A Lightning Sloop Strikes Again

I pulled into the parking lot of the Southampton Yacht Club on Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay, New York, on a warm July afternoon in 2022 with my wife, Robin, and daughter, Bella, after a six-hour trip from our home in Manchester, Massachusetts. We arrived just in time to meet my brother, Ken, and sister, Dorothy, and get our newly restored 1958 wooden Lightning-class sloop out on the bay for the start of the class’s traditional Wednesday-evening races. This was the first time our boat had sailed in 45 years.

A lot had changed, but much remained the same. The club was bigger. With few exceptions, the faces were unfamiliar. All the other Lightnings were fiberglass, and ours was by far the oldest. Optimist prams and 420s were everywhere, having replaced the old Dyer Dhows in which I learned to sail. But bucking national trends in one-design classes, the club’s Lightning fleet remains robust. As has long been the case, the boats are dry-sailed and launched by hoist, which still creaked under the strain as the boat bounced a bit in the wire bridle. We breathed a little sigh of relief (and a small bet was won) that there were no leaks after she splashed.

Rigging her took a while. For the first time in our ownership, our boat had new sails, and they crackled loudly while luffing at the dock. It was a thrill for us to tack out of the channel, although it was a bit harder than we recalled to duck under the boom during tacks. Those tacks were clumsy at first, but the boat came to life and brought us with it. The feel of the helm and the sound of the wooden hull moving through the water both transported us to another time and brought us right into the present. Same boat; same water; same southwest breeze.