Flight of the Owl

It was the summer of 1952. The Eisenhower/Stevenson race was in full swing. I was in my junior year, studying naval architecture at the University of Michigan and had been offered a summer job at Jakobson Shipyard in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Practical experience is very useful to a designer. It helps prevent you from designing something that can’t be built.

I decided to get there from Detroit by sea. My boat was the a Luedtke Interlake catboat, a 22ft-by-8ft marconirigged centerboarder designed by Charles D. Mower and built in 1918. Auxiliary power was a 7hp Scott-Atwater outboard, which never failed to start. This turned out to be fortunate. Cooking was on a charcoal grill in the cockpit, and berthing was on two Army-surplus canvas stretchers upon which you could sleep, so long as you also got up periodically to rest. Someone had appended a crackerbox cabin over the cockpit, which was awfully ugly but kept