By Peter Brace

Philosophically, you can see their reasoning for spending millions of dollars to hold back the unwanted advances of the often-aggressive Atlantic Ocean.

Every chance she gets, the great Atlantic paws, grabs and gropes at beach and bluff along Nantucket’s eastern shoreline, which holds generations of summertime memories for seasonal residents, along with the promise of many more to come. In the summer, the ocean is relatively coy and relaxed, seemingly content to let us enjoy summer and even allowing the beaches to widen and the bluffs to rest.

But from fall through late spring, the honeymoon is over, with the ocean hurling its monstrous waves onto the beaches and at the toe of the bluff from just north of Sankaty Head Lighthouse to south of Codfish Park. Nor’easters take a heavy toll on this section of Nantucket’s shoreline. During the mightiest of these blows, huge chunks of bluff fall down to the beach below as the relentless waves gnaw at the base of the bluff, undercutting it and causing its upper bulwarks to collapse.

If the storm is severe and long enough, whole houses may topple down the bluff. Despite the recent dire publicity of the process, the erosion of Nantucket Island’s sandy shores is nothing new, and in five- or six-hundred years—the popular estimate—it could whittle the Grey Lady down to a sandbar only exposed at low tide.

But before it does, a group of Nantucket property owners are doing their best to stave off the inevitable, if only long enough to enjoy their ocean views in at least their and their children’s lifetimes.

Calling themselves the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund, this group composed of Baxter Road and Codfish Park beach

property owners as well as inland ’Sconseters is 15 years old this summer, with more than 400 individual contributors. From its formative years in the early 1990s and up through mid-2005, SBPF has employed a variety of innovative erosion-slowing measures, some successful and others bringing less than longed-for results. Arguably they have accomplished their mission, but they have also sustained heavy losses.

Painfully aware that the ocean absolutely will not stop and that the depth of many of its members’ lots is growing shallower while their wallets grow lighter, SBPF is working on a massive erosion control project designed to shore up three miles of beach from the lighthouse down to the old sewer beds. Using sand from the ocean floor offshore, SBPF wants to provide the hungry ocean with enough sand to munch on instead of letting it dine on upland soils and back porches.

Disappearing dunes

In 1974, Helmut Weymar, one of the founding members of the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund—the group’s most visible, vocal member and now its vice president—began renting the house that he now owns at 78 Baxter Road. In that decade, residents of the bluff likely had a more bucolic, romantic description for erosion, such as “the roar of the ocean” or “waves lapping on the beach.” And while Weymar and other residents were aware of beach loss, they didn’t give it much attention.

Helmut Weymar, president of the SBPF, with an aerial photo illustrating the beach nourishment program.

“There were two-hundred feet of dunes in front of the house and that was similar for other residents here. Yes, there was an erosion issue, but it wasn’t that much of an issue,” said Weymar. He believes the southward erosion of the bluff began to have noticeable impacts on the area in the 1940s. Cognizant of that, in 1988 Weymar and some of his neighbors hired Frank Fessenden, a Bentley College geologist, to measure the erosion. Planting posts from the water’s edge up the bluff and inland at set increments, Fessenden and his clients charted the advance of the ocean. What they saw in the data collected over just two years prompted them to form the Siasconset Erosion Committee, the precursor to SBPF.

Holding open meetings in the ‘Sconset Casino, the new group began looking at preventive measures to control what they now believed could take all of their properties out to sea in a very short time

if nothing was done. Proposals of seawalls, submerged barges as artificial reefs, tires cabled together, concrete structures below the beach sand and giant sand-filled bags called Geotubes were explored over three summers and six public hearings. Initially, a daunting maze of permit protocols kept the committee searching for more feasible solutions. Serendipitously, they talked about beach nourishment with sand from offshore shoals, but at an estimated cost of $10 million at that time, their focus turned to the new beach dewatering technology called Sta-beach.

“For various reasons, we rejected everything but the dewatering and we were extremely impressed by the project, a demonstration that the Danish government did with wave action like that of Nantucket’s,” said Weymar. “An even more striking piece to that story is that back in the forties, somebody at MIT theorized that this would be a way, but nobody every did it. They [Denmark] did it by accident.”

The “accident” occurred at a Danish aquarium that extended pipes out under a beach into the ocean to provide its sea life with well-circulated seawater. But the pipes kept clogging with sand and the aquarium had to keep extending its pipes, as the beach grew seaward. Thus, dewatering was born.

SBPF convinced enough of its members that the $1.5 million needed to install the system—a network of perforated PVC pipes beneath the beach that pumped wave water back out to sea, leaving sand behind to build the beach outward—was the way to go. Installation in front of Codfish Park and from the lighthouse to Bayberry Lane (70 Baxter Road) began in the summer of 1994, but was hampered by a nor’easter that August, forcing them to split the lighthouse-area system into two sections.

Although the Codfish Park installation eventually added around 100 feet to that beach from 1995 through 1999 overall, none of the three installations could handle the weather.

“The longest we ever got to get this thing to run was nine months,” said Weymar.

“It was clearly under-engineered. We did not have systems that could withstand the weather here and the different types of storms.”

In addition to the breakdown-plagued Codfish Park system, a large hole in one of the pipes farthest south in the lighthouse-area system caused a massive sinkhole in the beach, forcing SBPF to shut that system down. SBPF shut down the remaining northern 550-foot lighthouse system that year as well. Although SBPF wants to restart all systems now, Nantucket’s Conservation Commission isn’t in favor of it. Weymar is sure they’ll come around.

A sand tortilla

With the relative failure of the dewatering system, in the last five years SBPF turned to several bluff containment installations designed to keep the bluff from sliding down to the beach while it worked on

re-starting its systems. They planted a beefy form of snow fence made of plastic webbing called Dune Guard in a zigzag layout on the beach below the problem spots, but SBPF’s most aggressive project since the dewatering system shut down is its terracing of the bluff.

Using thick, biodegradable coconut fiber mats called coir, starting from the toe of the bluff working upwards, the mats were folded over like giant tortillas and filled with sand before each section was folded over on top of the other, stepping-up gradually and deepening sections up the bluff. The mats were anchored by four-inch-square pressure-treated posts pounded deep into the bluff face and, in some places, fortified with pressure-treated planks running horizontally across the posts against the soil.

Up on the bluff, hundreds of narrow diameter drainage wells were drilled to pierce the clay layer in the ground running along parts of the bluff. Those allow runoff to percolate through the sandy soil beneath the clay and back into the aquifer below. This stops water from flowing over the clay and down the bluff face, thus eroding it from the top-down.

Weymar and SBPF are hoping that these latest erosion control efforts will work in concert with the beach nourishment project and the dewatering systems,

if they can be re-started. “There are clearly linkages,” said Weymar. “The toe protection I would categorize as holding protection. When storms get big enough, they actually take out some toe protection and we lose some bluff.”

The believers

Lawrence McQuade at 97 Baxter Road lost half his cottage to a three-day nor’easter in February. With the ocean battering away at the toe of his section of the bluff, the top of it cascaded down to the beach below making his cottage flush with the new edge of the bluff. McQuade got an emergency permit from the Conservation Commission to cut away half of his backyard guest accommodations before the eroding soils took the entire structure all at once. He still attributes the loss to last winter’s erosion, which only served to steel his resolve to keep fighting it by supporting SBPF.

After all, McQuade and his family got into SBPF in the beginning. He has seen his neighbors to the north move their houses back one by one or across the road to their inland lots as the erosion of the bluff progressed southward. He knew two things for sure: that his land and his buildings could easily be next and that he could not move his house across the road further inland.

“I think we felt there ought to be some reasonable way to deter the erosion from the bluff, and some of the ways that it might have been done seemed to be forbidden by the local authorities,like putting some boulders at the bottom of the bluff, and we we’re frustrated by that,” said McQuade.

Listening to Weymar speak at the SBPF meetings, McQuade liked what he heard. “We all knew without any doubt that this is experimental and, as I recall, there had been some of these dewatering installations elsewhere in the world with some success [and there was the] mixed belief that it could work here. We clung to that.”

The McQuades weren’t the only ‘Sconseters to lose land and cottages.

The worst property losses the angry ocean smote on beachfront owners happened in Codfish Park in the early 1990s. A nor’easter in December, 1992, picked up Sand Piper—one of Harrison Smith’s two beach cottages—and swept it out whole just offshore then hammered it with several 20-foot waves that blew it into bits. His second cottage followed later in that storm. The next winter, the waves reached Ray Maki’s house, which had been behind Smith’s prior to the December, 1992, storm. The town condemned Maki’s house in 1993, along with that of his southerly neighbor, Donald Hollings’ house. Hollings had built his house on long pilings sunk deep into the sand to meet new floodplain construction standards enforced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Despite his efforts, the beach washed away beneath his house, leaving it teetering toward the surf 15 feet above the beach. At the urging of the Conservation Commission, Hollings eventually cut his house free of its pilings cum foundation and moved it inland to a safer lot on Sleetwing Circle in Siasconset.

A noble experiment

Not that he could have predicted the tragic events that befell the Codfish Park properties in the winter storms of the early 1990s, but a former resident of the bluff along Baxter Road—who moved off-island last fall and wished not to be identified—believes there’s no way of stopping or even reasonably slowing the ocean enough to save waterfront property. He didn’t buy into the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund’s beach dewatering spiel and couldn’t fathom how his neighbors could throw so much money—tens of thousands to millions of dollars—at a project the ocean will most certainly wash away, along with their land and houses.

“Helmut had a meeting and he explained how he and others felt that erosion could be stopped by certain methods. I tried to keep an open mind at that time, but I wasn’t at all convinced,” said the former Baxter Road resident. “I think I put up twenty-five dollars at the time and that was all.”

This longtime bluff dweller whose father built their simple, one-story house in 1950 on the ocean side of Baxter Road and who lived in it from 1980 through October, 2004, had his fears confirmed in 1992. That year, he and his wife had their house moved deeper inland on their lot as the edge of the bluff—under siege from numerous winter storms including the nor’easter of 1991 known as the Perfect Storm—crept to within 28 feet of their back doorstep. Before Weymar and SBPF even got going, this guy’s mind was made up. Once the dewatering system came online, from his view of the bluff, his speculation quickly proved his theories.

“I wasn’t convinced after he got started,” he said. “They were going to put pumps under the sand and supposedly the waves would hit the beach and leave the sand behind. That did not happen. In other words, the winters were so severe that they were negating what they did in the summer.”

Unlike his former neighbor, McQuade is not ready to give up, but he does now share the sentiment about the dewatering system’s unworthiness. Though he admits to knowing little about what Weymar and the SBPF board are working on right now, he remains a member willing to contribute financially to the effort.

“Evidently it doesn’t work,” said McQuade. “That’s the short of it as far as we’re concerned. It was a noble experiment. We honor the people who led us into the route because we all share the common feeling that we had to work together and we are grateful that there were a few people who stood up to lead, even if it didn’t work.”

Beach building

SBPF’s latest project is an ambitious beach nourishment plan that proposes to rebuild the beach from several hundred yards north of Sankaty Head Lighthouse down past Ocean Avenue in Siasconset. Initially, SBPF wants to mine 1.6 million cubic yards of sand from one of several shoals roughly three miles offshore.

“The erosion has gotten worse,” said Cheryl Bartlett, SBPF’s executive director in charge of this new project. “There’s much more urgency to do it now, and beach nourishment is the most environmentally friendly way to prevent erosion. We’re the only coastal state in the country that’s not doing beach nourishment.”

Bartlett said SBPF would barge the sand close to shore, create slurry out of the sand and pump it onto the beach. The sand would be used to build up the original beach, then another beach would be layed on top and in front as a snack for the ocean.

“What’s a little bit misunderstood is that roughly half the beach one installs is a design beach and is basically there to protect the dunes and the upland,” said Weymar. “In front of that you put the sacrificial beach. With normal storm activity over a five-year period, you will lose the sacrificial beach down to the design beach.”

Weymar estimates that over the course of the project that includes the initial installation and two renourishments at five-year intervals, SBPF could mine and pump a total of 2.4 million cubic yards of sand onto their beach, costing members $10 to $15 million.

“The ugliness of dewatering is that we haven’t been able to make it work, except in Codfish Park, and we know that beach nourishment can work because it works in other locations,” said Weymar. “What’s changed with beach nourishment since the early eighties [is that] three things happened. The threat has worsened for a large number of properties, there’s a much broader, immediate recognition of the erosion issue now and the property values have increased so much.

“The amount of property value an individual is protecting is much larger than before, so it’s rational to make a much larger contribution to the effort.”

Currently, SBPF is working on its draft environmental impact report that it must file with the state’s Executive Office of Environmental Affairs to get a permit from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Among other permits, it also needs a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit, a state Chapter 91 Waterways permit and an order of conditions from Nantucket’s Conservation Commission. Given all these permits in hand, SBPF would like to start armoring the beach with fresh sand in 2006 if it gets the green light next spring.

Having been the first in years to lose part of his summer living space to the erosion, McQuade is at once enthusiastic about this latest project and defiant in the face of reality.“We know the ocean will win, but we know that we would like to have it win on a very slow schedule,” said McQuade. “For the moment, we’re going to enjoy it while we can.”

By Fifi Greenberg

Nantucket has always been known for its sailors. We start them young and breed them hardy. On any given day from May through October, you can spot sailors on the waters around the island, and it’s not uncommon to see a distant sheet snapping in the wind in the cold, blustery winter. Nantucket sailors are more concerned with getting out on the water than with what the weather is bringing in—as long as it’s wind.

Although it’s sexist to say it, the stereotypical image of a sailor conjures up boat shoes, khaki shorts, a polo shirt with embroidered burgee and the XY chromosome combination. But one sailing group breaks the mold: Nantucket’s all-women Echo IOD crew.

These women are no fair-weather sailors. They’re out there slogging through the bad stuff with the rest of them, going head to head with the guys. It harkens back to the days of the whaling era when island men were half a world away and strong willed women ran both the home front and the store front. These girls rock.

First, a little background. In something like a boat time-share, a group of sailors called a “syndicate” pays to “own” a boat for the season. A number of syndicate boats based in one location form a fleet to compete amongst themselves. In an interesting twist, each syndicate gets a different boat every time out. In theory, each “owns” only the availability to a boat, not the actual boat.

The beauty of this is that no one gets an unfair advantage from sailing a better maintained boat, because everyone gets that one somewhere down the line. The same goes for a lesser boat: everyone eventually gets that one, too. Except that in this case, there are few “lesser” boats. We’re talking IODs.

The IOD—or International One Design—is a classic racing sloop first introduced in Long Island in 1936 by Cornelius Shields, who commissioned Norwegian designer Bjarne Aas from Fredrikstad to design a slightly different version of a 6-metre boat he had seen in Bermuda. The following year, 25 IODs appeared in Long Island Sound. Soon after, fleets started popping up all over.

These boats were what every sailor aspired to have, and sailing in an IOD regatta meant rubbing elbows with royalty. Today there are active IOD fleets in Norway, Sweden, Scotland, Bermuda, San Francisco, Fishers Island, Long Island, Northeast Harbor in Maine, Marblehead in Massachusetts and, of course, Nantucket.

One IOD website describes the boat as “long and narrow, with beautiful lines and traditional overhangs. The tall, powerful sail plan is perfectly balanced by a full

displacement keel, so the boat is a delight to race and day sail.” The class’s strong one-design commitment—sails, hulls, masts, booms, rig and geometry remain virtually identical between boats—keeps costs of ownership low and makes racing extremely competitive. These boats are sleek, fast and not for the faint of heart.

It is also the first one-design class officially recognized as a “Classic Yacht” by the International Sailing Foundation (ISAF).

The Nantucket IOD fleet, hosted by Nantucket Yacht Club, consists of 13 syndicates with names ranging from Alpha, Delta and Foxtrot to Juliet, Mike and Victor. The only all-women IOD

syndicate on-island—and possibly in the world—is Nantucket’s Echo Syndicate, which consists of nine women who run the gamut from corporate leaders to stay-at-home moms. They recently spoke about what drives them to compete in this sometimes dangerous, mentally exhausting and physically challenging sport.

How did the Echo Syndicate come about?

Sharon Lorenzo: Rebecca was the spark plug. She and Alice got us going on the syndicate.

Alice Breed: Rebecca, Julie and I were in a sailing class together and came up with the idea. We got a list of women together and Rebecca called them while Alice [Rubenstein] helped us work out the financials. We needed a skipper who had a certain level of sailing proficiency, and we found Linda.

Julie McConihe: I don’t remember when the idea of a group of women buying and sailing competitively actually began. I think it started gradually, after increasing our confidence as we sailed on Wednesdays, [and was] probably [provoked by] some joking by the men and some building [up of] “women power.”

Rebecca Lambert: The late Dick Sykes, one of the former IOD skippers, was very supportive of a women’s syndicate. He encouraged us to form Echo.

Linda Green: We knew Whitey Willauer wanted to enlarge the [local] fleet. I think with a fleet of thirteen, you can qualify for the World Championships. We were the thirteenth boat.

Whitey Willauer: I did want to add more boats to the fleet. With ten, you can go to the World’s [championship]. But you also need a boat for the returning champion and two spare boats. So I was looking for a fleet of thirteen. I found three boats to add and was looking for people to buy the interest. The Echo crew came on as the last of those three.

What brought you to Echo?

Green: I was a member of another IOD syndicate. I liked the idea of an all-women crew. I love to teach and was eager to see women enjoy sailing and the challenges of the racecourse.

Barbara Southwell: I was used to sailing with my husband and other men. I wanted to be on a crew that wasn’t so quick to judge and criticize. The Echo women are more supportive than any other crew I’ve been on.

McConihe: I was going out every Wednesday for the IOD clinic and loved it. I was getting to know all the IOD sailors and I especially admired the few women who raced. There was so much to learn, especially on the tactical side.

Breed: I was tired of sailing with guys who would never let me take a hand on the tiller. I wanted to learn to sail and become a skipper. Echo has also opened up a whole new world of friendships.

Lorenzo: I have a Sunfish for summer fun with my children and I sail in the Rainbow Fleet, but I wanted the excitement and camaraderie of racing. This year they helped me mend my life and re-form my future.

Tell us about your racing tactics and expectations:

Green: Last summer we won a race, which shows we are capable of winning. Unlike the men’s crews where each have specific positions on the boat, we rotate around so that everyone gets to learn different skills.

Lorenzo: It’s like cross-training.

Southwell: Changing positions on the boat makes us stronger and more supportive of each other. We can empathize with what each individual is going through, having done it ourselves. And we don’t always have the best person in the best position like the other crews.

Anne Cross: We’re more about teaching and nurturing, not purely driven to win.

Southwell: Although it is still about winning!

Alice Rogoff Rubenstein: But it’s not about physical strength. We prepare mentally for a race and use strategy. That’s our strength.

What’s it like to race on an IOD?

Breed: It’s scary! I used to race Lightnings in the Long Island Sound as a teenager, and this is really different. IODs don’t change course that easily and the other boats don’t always stay a boat length away. You get pretty close.

Lorenzo: It’s a big boat with a lot of sail. In heavy winds, it’s tough going.

Rubenstein: IOD rigging is very difficult; there are a lot of different lines and parts, plus some really odd names to remember.

Polly Miller: They’re fast boats and there aren’t any handholds, which is very tough on short people, like me.

Southwell: The racing is very public; there’s no hiding if you make a mistake.

McConihe: Wet. When my job on Echo is foredeck or spinnaker, it’s like an old “I Love Lucy” show. You know, the one where buckets of water are dumped on Lucy.

Green: It’s very competitive sailing. We’ve got some of the best skippers around. The boats are big and the racing is aggressive. Damage and collisions are not unusual. There was a collision in this last June Invitational, and a near one recently.

What is different about the Echo crew?

Lorenzo: There’s an intimacy and bonding that happens on board. IOD sailing is very fast and dangerous, and we’ve learned to rely on each other. I love my soul sisters in this gifted group!

Rubenstein: Our skipper [Linda] is really great. She talks to us and teaches us instead of shouting commands. It’s a much better, less stressful learning environment.

Lambert: Sailing with the ladies is altogether different from my traditional role of “first mate.” We operate as a team, even as everyone is still learning. And we always—yes, always—return to the mooring laughing.

Breed: I’m more interested in the learning aspect than the racing aspect, and I find women are a little more patient. It’s been an affirming experience—learning a new skill and making new friends.

Green: I really want to bring women along in the art of sailing. The Echo crew is here to race and obviously to win, but also to improve our sailing.

Miller: I have sailed with people who scream a lot and judge your sailing technique; there’s none of that on Echo. Our main purpose is to learn and get better.

Willauer: These women work hard. They really take it seriously and want to be better sailors. They’re very competitive. And have you seen their degrees?

That’s one powerful group of women.

The Crew of the Echo

Alice Breed has summered on Nantucket her whole life and has enjoyed sailing on the island’s waters. After earning a Ph.D. in economics, she taught at three universities and was the chief banking economist at Chemical Bank. She now focuses on “home” economics with her husband and two twenty-something children, but manages to find time for tennis, golf, surfing and, of course, sailing.

Ann Cross grew up summering on Nantucket and learned to sail at the Nantucket Yacht Club as a child. She has crewed on Indians, Rhodes and Marshall Cats, but her love of Rainbows inspired her to oversee the Rainbow Fleet Parade, which she presently captains. Trained as a classical pianist, she performs regularly in Nantucket and New York City, where she resides and serves as President of the French American Conservatory of Music.

Linda Green, the Echo skipper, grew up sailing in San Francisco Bay , which makes her comfortable with Nantucket ’s windy conditions. Having graduated with degrees in mineral engineering, biology and psychology, she became a high school teacher. She now uses her teaching skills in preparing students for college entrance exams and coaching her Echo women on how to become better sailors.

Rebecca Lambert started sailing Sunfish and Hobie Cats on Lake Champlain and later kept a C&C 27 in Annapolis while living in Washington, D.C. After graduating from the Harvard Business School, she had a wide range of jobs, including Associate Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington Representative to CBS and CEO and Chairman of Lambert Communications, a satellite network for the healthcare industry. She sails Rainbows on Nantucket with her family and often “joins” her husband on their Laser, Conjugal Boat.

Sharon Lorenzo was a sailing instructor and raced as a teenager on Long Island. She was the first female instructor at the Royal Hamilton Dinghy Club in Bermuda. Since graduating with a Masters degree in Latin American art history, she has toured the country lecturing on art, most notably on the works of Frida Kahlo. She contributes to Houston’s Intown Magazine, The Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror and Nantucket Times Magazine. When she’s not racing with Echo, she’s sailing in the Rainbow Fleet.

Julie McConihe started sailing as a Senior Girl Scout in Annapolis and first raced on Nantucket with her then-husband Whitey Willauer on their Marshall Cat. She became enthralled with IOD racing while volunteering on the Race Committee boat at the Nantucket Yacht Club. Having lived on Nantucket for many years, she recently moved back to Washington, D.C., where she’s actively looking for sailing opportunities.

Polly Miller raced on a Yankee in her teens before she graduated to deep-water cruising with her family on a Carter 30. She now resides on Nantucket, where she has a hooked rug business, tends her garden, rides horseback and plays golf even in the cold seasons. She admits that she’s happiest when sailing on the open sea under the stars or just puttering around in small boats.

Alice Rogoff Rubenstein has hung out on boats most of her life. She began small-boat and daysailer racing about a dozen years ago and discovered her first Beetle Cat (aka Rainbow) at the Chatham Yacht Club. A graduate of Harvard Business School, her diverse career has included Chief Financial Officer of U.S. News and World Report and co-founder and chair of the non-profit Alaska Native Arts Foundation. She travels to Alaska regularly, but can be found most summer days in the harbor sailing her signature Stars and Stripes Rainbow.

Barbara Southwell’s first sailing experience was on a Sunfish at the age of two. She started sailing competitively at 14 for the Little Traverse Yacht Club on Lake Michigan and later for the Dartmouth Sailing Club. Her sailing career was briefly curtailed by a career as a biotechnology analyst, marriage, five children and being landlocked in Denver. The purchase of an island summer home and the formation of the Echo crew have gotten her back on the water.

By James Kinsella

The image has become synonymous with Nantucket: a group of small sailboats with brightly colored sails, moving in a line past Brant Point. To the casual observer, that’s as far as it goes. But a closer glance reveals that the boats are identical in design, each a little open catboat with a single gaff-rigged sail.

The subjects of the famous photo of the Rainbow Fleet are, in fact, Beetle Cats—a design that, after 80 years, continues to flourish in the waters of Nantucket.

“It’s just a great all-around Nantucket sailboat,” said Toby Smiles, co-captain of the Beetle Cat fleet at the Nantucket Yacht Club. “It’s very versatile. You can race it. You can pull it up on the beach. You can sail it with families. You can go out in it yourself, which is what I like to do.”

“It’s one sail,” said Nathaniel Philbrick who, with his wife Melissa, often wins local Beetle Cat races in their boat, Clio.

“It’s simple. It’s pure. It’s wooden. They really are a wonderful boat to sail in these waters.”

“When sailors get together and the subject of Beetle Cats comes up, everybody puts a smile on their face,” said Nick Judson, a world-class Nantucket sailor who learned to sail in Beetle Cats.

But it hasn’t been all clear sailing, either for the Beetle Cats or for the Nantucket Beetle Cat fleet, now estimated to exceed 70 boats. The Beetle Cat design itself narrowly escaped drifting into oblivion soon after its birth. Forty or so years later, Alan Newhouse led the way in saving the Nantucket Beetle Cats, or Rainbows as they are commonly known on the island, from extinction.

A lifetime of Beetle Cats

The Beetle Cat story gets going shortly after World War I in New Bedford, home to the Beetle family, which made whaleboats. Waldo Howland tells the tale in “A Life in Boats: The Concordia Years,” published by Mystic Seaport Museum in 1988.

“In 1920, as a fill-in project for his boat yard, John Beetle and his son modeled a 12-foot Cape Cod-type catboat that they were convinced would make a safe, pleasurable boat for young members of the Beetle family and, they hoped, for other youngsters as well,” Howland wrote. “It would be known, quite naturally, as the Beetle Cat.”

The little boats proved popular along the Massachusetts coast, especially in towns with shallow harbors, including Nantucket. People used them both for racing and informal sailing.

In 1921, John’s son Carl put the Beetle Cat into production. But Howland reported that he apparently lost interest soon after in favor of building larger boats.

Fortunately for the little cats, his father John came to their rescue, and worked on them evenings after finishing his day’s work at Greene & Wood, a nearby lumber company.

Following John Beetle’s death in 1928, the family put the boats back into regular production, aided by a teen-aged apprentice, Leo Telesmanick. In the coming decades, Telesmanick would become the master builder of Beetle Cats, his name now inextricably linked to the little boat. Telesmanick taught his Beetle Cat construction skills to Charlie York, who continues to build the little catboats at Beetle, Inc., the Wareham-based company that holds the exclusive design rights to the Beetle Cat. Despite Nantucket’s distance from Wareham, Beetle services about eight Rainbows from Nantucket. York travels to Nantucket to service some of those boats, or the boats’ owners send them to Hyannis via the Steamship Authority and York picks them up over there.

Decades ago, the Nantucket Beetles caught the fancy of a young boy, Alan Newhouse, who began sailing in a rented Beetle at age 8.

According to Newhouse, Austin Strong, a playwright and Broadway producer who was commodore of the Nantucket Yacht Club, instigated the familiar photo of the Rainbow Fleet.

“He was very theatrical,” Newhouse recalled of Strong. “He’d walk around in his commodore’s uniform. He was a great guy.”

Strong, who helped produce theatrical benefits for Nantucket Cottage Hospital, hit on the idea of having a Beetle Cat parade in the harbor about 1930. The parade, he decided, would look good if the boats had colored sails. From that, Newhouse said, he might have drawn inspiration from a set of earlier, larger sailboats in Nantucket waters, which had colored sails that had then fallen out of popularity. To record the parade, Strong tapped H. Marshall Gardiner, the leading commercial photographer on Nantucket back then.

Among the sailors in the fleet that day was C.S. Butsy Lovelace. He’s in the boat where you can see two heads. The larger of the heads belonged to his brother Richard Lovelace the skipper of the boat, known as North Star.

“We had paraded into the basin and saluted the commodore,” Lovelace recalled. “We tied all the boats together and we were being towed by a power boat.

You can see the wake of the power boat in the picture.”

Lovelace said the Rainbows had colored sails, but not necessarily all of those appeared in the print. Before turning his photographs into commercially sold postcards, Gardiner colored them by hand, sometimes taking great liberties with the real-life color of his subjects. Still, the tradition of colored sails set the Nantucket Beetles apart from mainland Beetles, most of which used mainly white sails with conventional numbers and letters.

Beetles thrived for a long time in Nantucket Harbor, whose shallow, protected waters were a natural match for the little catboats.

Rainbows reappear

But the venerable Beetle fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s.

“It dwindled pretty badly,” Newhouse said. “The small children went into faster boats. They were a little hotter, they reacted more quickly.”

Rather than bobbing gently at harbor moorings, the Rainbows rotted away in island back yards. Newhouse, remembering his early love affair with the Beetle, decided something had to be done. Around 1970, he and his fellow Yacht Club members retrieved five boats from their landlocked ignominy, encased the hulls in fiberglass to hold together the wood that had deteriorated and set them on moorings, available to anyone who wished to sail them.

The Rainbow comeback had begun.

One of the early participants was Posey Constable. She had found that being seven months pregnant made the clearance too tight between the centerboard box and the boom on the Indian sailboat that she and her husband sailed.

Undeterred, Constable, who had never skippered a boat, got one of Newhouse’s fiberglass-hulled boats into the water, rigged it and “got myself out to the racecourse,” she recalled.

A Beetle, she discovered, was really fun to sail. She soon bought another Newhouse reclamation project and quickly became a Beetle fan.

The Beetle’s forgiving nature makes it an ideal boat on which to learn how to sail, whether as a child or an adult. The width of the Beetle gives the boat stability. If the tiller is released while under sail, the boat, like other catboats, will swing into the wind, effectively stopping the boat in its tracks.

“Above all else, they’re sea-kindly,” said Steve Caulfield, a Nantucket Yacht Club member who 45 years ago was using Beetles to teach sailing at the West Dennis Yacht Club. “They’re easy to sail and they sail well.”

But keeping a Beetle moving along in the direction one wishes to go can take some work, particularly with a heavy wind behind the boat. Here the width of the Beetle makes the boat want to turn into the wind, requiring the helmsman to keep a firm grip on the tiller.

A sailor looking for speed should look elsewhere. “They’re a big bathtub,” Smiles said. That bathtub-like nature, however, also helps the Beetle handle larger swells than its small size might suggest.

“You can take it out in all kinds of weather,” Smiles advised. “Today, when it’s blowing a little, you can go right through it.”

Judson said the skills taught by the Beetle transfer well to other boats. Many of the America’s Cup skippers, he noted, have spent time in Beetle Cats.

The executive director of Nantucket Community Sailing, Judson was part of the crew that won a gold medal in sailing at the 2003 Pan American Games. Now 40, he learned to sail on a Rainbow with his mother, Cally Judson. She still keeps her Rainbow—a boat with a black hull, a bright orange sail and the name of Alexander Beetle—in the Easy Street basin.

Like Newhouse and scores of Nantucket sailors before and after him, Nick Judson is a fan of the Rainbow’s special compatibility with Nantucket. Sailors can raise the centerboard and pull into Coatue for a picnic, nose about in the shallow waters of the Creeks or sail down the channel for deeper water.

A family favorite

Indeed, the affable little boats tend to foster a kind of mutual affection with the people who sail them, whether they be parent and child, grandparent and grandchild or husband and wife. These days, Henry Gewirtz is sailing My Huckleberry Friend, a Rainbow whose sail is solid blue with a white star. Gewirtz’s wife Nancy, who died recently of cancer, chose the name.

Miffed by Henry’s decision some years ago to sell off his cruising sailboat and replace it with a racing sailboat, Nancy decided to get the Rainbow as her own. She sailed it at the Nantucket Yacht Club, where she did well in races.

Like Nancy, Henry’s a Beetle fan.

“It’s a basic, pretty boat,” he said. “It’s a great boat for one person or two. You can gunk hole it, you can race it. It has gorgeous workmanship.”

According to York at Beetle Cat, about 3,850 of the little catboats have been built since the original by John Beetle and his son, Carl, in 1920. Since World War II, Beetle, Inc. has registered and sequentially numbered Beetle Cat 2,720, of which about 2,500 survive.

As the big sailboats set off in this year’s Opera House Cup Regatta, the Rainbows will have their annual moment in the spotlight, sailing past Brant Point in homage to the classic image created eight decades ago.

“It’s such fun,” Constable said. “We’re such showoffs. The Rainbows,” she said, “offer a great camaraderie.”

Judson, who, like other Nantucket sailors, praises Newhouse for resurrecting the Rainbows, welcomes the fleet’s resurgence.

“To have a classic boat like that come back on the island is wonderful,” he added.
“It’s a good fleet—I’m really glad I’ve been part of it,” Newhouse said. “I love the Beetle Cats very much.”

By Sharon Lorenzo

Artistic couples throughout history have fascinated critics and historians alike: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler. But few, if any, compare to the multi-generational approach to painting from three generations of a single family, the Wyeths. Newell Convers Wyeth, his son Andrew and grandson Jamie all worked out of the same art studio on their family compound in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. All three men have incorporated different styles and techniques into their individual works, but they have a shared passion for the sea.

All three have sought to share that passion with their viewers.

NC Wyeth, born in 1882, weathered the Stock Market crash of 1929 by using his natural artistic ability as an illustrator for Scribners Publishing. During moments of leisure, the elder Wyeth spent his time painting at the easel. A work that captures both his artistic talents and his love of the sea is “Eight Bells,” an oil-on-panel dating from 1937. The painting’s title refers to U.S. Naval lingo meaning an eight o’clock A.M. departure. The scene Wyeth depicts is of a nautical jaunt, presumably commencing at eight in the morning, with family friend Clyde Stanley at the helm of a Maine leisure craft in the Port Clyde harbor.

In this particular work, Wyeth chose to live vicariously through his son Andrew, born in 1917, whom we see in the cabin below, completely absorbed in his own artwork. Interestingly, some 48 of Andrew’s watercolor works had already appeared in the Macbeth Gallery in New York by 1937, a success usually attributed to instruction by his father.

Drawn to the water

Another Wyeth water scene—this one a tempera-on-panel from 1946 by Andrew Wyeth—features a lone gull soaring above a beach with waves crashing on the shore below. The viewer also sees his wife Betsy and son Nicholas walking the beach in the remote distance. By age 27, Andrew was married with two sons, and they occasionally took day trips from Chadds Ford to the beach at Stone Harbor in New Jersey.

Daily walks had always been part of Andrew’s artistic process, as if the solitude allowed him to soak up the environment for his painting later in the studio. Andrew was introduced to the medium of tempera by his brother–in-law Peter Hurd—a contemporary realist painter—who had written out instructions for working on gesso panels with mineral pigments,

egg yolks and distilled water. This work is Andrew at his best: a voice of solitary realism at a time when his peers like Pollock were immersed in a world of self-indulgent abstract painting, which was mesmerizing the art world during the war years in New York.

The third of the Wyeth triumvirate is Jamie, born in 1946 to a dynasty that was well-established and successful on all counts until the tragic death of NC Wyeth in 1945, in a car-train collision. Working in the studio of his grandfather, Jamie has told many that he feels the presence of his grandfather in the brushes, the costumes and the arrangement of objects in the Chadds Ford studio. Jamie withdrew from public education at the age of 12 to be privately tutored at home, which allowed him to concentrate on his own painting. Working with his aunt Carolyn and father Andrew, Jamie embraced both the attention to detail of his grandfather and the

solemnity of composition and color of his father. Jamie has forged ahead to formulate his own mode of painting with impasto paint and an expressive hand. An exemplary work in Jamie Wyeth’s maritime-inspired canon is “Feeding Gulls,” painted in 1999. Bright, bold brush strokes coupled with a complicated composition fill the canvas with action and refracted light on water. One can almost hear the gulls screeching for their share of the catch, whether a small baitfish or a discarded sandwich tossed overboard.

Inspired by dreams

Each generation of Wyeths eventually moved into another realm of painting that involved formal and informal portraiture. In his later years, NC noted that he awoke from a dream in which he had a chat with George Washington. The resulting painting of the two engaged in conversation is one of NC’s most curious works. Similarly, Andrew became famous—and infamous—for his works using his neighbor Christina as his intimate model for a series of detailed, portrait-like works. Jamie has had unique opportunities to engage in various commissions with a gallery of ubiquitous personalities, including John F. Kennedy and Rudolph Nureyev.

In numerous exhibitions of the dynasty—which have often looked at the inter-relatedness of the shared studio of these generations of Wyeth painters—curators and critics have hypothesized that perhaps their mutual visual acuity is an inherited trait, much like blue eyes, brown hair, near-sightedness or blood type. Whether nature or nurture, there is remarkable

evidence for a multi-generational dedication to the painterly tradition, which leaves Jamie with a familial legacy both to emulate and surpass. One noted American scholar, when asked about Jamie’s work, noted that in this situation, his burden is to develop his own hand and distinctive competence, differentiating himself from his ancestors while building on the family’s success with his own brilliance and determination.

In person, Jamie is a charming figure with a quixotic mix of charm, wit, sensitivity and detachment. He is as comfortable in a tuxedo at a New York dinner party with corporate moguls as he seems to be living alone in Maine on his private island retreat.

Today, Jamie paints alone in his studio on Monhegan Island, where the birds and beasts are some of his closest friends and models. He recently told the story of trying to paint a pig at his family farm in Chadds Ford. The pig kept lurching and attacking the canvas. Jamie consulted a local farmer, who suggested he put a soothing CD of music nearby. He was able to return to this painting with the pig sitting quietly, mesmerized by the Mozart piano concerto.

By Amy Jenness

Each time Craig Kay begins to restore a painting, he says a little prayer to the artist who created it and asks that he or she guide his hand.

“Painting conservation is part science and part intuition,” Kay said. “For me it comes from a school of healing. I try to connect with the artist’s original intention.”

Kay combines his knowledge and love of 18th- and 19th-century art with a hi-tech, sophisticated bag of restoration tricks that include chemical cleaning rocesses, special putty for repairing rips and chips, space-age lining materials and restretching techniques for damaged or sagging canvas.

Working in his tidy, light-filled studio on Atlantic Avenue on Nantucket, Kay can spend hours bent over a work, painstakingly cleaning it with oversized Q-tips and filling tiny, pinpoint-sized holes.

He starts by “opening a cleaning window,” which is to say he spot-checks different areas of the painting to see how the materials react to his cleaning agents.

If one solvent doesn’t cut all the way through decades of smoke, dust and yellowed varnish, he then tries a stronger one. If another solvent is too strong, he dilutes it.

When he’s satisfied that he’s got the right tool for the job, he begins cleaning the painting in sections. He’s always analyzing where he’s going, always asking questions. When he’s finished, will the painting look like the original? Does the owner want it to look like the original? Is that appropriate?

Honoring oldness

“Here’s an issue to think about,” he explained. “Why do anything? Why even bother being a conservator? If you’re an old person, you’re an old person and you don’t want to look like you’re twenty. It’s the same for paintings. I need to honor the artist’s original intent, but I need to honor the painting’s oldness, too.”

For his recent restoration of a Wendell Macy painting, Kay cleaned it, restretched the canvas across a frame and added textile layers to the back of the canvas, which gave it renewed strength. But he was careful to leave the noticeable spidery crackling.

In another case, a client balked when she came to pick up her painting.

“She said, ‘That’s not my painting,’” Kay recalled. “She had a painting in mind that she had grown up with. So she knew the painting in a very different way than the artist did,” he said. Eventually Kay added a layer of yellow varnish, which returned it closer to the owner’s vision of what it should look like.

“When a painting comes in to me and it is one-hundred years old or more, I’m usually wondering how it held together for so long, not that it’s dirty or chipped,” he said.

The son of an artist and himself a painter, photographer and stained glass craftsman, Kay has spent his life surrounded by art. While a student at the Rhode Island School of Design 30 years ago, he met a man who restored paintings. Curious, Kay offered to be his apprentice and ended up working with him for five years.

“I walked into that studio and I saw what he was doing,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, man. What a cool thing to do.’”

He first started coming to Nantucket as a college student in 1973. In the early 1980s, he began conserving paintings here, receiving his first job from antiques dealer Sam Sylvia.

Kay said Nantucket is a great place for a conservation studio because of its rich history as an artist’s colony, the current vibrant art gallery scene and because there are so many sophisticated collectors living and visiting here. In addition, there are great painting collections held by island institutions like the Artists’ Association of Nantucket, the Nantucket Historical Association and the Nantucket Atheneum.

“I get all kinds of people coming through that door with a painting under their arm, and each one of them has a great story about their treasure,” Kay said.

But changing other people’s artwork can be a stressful business. “The signature is the most nerve-wracking. It’s the last thing to go on, it’s frequently the most delicate part of the painting and it’s the most important thing. You gotta’ have the signature,” he said.

Unhurried progress

You can’t be in a hurry in this job. An oil painting is created in layers, with the fine lines that give it perspective going on last. Kay said that he examines a piece in the beginning to assess how the artist painted the scene and to assess how it was stretched on the canvas and mounted in a frame. He begins the work in tiny movements. He often magnifies the surface so that he can see the detail better.

“It’s the same procedure in whatever I do, whether it’s a ten-foot painting or a two-inch painting,” he said.

His biggest project, a 30-foot mural in a Connecticut church that depicts Christ’s life, took him six months to restore.

He said his most nerve-wracking project was a painting about a foot-square that took a week to clean because the paint was so delicate.

“Conservation is very tactile. You’d think it would be visual, but it’s not. It’s a sense of feel; it’s constantly touching the canvas to see how it feels. There is a visual element; you have to have a sense of aethstetics, a sense of what looks beautiful,” he said.

From a practical standpoint, Kay said his biggest priority is always to make the structure that holds the painting as sturdy as possible so it will last another 100 years.

“I know that most of the paintings I work on don’t go back into a controlled environment. For all I know, the guy probably throws it in the back of his car and goes surfing when he leaves here. So I like to make the paintings secure. For me, structural integrity always comes first,” he said.

Kay calls himself “one of those crazy collectors” and is a frequent prowler at art auctions, on the lookout for 18th- and 19th-century paintings. He brokers works of art for many of his clients and often buys, restores and resells artwork himself. “There are dealers and then there are collectors. I’m a collector,” he said.

This spring he started working with the Artists’ Association of Nantucket—which has received a grant to restore its works—on a survey of the AAN collection. He will be restoring those paintings in need of TLC. This summer, he traveled to London to learn new cleaning techniques.

Aside from his passion for art, Kay also builds model rockets and is a surfer. He and his wife Anne spend part of each winter in Hawaii, where surfing—not painting—is his daily pursuit. But it’s the art conservation work that makes it possible for Kay to stay on Nantucket.

“I have been able to spend my entire adult life on this beautiful island, with its gorgeous natural spaces and its great community. I feel really grateful,” Kay remarked. “The conservation work has allowed me to live here. Taking care of people’s treasured artwork is one of my ways of giving back to the island that I love.”

The adage says “too many cooks spoil the broth,” but Susan and David Hostetler would certainly disagree. For many years, the pair has regularly invited friends and colleagues into their home for cooking

parties, with all guests ushered into their kitchen for food preparation and presentation. What began as a tradition of Sunday brunches at their Ohio home has evolved into once or twice weekly luncheons and dinner parties during their annual seasonal stay on Nantucket.

David, an artist and retired professor of sculpture at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, has created works that appear in prominent museums throughout the United States. Susan manages David’s Nantucket gallery on Old South Wharf and oversees the business and promotion of his work. Their bright and cheery Nantucket home holds many sculptures and other art by David and by his artist colleagues from Nantucket and elsewhere.

As a hostess and party organizer, Susan has found their shared-cooking events—the two occasionally throw catered affairs as well—to be engaging and enlightening experiences. “The parties bring out a certain social dimension of people that

you normally wouldn’t see at a regular dinner party,” she said.

Although Susan suggests the general menu theme to her guests, they bring along their own unique recipes.

And sometimes they bring more friends. Before the mid-July dinner party shown here, Hostetler recalled, “Around noon, there were three couples invited and by the time the gallery closed that day, there were twelve people coming.” Sometimes, Susan meets interesting people during the day at their Nantucket gallery and invites them over for dinner. “The more, the merrier,” she said.

Susan also relishes setting the table.

She collects small objects to give each table a new theme. Once she decorated the whole table with tiny children’s toys.

And, of course, David’s art creates a colorful and engaging background throughout the house. “People find moments of serenity with the artwork while they are at the house enjoying the evening,” said Susan.

“It is a different sort of experience than going into the gallery downtown.” Houseguests often include avid private collectors of David’s work.

For this mid-summer meal, Susan suggested seafood and other recipes with a Mediterranean flair. Because the island offers plentiful fresh produce at this time of the year, grilled vegetables and fresh fruit salads supplemented the main course of seared salmon with a beurre blanc sauce.

Guest and friend Michael Hite, along with his wife Diane Zuckerman, selected wines from his home cellar. Colorful hand-blown glasses and candlesticks—made by guest and glass artist Robert Dane, joining the dinner party with his wife and business partner Jane Dane—decorated the table. Other guests of the Hostetlers included Judy Greenberg Seinfeld, Susan Lister Locke, Patty Pennington and Mary Hite.