TO Name a BOAT

In order to envision our next cruising adventure, we had to look to the past.

- ROB MULLEN

Eibbor and Knarf ’s parents were kidnapped by Frost Giants. The boys desperately needed help. Scooter Squirrel raced to Winston Woodchuck, who dived into his burrow, frantically digging until he reached the tunnels of the Dwarves. They summoned Frey, who came with his longship, Skidbladnir, and took the boys to Asgard to plead their case to Odin. Skidbladnir was enchanted so that, among other magical traits, it always had fair winds and got where it needed to go.

Such were the bedtime stories Dad told my brother, Frank, and me more than 60 years ago in the wild hills of West Bolton, Vermont, overlooking Lake Champlain. Despite the US Navy being born on Lake Champlain and the famous Capt. Phillips living a few miles from our house, Vermont is the only landlocked state in New England, so it might not seem an apt setting for nautical lore and traditions. However, a few years after my grandfather returned from World War II, he and my then-preteen father built a 16-foot Moth and ignited an obsession in Dad for sailboats. He found plans for a 26-foot ketch that became his lifelong white whale. I grew up with those plans and, under Dad’s tutelage, learned almost every rig that had sailed for the past thousand years by copying illustrations in The Book of Old Ships by Henry B. Culver and Gordon Grant.