[Written by Meredith
Murray for “The Magic Boat,” this story had to be cut in size for the final
manuscript. Here is the original, expanded version.]
The Westhampton Yacht
Squadron’s various club histories list all of the SSs ever built, but the
whereabouts and ownership of two of these boats -- # 149 and #150 -- remained a
mystery to members of the SS Association, the Great South Bay Yachting Association,
and the various yacht clubs along the South Shore for almost 50 years. Until
January, 2006, when a letter announcing the upcoming Centennial festivities was
sent and re-sent through cyberspace to countless sailors via the modern miracle
of e-mail. Alexander “Skip” Pendzick was
just beginning Center Moriches High School in 1959 when he learned that Louis
Howell’s arthritis had grown so severe he couldn’t finish the two SSs he’d been
building in his workshop on Lake Avenue. The numbers of the boats were already
burned into the centerboard trunks -- #149, completed except for the deck, and
#150, framed out with just the keel and sheer strake in place. Skip paid Howell
$90 for the two boats. He kept the 149 for himself and sold the framed-out boat
to his buddy George Sandberg for $40.
The two boys had been best friends “forever,” according to George.
The Sandbergs lived on Brookfield Avenue, some distance away from the water,
but Skip’s family lived on Senix Creek, on the grounds of an old boatyard.
“Pendzick’s Boatyard, that was my playground,” George remembers. “It wasn’t run
as a boatyard then. It was just derelict.” The two boys built their first boat
when they were in 6th grade, just “a little box,” says George, whose cousin
Bill “Cut” Reden taught him how to sail, first in a Gil Smith cat boat and
later in a Snipe Cut he borrowed from his high school English teacher, Mr.
Debler.
Skip and George were only 15-years-old when they set to work on SS 149, and
there was no one around to help them. “Skip’s father passed away when he was in
8th grade,” George says, “and my father had no boat experience.” Skip and his
brother Dan, with some help from George, began to put the boatyard, located at
26 Union Avenue in Center Moriches, back into operation, and it was there at
the reborn Pendzick’s Boatyard that they finished the 149.
“We couldn’t afford to buy sails,” says George. “Someone said the Fenners had
some extra sails, so one day we walked down to Skip Fenner’s house on Union
Avenue and knocked on his door and asked if he had an old sail.” Skip gave the
boys a set of his old SS 2 sails that he’d been using as paint drop-cloths. SS
149 wore the “dropcloths” proudly for the next three years.
George then set to work on his own boat, the $40 #150, without any blueprints,
with more curiosity and energy than experience. “What was kind of neat about
putting this boat together,” he says, “was my mother would drive me to Riverhead
Building Supply, and after I told them what I needed the stuff for, they
basically gave it to me. They probably thought, hey, this kid is staying out of
trouble! It was the only place we could get white cedar, which was basically
logs, and they had to go out and mill them down.”
He worked on the 150 on and off throughout his junior and senior years in high
school. “It was a chore,” he still remembers. “I struggled with it, just trial
and error -- I didn’t have any plans, just a hammer. See that window? One time
I threw the hammer through the window, I was so angry.
“The very last plank I couldn’t get in. I just couldn’t get it in, couldn’t
make it work -- it was one plank up from the garboard plank. My cousin knew
this guy named Harliss, a boatbuilder who specialized in building ice-scooters.
He was a crankety old guy, not very cooperative. My cousin said if I went over
there and talked to him and kind of hung around, that maybe he’d help me. So I
did, I went over and I was with him from 9 in the morning until about 5 in the
evening. He’d been a carpenter on a four-masted schooner, and he knew a lot
about building boats. At the end of the day I finally got the nerve to say, ‘Oh
by the way, I have an SS and I’m having trouble putting a plank in.’ He said,
‘I always wanted to build one -- bring it over here and I’ll fix it.’ So I went
home and towed it over. The next morning I went back to ask him if he thought
he could fix it, and it was all done. He’d done it overnight, and he wouldn’t
tell me how he did it. I’d been working on it for months, trying to figure out
how to get that plank in, and he did it overnight.”
George finished SS 150 during his senior year, and with great pride he berthed
it alongside SS 149 at Pendzick’s. Not long afterwards, however, he and Skip
narrowly escaped disaster in the 150. “We’d finished the boat,” George
explained, “and I was out sailing with Skip. Around 10 or 11 o’clock at night
we were becalmed. It was absolutely pitch black, and we heard a boat engine.
And it was coming closer and closer. We didn’t have a flashlight, nothing. That
boat came within inches of us, at full speed. I thought we were done for. As it
passed we heard someone say, ‘Hey! There’s a boat!’”
Neither Skip nor George ever raced his SS, and neither one ever made any
contact with the yacht clubs. “I liked everything about the water, and sailing
was a part of it. The racing part never appealed to me,” says George. Instead
he just sailed -- to the head of Senix Creek, out into Moriches Bay, exploring
east and west. Half the time he sailed by himself, and half the time he took
someone with him. Or the two SSs would sail together. “Skip would be in one
boat, and I’d be in the other boat. One time we decided to see how far west we
could go. We sailed to Great South Bay, way past the Smith Point Bridge -- I
don’t know where we were. Skip’s brother was trailing behind us in an outboard,
and we put up a little tent and slept on the beach.” When asked what they’d
brought to eat, George answered, “Eat?? I think we just drank beer!”
The boys sailed over to
the town beach at Great Gun, went for clams and crabs with their boats, and
used one or the other of the SSs for camping trips. “We used to do a lot of
camping,” George says. “We slept on the boat, one of us on either side of the centerboard.
It was a perfect fit.”
Skip had the 149 until the early 1970s, when he sold it. George sailed the 150 until 1966 or 1967, when, he says, he “went to sea for a living,” beginning with service in the Merchant Marines, distributing supplies along the coast of Viet Nam.
SS 150 was still very much a part of George’s life in 1969 when he was courting his future wife Joy, who was not a sailor. He took her out in the SS to, Joy says, “drown me...in a hurricane.” Not so, says George. “It was just a squall. It was really blowing, and we flipped. I didn’t want anyone to know it happened because I was embarrassed, so I made her sit in the sun until she dried out.” However, George’s buddy Stan Abrahamsen had seen the SS capsize. “By the time we got back to town, everybody knew.” But, says Joy, “I married him anyway.”
Like George, Skip
Pendzick, too, graduated from the New York Maritime College, as a Marine
Engineer. After sailing for a few years, he earned a Masters Degree in Nuclear
Engineering and went to work for Brookhaven Lab, where he currently is the
Chief Engineer for the Accelerator. He and his younger brother still own and
run Pendzick’s Boat Yard.
He never named the 150.
“If I named it now,” he said, “I think I’d name it something like ‘Lost.’”
Looking askance at the boat Joy mutters, “’Derelict.’”
Six months later George
wrote that he had “cleaned up” #150 and had put it under cover in a shed. But,
he admitted, although things didn’t “look good for it,” he hadn’t given up yet.
Not long afterwards he e-mailed triumphantly that he had bought his neighbor
Ray Richmond’s SS 76 and was “getting ready for the Centennial!”
SS 150 may not make it to
the yacht club for the 100th birthday celebration, but, with # 149, it is now
safely logged into the official chronicle of SSs “that really were.”
And, “one way or the other,” Sandberg will be sailing an SS in the Centennial
parade.
Today George Sandberg is a
Captain in the United States Maritime Service. In 1990, after sailing for 20
years with the Merchant Marines and wearing ribbons awarded him by the U.S.
Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy and the Merchant Marine, he “swallowed the anchor”
and came ashore to teach at the Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point, where
he is currently the head of the Marine Transportation Department.
Both George and Skip still
hold the SS close to their heart. As George says, “I have sailed around the
world a few times, sailed on every ocean and on most seas, aboard many
different types of ships ranging from a 65-ft. research vessel to a 1,000-ft.
LNG vessel, but some of my best memories are sailing an SS on Moriches Bay.”
SS 150 still survives but
only barely, as it has been sitting uncovered in George’s backyard for the last
30 years. “It came real close to being sawed up and used for firewood last
year,” said George as he and Joy stood on their lawn, looking solemnly down at
the rotting hulk of a boat. “But I decided I’d try to fix it up. I think I can
salvage it with stitch and glue. I have some other ideas. I have a complete set
of ribs in the basement.” A few seconds went by before he added, “Joy isn’t too
enthralled with the idea of my restoring my SS.”
But George’s imagination
is captivated by the idea of sailing an SS in the 2008 Centennial celebration
festivities. “One way or the other,” he says, “Sandberg is going to have an
SS!”
EPILOGUE: George did indeed sail an SS in the
Centennial parade, but it was not SS 150. Instead, George sailed #76, a boat he
purchased from his Center Moriches neighbor, Ray Richmond. The “derelict”
“flower pot” SS 150 George gave to Fred Scopinich in partial payment for the
restoration of his “new” SS 76, which sailed in the parade as “The Spirit of
’76.” Fred miraculously brought SS 150 back to life, sold it to Paul Haines,
and that boat, too, sailed in the Centennial parade. Paul named the boat “The
Two Sisters” and registered it for the parade under the name of his two
granddaughters Noel and Naomi Haines, who served as crew with Cheryl Baker and
Sue Jenkins skippering.
After the Centennial, SS
150, once just a dream in the eye of an Center Moriches teenager, was trailered
to up-state New York, where, renamed “Endurance,” it now resides with Paul’s
son Will Haines, the author of this blog, who sails it on the waters of Keuka Lake every summer. From Center Moriches
to the Finger Lakes, the fame of the SS continues to spread!
Just five days after a typically busy Labor Day weekend on Keuka Lake, today was its antithesis. Sans motorboats. Sans fireworks. Sans hubub. September on Keuka is probably my favorite time on the lake. Still a hint of summer. The water is still warm. But Fall is definitely in the air, and in a couple of weeks the leaves will start turning. Having endured a busy Labor Day weekend here, today was the complete opposite, quiet. Ahh.
And happily I can report it sounded wonderful. I have a portable speaker system that can readily connect to any mp3 player (iPad) and it is actually pretty loud, with it's own subwoofer. I could have brought along a smaller Jambox that works great too, but decided I needed a little more power. And since I was sailing, I did not have to listen to it over the sound of a motor (take that you gas guzzling motor boating resource burning heathens). Once I got underway I was literally my own floating rock concert. I swear I could hear the music echoing down Keuka Lake, bouncing off the cottages as I sailed by. With the speaker sitting back toward the boat's transom, SS #150 became one big boom box today.
What music did I play you ask.? Well I opted for Grateful Dead's live album, "Dead Set." Now I must admit that my music choice is still somewhat surprising to me. I have to admit that I am a relatively new listener to the Dead. Growing up I never really listened to them too much, and frankly could not relate to all the hippie wannabes that followed them religiously (no offense to true, authentic hippies that I have the upmost respect for - you know who you are). And some of their songs I just can't stand, particularly their commercial offerings (Touch of Grey, enough said). Overall, GD sounds great at the lake. I am not sure what it is. GD sounds great at a campfire. GD sounds great sailing. To me, I love the improv. It reminds me of jazz. I like that the songs last longer than three minutes. Play, Gerry, play. FYI you can like the Dead and not be druggie, it is true. I also like listening to The Band, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and just about any band that played at Woodstock etc, and have never dropped acid.
There are several exhibits and historic buildings on the grounds, and the one of particular interest to me was the museum's small craft building. I obtained a list of the some 76 vessels that are housed here for preservation. Included here is essentially a collection of boats built by the "who's who" of historic Long Island 
haylard holes in deck
