially loved watching them on the blowy days, which were common. I remember one big regatta that included sailboats from other yacht clubs up and down the coast, Little Egg Harbor and Barnegat and so forth, including one Flying Dutchman. The Flying Dutchman had a spinnaker, and it was the first time I had seen one in action, but there were a couple of the older teenagers in Jets that gave the Flying Dutchman a good run for its money. In the final race, on Sunday afternoon, Richie Etrim was skippering his boat and Ray Poplar was his crew, and it was perilously windy, white caps all over the river. To get as much speed as they could, they trimmed the sails very tightly in the wind, and the boat was up on its side with both Richie and Ray hiking out as far as they could to keep from capsizing. At one point, Ray actually climbed out of the boat and stood on the centerboard, and I have this image of them crossing the finish line in their foul weather gear, holding up their anchor and life preservers for the judges to see. It’s a flashbulb memory.
Ted later sailed in similar regattas, in Little Egg and places like that, but they were overnight trips and I never got to go. At home we were always on tenterhooks waiting to hear how he did, and he did well most of the time.
About 10 years ago, I visited Uncle Bob and family in Shark River Hills, and I took the kids for a drive along Riverside Drive. The Shark River Hills Yacht Club is no longer there. In fact, the hill is gone. It’s completely flat, and it makes me wonder if the old mansion was really on a hill or if the hill was much less than it appears in my childhood memory. I did find the tennis court where we used to play, though it was hard to find. I found some patches of macadam, but it was otherwise all overgrown.
