For many of us who live north of latitude 43 north, summer is sacred. It’s an elemental imperative of our being, a compulsion imprinted on our DNA, to experience as many minutes of the fleeting season of light and warmth as possible. This cannot be done inside, so moments when we don’t have to be in an office or a house are doubly precious. Fortunate seaside worker that I am, I can make a beeline to my boat, moored a scant block away from my office, when the workday ends. Or just go home, where the deck awaits, along with the First Mate and a glass of wine. This is a place well suited for the passive enjoyment of summer, embraced by garden blooms and foliage and rugged stands of trees that need a good trimming but still allow avenues of views of Lake Michigan, whose water is typically rendered a rich shade of cobalt blue this time of the day by the remains of the sea breeze.

If summer is sacred, then it’s fitting that the ambience described above inspires a certain reverence. We tend to talk about the happenings of the day in muted tones so as not to shut out the rustle of the garden grasses, the calls of the resident birds and the whisper of small waves breaking at the base of the bluff.

When these sounds—you might call them, with apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, the sounds of silence—are drowned out by noxious man-made noise, it is as though precious moments of summer are stolen, never to be replaced.

We can’t see our neighbors through the leafy screens between our properties, but at times we can certainly hear them. They are good people, but their idea of enjoying summer often involves operating equipment powered by internal combustion engines at the very time we are savoring the late afternoon quiet. The south neighbor’s new John Deere riding lawn mower is so loud that I suspect the manufacturer intentionally left it inadequately muffled to satisfy the inner tractor driver of a typical male owner. The north neighbor tills his garden with an antique machine dating to an era when it was not understood that loud noise causes hearing loss. To appreciate its impact on the ear, think of a dentist’s drill amplified a few hundred times.

We could escape the din by going inside, shutting the doors and windows and turning on the AC and TV. Since that would be a lot like winter, it’s not an acceptable option. I am fortunate to have a better alternative that I’ll get to shortly, but still I worry that the ever present and ever growing blight of noise is a sign of a civilization going backward. I tried to imagine the other evening, when the south neighbor fired up his tractor five minutes after I came home from the office, how much quieter the world must have been before the gas-powered lawn mower was invented and grass had to be cut with a pushed reel mower. Besides less noise, most of us would have a lot less grass to look at, hardly a bad thing in the scheme of things. (Disclosure: As the owner and user of lawn mowers, a chain saw and a leaf blower, all I can say in my defense is that I never use them during cocktail hour.)

It would be one thing if the noise blight were being forced on society, but a big portion of the human population seems to want it, indeed can’t get along without it. How else to explain that even expensive restaurants of high repute feel they are pleasing customers by inflicting a music soundtrack on their diners? Stores do the same thing to shoppers. People go to parks and beaches in search of natural beauty and take their noise with them, polluting the atmosphere with radio music or, infinitely worse, talk radio blather.

At least it can be said that sort of noise is incidental to some folks’ enjoyment of life, but other noise that deprives us of the enjoyment of summer is premeditated. Making noise is the goal and the racket is the reward. I know, the appeal of motorcycles is the wind in your face, the freedom of the open road, the thrill of G-pulling acceleration, etc. etc. That’s part of it, but another part, maybe the biggest part, is generating noise that can make my neighbor’s garden root-canal machine seem like a purring kitten. Harley-Davidson is perfectly capable of making quiet motorcycles. It doesn’t because so many motorcycle riders need to announce they are free spirits of the open road by detonating thundering exhaust explosions near as many forced listeners as possible.

I said I was lucky, and so are most of the people reading this column. We can go sailing. Of all the wonderful things about sailing, the one that gets more wonderful everyday, because the world gets noisier everyday, is that it’s our ticket to escape the clatter, for not only are sailboats quiet, but they can take us to where there is no noise.

Not that getting there is easy. The places where many sailboats live can be noisy. The other day, the owner of a boat on a pier near where my boat is docked, a sailboat no less, spent two hours cleaning his deck with a gasoline-powered pressure washer, the kind whose manufacturers warn should not be used without hearing protection. I went home to listen to a John Deere tractor.

Even away from a slip or mooring, there are auditory hurdles to clear on the way to the quiet. Jet Skis, for example. Or, if you are truly unfortunate, you can find yourself within earshot of what may be the most offensive noisemaker in the universe, on water or land. The purpose of the cigarette boat when it was invented was reputedly drug smuggling, but now it has morphed into something arguably more harmful to society—making eardrum-crushing noise that is utterly out of place in the marine environment for the express purpose of showing off. Boatbuilders have all the technology they need to produce long, sleek, sexy powerboats that can cruise at 60 miles per hour or more without excessive noise, but when catering to the cigarette boat crowd they don’t—because making noise is the whole point of these ultimate narcissist’s toys. Regular readers of this column will recognize the name of one of these boats I frequently come across that speaks volumes about the cigarette boat phenomenon—Mine’s Bigger. (No, I’m not making this up.) There has been some speculation as to what the name means. I guess it refers to the boat’s decibel output.

One of the reasons sailing allows us to get away from such din is that the noisemakers don’t want to go where there is nobody to hear their noise. Sail far enough offshore, and you’re in aural nirvana.

It’s not that sailboats are silent. They exist in a world of sound. The wind and sea can be loud. Blocks, lines and sails are all soundmakers. Modern, thin-skinned boats amplify the bubbling and surging of the water against the hull and are veritable symphonies of sound below deck.

Sounds, yes, but not noise. What you hear when you’re sailing are the sounds of silence.

When sailing makes it onto the nightly TV news, it’s time for sailors to cringe, because it will likely release a stream of ignorant stereotypes and clichés about the pastime we think is wholesome and good and just about the finest way imaginable to spend leisure time.

So it was with Tony Hayward’s not-so-excellent sailing adventure. Hayward decided to take a day off from his job as CEO of BP to sail in the Round the Island Race on the Solent in England on the 52-foot racing sailboat he and two friends own. When Hayward was discovered sitting on the starboard quarter behind the helmsman, a media storm blew up and images of the captain of industry (but not captain of the boat), looking as though he were trying to sail incognito, all scrunched up and covered from head to toe in foul-weather gear on a sunny day, were plastered all over the world’s electronic and print information portals. And, of course, the world was shocked, shocked with many exclamation points. Shocked not so much because he took a break from manning the desk where the buck stops in the Gulf of Mexico oil well disaster, but because he went sailing.

Worse than sailing, really— he went “yachting,” the media’s gerund of choice when describing what rich people do on the water. The race around the Isle of Wight attracts some 1,700 sailboats, most of which are rather prosaic and quite small, yet to the media it was a “glitzy yacht race.”

It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for Hayward, in spite of my contempt for his company’s negligence. Taking a break is not a mortal sin.

I will have to admit, though, that in this case taking a break by going sailing was a public relations sin. Hayward would have gotten off easier if he chosen almost any other recreation on his day off, say, horseback riding or playing in a croquet tournament. It wasn’t just that the image of him out on the comparatively pristine water of the Solent while his oil well continued to foul the Gulf was too much for some to choke down. It was that he went sailing, which everyone knows is a metaphor for the wretched excesses of the indolent rich.

Abby Sunderland’s sailing adventure got the attention of the media too (the gamut from staid newspapers to hyperbolic Internet blogs), although in her case some in the press actually got it right. Syndicated Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts was spot-on when he described Abby as a “teenager from Thousand Oaks, California, whose parents allowed her to risk her life in search of a dubious and ultimately meaningless record.”

Abby and her parents hoped she would become the youngest person to sail alone around the world nonstop. She was one of the youngsters I wrote about in the February issue in a column titled, “The quest for fame has teenage girls chasing Joshua Slocum.”
Since then, Abby has found fame, though not in the manner her parents had hoped. She was rescued from her dismasted boat (which was then abandoned) in the far southern reaches of the Indian Ocean in an elaborate operation involving a number of ships and aircraft.

She is now the poster girl for a controversy over parents exploiting children for financial gain, but before we go there I want to say this about Abby Sunderland, based on the grit she displayed even in failure: This is one brave girl who obviously possesses qualities of determination and commitment developed well beyond those of many adults and certainly of many of her contemporaries, who were strolling malls and chirping into cell phones while she was sailing a 40-foot boat in conditions that would tax any sailor, no matter how experienced.

What’s more, if her voyage had resembled the interpretation of it her media-savvy father has been spinning since her rescue—as a sort of singlehanded Outward Bound experience for a splendidly prepared lifelong sailor who has been yearning for years to take on the challenge of sailing around the world—many would have thought it an admirable quest.

Alas, this was something different—a heavily publicized campaign to set a record with the goal of harvesting all of the commercial possibilities that come these days with fame, however fleeting. Pursuit of the foolish record set up a series of dominoes that fell one after the other until the high school girl was left on a disabled boat in 25-foot seas 2,000 miles from Australia and far from other vessels.

The good weather window closed as problems with the boat delayed departure from California, yet the Sunderlands pressed on, lest some other teenager swipe the coveted record. Dangerous weather became inevitable when more time was lost stopping for repairs in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and Cape Town, South Africa. It was storm season by the time Abby set out across the Indian Ocean.

Abby could have attempted her circumnavigation in much gentler weather if she had waited until the Southern Ocean winter was over, but then there would be no record for her. Another teenage girl, Jessica Watson of Australia, 4 months older than Abby, was well along in her around-the world record quest.

For her adventure, Abby was given an ultra-lightweight, water-ballasted, canting-keel Open 40, a boat so complex and sophisticated (it had no permanent backstay) that it would have tested the skills and physical strength of a mature, experienced around-the-world sailor. Maybe the idea was that a really fast boat would give Abby another edge in completing the circumnavigation before she was too old to qualify for the record. (Jessica Watson sailed a comparatively heavy 34-footer, strong and seaworthy but no speed demon.)

On the other hand, while Abby’s boat may have been hard to handle, it might well have saved her life. Built for the 2002 Around Alone race, it was unsinkable and self-righting, and proved to be a safe lifeboat for Abby in the long wait for rescue.
All of this is prologue to the most disturbing revelation in the whole disturbing drama: Abby’s father Laurence Sunderland was reported to have signed a contract to do a TV reality show about Abby and the other kids after she set sail. It was to be called “Adventures in Sunderland.”

Sound familiar? As I wrote in February, “it may be recalled it was a shot at becoming famous by appearing in a reality TV show that motivated a Colorado father to release a spaceshiplike balloon and call 911 to report that his young son was trapped aboard the high-flying craft. At least it can be said that the balloon boy spectacle was a fraud. Sadly, children sailing around the world alone in pursuit of fame is the real thing.”

I think of them as a ghost fleet, even though they’re not dead. Not only are they not dead, it seems that some of them will live forever. So I guess they really are like ghosts, or benign zombies.

The ghost fleet consists of fiberglass sailboats made by builders no longer in business, built during the two to three decades following that magic moment in the late 1950s when it dawned that mass production of sailboats of any size up to 60 feet or more was practical.

No one knows for sure how big the ghost fleet is, but it certainly numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Within that number there are easily more than a thousand different models. Even more amazing—they are the products of more than 75 different builders.

The last number is no doubt conservative. Besides mining my memory (I can still win the occasional bet with skeptical friends by identifying the make and model of a production sailboat built during the Lyndon Johnson administration), I did only rudimentary research. I didn’t include any boatbuilders that are still in business (not Beneteau, Hunter, Catalina or any others producing boats today) and excluded non-American builders except a few that had a big presence in the U.S. market.

Still, I came up with an incredibly long list of now-defunct builders that were producing fiberglass sailboats during that furious burst of boatbuilding in a roughly 25-year span of the 20th century and left us with that vast sailing resource—the ghost fleet. I hope a business school somewhere is studying this phenomenon. It has to be one of the most powerful explosions of entrepreneurial energy in the annals of business. During the same period, the number of automakers in the world might have been a couple of dozen. Think of other products—television sets, farm implements, vacuum cleaners, motorcycles, bowling balls. It’s a safe guess that none of them was being produced by 75 manufacturers at more or less the same time, as were sailboats.

Some of these start-up sailboat makers were lured by optimistic (and to some extent accurate) business plans predicting that untold numbers of Americans were waiting impatiently to become yachtsmen through the magic of plastic and mass production, but for others, especially those who were in the pastime of sailing before the industry of sailing, the cachet of being a boatbuilder probably had something to do with it. But this new iteration of boatbuilding didn’t have quite the romance of creating boats from wood, and it didn’t require traditional shipwright skills. The hulls of some of the grandest fiberglass yachts were built largely by minimum-wage workers. Some of them came from “plants” that were essentially parking lots under the California or Florida sun or jerry-built Visqueen shelters. There was a fair amount of experimentation at first and sometimes shortcuts were irresistible, such as the infamous chopper gun that made hulls in a jiffy by spraying a slurry of chopped fiberglass into molds instead of hand applying layers of woven roving. I’m not saying these boats were shoddy. Some weren’t as good as others, but almost all of them did the job, and they endured. Boy, did they endure! The ghost fleet is testament to that.

There are superbly built boats in the ghost fleet too, with perfectly sound hulls at age 50 or older. But the most remarkable thing about the fleet is its diversity. The estimate of more than 1,000 models is not hyperbole. There are 54 different Columbias, for example. That’s an average of more than three new Columbia designs per year for the life of the company from 1961 to 1978. Pearson, America’s pioneer builder of cruising-racing fiberglass sailboats, contributed no less than 76 models, among them several of the true classics of the fiberglass era, well-built boats with lines that are easy on the eye, including the Triton and Alberg 35, designed by Carl Alberg, and the Vanguard 33 designed by Phil Rhodes. If they look a little different than most boats in the ghost fleet it’s because they were basically wood-boat designs from the 1950s with traditional wine-glass sections. It didn’t take long for designers to realize there were almost no limits to fiberglass shapes, no curve too complex to execute in plastic.

Each of many other big producers, the likes of Cal, Ericson, Morgan, Irwin and O’Day, contributed dozens of different designs to the fleet. These are instantly recognizable names to many sailing enthusiasts. Other builders are more obscure. Who remembers Seidelmann Yachts, a New Jersey firm in business for less than a decade that produced 25- to 30-foot boats designed by company namesake Bob Seidelmann? Or how about Laguna Yachts? The California company built about a dozen models over 13 years in the 1970s and ‘80s.

It would be a mistake to associate the ghost fleet with derelicts. I’m ruling out of fleet membership any boat that has not been launched or sailed in three years; no forgotten boats growing barnacles in marina slips or accumulating guano on moorings or in permanent residence in backyards, and certainly none in landfills. Ghost fleet boats are for most part active and well loved. Owners’ associations for these relics of the early years of fiberglass boatbuilding abound. Proud owners trace their boat’s provenance with the same devotion some people unravel family genealogy.

The ghost fleet includes a lot of boats that have had hard use and look like it, but there are also plenty of sparkling gems, boats that are not only beautifully maintained but are examples of superior breeding. I’ve seen gorgeous examples of the Tartan 27, the compact centerboarder that was the first fiberglass design by Sparkman & Stephens. You can find exquisite renditions of three classic 40-footers that still regularly win offshore races: the Block Island 40, dating to 1950s, one of many outstanding designs in the fleet by the late Bill Tripp; the Columbia 40, a fast and pretty Charley Morgan design first built in 1964; and the Cal 40, the revolutionary Bill Lapworth design that launched a new era of high-performance production boats.

Some boats in the ghost fleet, on the other hand, are acquired tastes. The Buccaneer 27, to mention just one, is so ugly it’s almost charming. Something about the way portholes in the cabinhouse and at the top of the high-freeboard hull are stacked on top of one another creates aesthetic chaos. But, of course, there are owners who love the boat dearly and, yes, there is a Buccaneer owners’ association.

The existence of the ghost fleet is considered by some to be the bane of the contemporary alive-and-kicking sailboat building industry, the idea being that the ever-growing stock of used boats deters purchases of new boats. I disagree. Many owners of ghost fleet boats aren’t potential customers for new boats because they can’t afford them. (New boats are expensive, but that is not to say they are overpriced; most people would be surprised to learn how slim the profit margins are in sailboat building.) Old used boats bring new people into sailing and give them the opportunity to learn to love it—and in many cases to become new boat buyers one day.

Long live the ghost fleet.

People used to talk about dreaming in Technicolor, back when movies were still on film. Most sailing dreams and reveries should be in color. When I want to change my mental subject from something irritating, boring or depressing, I can conjure a perfectly pixilated digital sailing image in crisp, dazzling colors like you see in the photographs in this magazine. When I’m in a more reflective mood, I might opt for an inspiration from an Edward Hopper painting, perhaps the one called “The Long Leg” of a small gaff-rigged sloop sailing full and by in milky blue water, its sails and hull, and the lighthouse and sand spit in the background, aglow in highlights of sunshine.

Color is so much a part of it that it seems odd to think of sailing in black and white. Yet I sometimes do that because some of my best remembered sailing experiences happened at night when there was no color.

Have you noticed that at night crewmates of the on-watch tend to speak with lowered voices, sometimes in whispers? It’s not out of deference for the off-watch—they’re usually too zonked to be bothered by voices in the night. It’s more out of deference for the quiet of night sailing, when everything seems hushed except the natural sounds of the boat, the slap of wavelets on the bow, the gurgle of disturbed water passing under the transom, the occasional squeak of a block. So quiet is the ambience of a light-air night at sea that the ratcheting of a winch, a sound that barely registers in daytime sailing, can seem a jarring intrusion.

We sail at night usually because we have to as part of a cruising passage or a race, but there is a reason to make sailing in the dark an end in itself: If you’re far enough offshore, and far enough away from overlit urban areas, you will be treated to sights most people in developed areas of the world never see. Someone has estimated that 50 percent of Americans cannot see the Milky Way from their homes, a consequence of the excesses of public and private lighting that have ruined the night sky with light pollution. Is it ironic or just sad that the more people crowd themselves into cities and their suburbs, the more afraid of the dark they seem, compelled to defeat the night with mega-lumens of man-produced light?

You don’t have to sail too far from urban areas—cities without stars—to see the Milky Way and then, as the loom of artificial light fades, much more of the cosmos. Sailors have the advantage of not only a purer darkness, but a view unobstructed by buildings and trees and, at the usual slow pace of sailing, plenty of time to contemplate the heavens. The value of the word “awe” has been deflated by its profligate use by the verbally challenged to describe reactions to everything from an oversized hamburger to an iPad, but it is still useful to describe what one feels under a sparkling canopy of stars on a dark sea. Maybe the word was invented by thrilled stargazers in ancient times.

The night sky can inspire that feeling whenever it is not obscured by clouds, but sometimes it goes to extra lengths to dazzle us. If you haven’t seen the northern lights from a sailboat well offshore, I urge you to seek out the experience (forecasts of the magnetic storms that cause the phenomenon are available) before you shuffle off this coil. I can best describe my last encounter with aurora borealis as sailing toward a towering swirl of green and pink light that appeared as an alien visitor to an otherwise black and white world.

Lest I wax too romantic here, I should acknowledge that night is not always the sailor’s friend. I recall an Atlantic passage when I dreaded its arrival. Low clouds and 30- to 40-knot winds were present day and night, but in the gray light of day the helmsman could see the great seas marching up from astern and, aided by the reference points of the horizon and distinctive clouds, could steer down their steep slopes with a measure of control. At night, with the horizon gone, black water indistinguishable from black air, the seas came without warning. Sometimes, gazing aft, a crewman harnessed in the cockpit could see a subtle darkening as a wave rose to displace more of the sky, and a ragged line of gray high above our stern indicating a breaking wave top, but this was of no help in steering, and sometimes the boat skidded down the face of the wave on its side to the trough below.

Much as I value that experience, it’s not my preferred subject for night-sailing reveries. A better one is a spooky smooth-water phenomenon I’ve experienced while racing at night. By smooth I mean not flat—there were swells—but water so devoid of evidence of wind that there was not so much as a ripple, not a cat’s paw, not a ruffle, on its surface, as though it were a puddle of glossy fiberglass resin. Yet there was wind, plenty of it, not on the water but far aloft, and it drove the boat at fabulous speed. With all of that high-altitude breeze pressing on our tall rig, the boat was heeled, elevating the windward rail high over the glassy water. From that vantage point, the sensations were surreal, as though we were riding a ghost ship propelled through the inky atmosphere by some otherworldly force.

I’ve experienced the phenomenon more than once, but never during day, only when sailing in black and white.