The drunken sailor is dead—long live the temperate tippling sailor

"What should we do with the drunken sailor?”

The old sea chantey asks the question, but we don’t have to answer it any more. The drunken sailor is an obsolete stereotype. Today’s sailors are as temperate and prudent in their drinking habits as your average golfer, horseshoe pitcher or ballroom dancer.

This doesn’t mean, though, that Jack Tar has to be a dull boy. Sailing still offers satisfying opportunities for the consumption of fermented and distilled spirits, and I for one think we should take full advantage of them.

Examples of these drinkable moments include sunset (sunset being defined as a period spanning several hours before and after the actual disappearance of the sun beneath the horizon) anywhere in the world on a sailboat and immediately after any race regardless of the time of day.

There are other times, of course, when a sailboat offers an ambience well suited for the enjoyment of an alcoholic drink. These are presumably pleasant times, which goes to show how things have changed. We owe the drunken sailor stereotype to a time when shipboard ambience was so exceedingly miserable that strong drink was an essential palliative.

Credit the English Navy for creating the drunken sailor by making service aboard its ships such a brutal experience that sailors were wont to devote every waking moment ashore to drowning the wretched memory of it, thus creating a legend of chronic inebriation and mindless hell-raising. Sailors were drunk ashore, but only mildly buzzed aboard their ships. The commanders of the English Navy might have been hardhearted, but they weren’t stupid. The daily tot of rum and often a tankard of beer with breakfast mellowed the misery, a cheap vaccine against the mutiny virus.

It was effective on land and inland waters too. Napoleon marched with wagons full of brandy for his troops. Lewis and Clark packed kegs of whiskey sufficient to last until the party was far enough into the northwestern wilderness to make turning back impractical.

Even the American Navy took a page from the British book on booze. A friend sent me a copy of a purported excerpt from the log of the USS Constitution revealing that when the ship set sail from Boston in 1798 on a cruise to harass English shipping, she carried more rum than water, 79,400 gallons of the former compared to 48,600 gallons of the latter. What’s more, Old Ironsides took on an additional 68,300 gallons of rum in Jamaica, added 64,300 gallons of Portuguese wine in the Azores and confiscated an unspecified quantity of rum from the five English warships and 12 merchantmen she defeated. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the document I’m quoting from, but it wouldn’t surprise me that American sailors tried to outdrink the Brits.

The German Navy liked its rum too, imbibing it as a shipboard ritual as late as World War II, or so my old shipmate Werner told me. Werner, now casting his net off Fiddler’s Green, was a tough-as-dried-cod North Sea fisherman from the Frisian Islands who was conscripted into Hitler’s navy and developed a taste for grog on a destroyer. He introduced me to the drink, long after he had survived the war and moved to the United States, while we were getting a thorough bashing from a November gale on the Gulf of Mexico. Managing the boat, even under our survival rig of a storm jib alone, was so demanding that for two days we hardly slept or ate. When the wind at last showed signs of abating, I announced, “We have to get something to eat—now.” Werner corrected in his still thick northern German brogue, “No, ve have to get some grog—now.” He went below, and returned with coffee cups filled with tepid liquid, two parts rum and one part tank water (typical of Werner, it was a stronger mix than the English Navy’s one-to-one recipe for grog). It was vile tasting, but it hit the spot and, for the moment at least, was probably more restorative than the peanut butter sandwich I had in mind.

Many have been the times while enduring foul weather on a race that I’ve thought a cup of grog would be appropriate. Alas, on our boat, it’s inappropriate by skipper’s decree. No alcoholic drinks are allowed while racing. It’s not that my mates couldn’t handle the occasional beer or even grog in the heat of competition. It’s a matter of mindset: We’re taking this too seriously to relax and enjoy a drink. This is why one of the prime moments for sailorly drinking is the moment the race ends.

To that end, our boat sails long-distance races with exactly 12 cans of beer, one for each crew member, secreted in a place known only to the skipper, to be distributed after the finish gun sounds. I realize that’s a paltry ration for thirsty sailors. The presumption is that additional supplies will be available on shore. Needless to say, there is a strong incentive to finish before the last call at dockside saloons.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not evangelizing on the benefits of dry racing. Many boats I know have more liberal liquor policies, and more power to them. I count among my friends two old salts who race a big boat and spend considerable time below navigating. While the crew is restricted to bottled water and soda, they refresh themselves at will from a supply of iced Heineken. The arrangement seems to work—they win a lot of races. From a skipper’s standpoint, I have to say there’s a certain appeal in their system. Besides, egalitarianism isn’t a natural way to organize society on sailboat anyway.

The teetotal-while-racing approach is further undermined by the lessons of one of the icons of American yacht racing history, Carleton Mitchell, who made a convincing case that alcohol and racing success mix very nicely. On his way to winning three Bermuda Races in the 1950s, he wrote, dinner was served with wine in the saloon of Finisterre. Mitchell was of an era of kinder, gentler, more civilized boats. Finisterre, yet another manifestation of the design genius of Olin Stephens, was a plump, well-appointed centerboarder that could handle the weight of several cases of wine without adverse effect. Today’s designs are less forgiving, and so is the sport of yacht racing. If by some miracle wine were to get on board one of them, it would have to be consumed on the rail by passing the bottle.

The drunken sailor stereotype may be fading away, but the rich tradition of drinking and sailing live on in our lexicon. You still hear sailors talking about splicing the main brace. For those not up on their seafaring lore, this is not an act of marlinespike seamanship. It’s old sailor talk for having a drink. Then there’s the business of looking for the sun over the yardarm, the idea being that when the orb is just over the foreyard when viewed by the quarterdeck, it’s time for a drink. Yardarms have gone the way of the drunken sailor, so a spreader is usually substituted. One authority says that in the high latitudes in the days of yardarms, the position of the sun indicated it was time for a drink at about 11 a.m.

That’s pretty early. On the other hand, a sailboat is such a splendid place to enjoy a drink it might be said that almost any time is the right time.