Minding the Schooner BRILLIANT

While sitting aboard the schooner BRILLIANT on a quiet Wednesday afternoon in the early summer, I finally had a chance to reflect on the major work done to the yacht the previous winter. While the teen crew was ashore with the mate, off in search of well-deserved ice cream after a long day barreling around Gardiners Bay, New York, I snuck a scone from the galley and soaked in the relative calm. With 12 people aboard, quiet is rare aboard BRILLIANT and, even at anchor, she was far from silent. But the sounds were familiar and comforting: the slap of water against the hull, the low hum of the refrigeration compressor, the 1932 Chelsea clock chiming every 30 minutes.

When the crew and mate returned to BRILLIANT in our nearly 19' Herreshoff lifeboat, AFTERGLOW, we sat down to dinner and pondered the questions we ask every day: “What was something today that was expected? What was unexpected?” Later, we gathered for navigation class and worked to solidify the charting skills we’d been developing on the fly, while on watch.

We’d made it to the South Fork of Long Island during a five-day voyage. I chose this destination partly because I hadn’t brought the boat here in a while and partly because it seemed like a relatively calm alternative to jockeying for anchorage in Block Island, Rhode Island’s crowded Great Salt Pond. The trip was a reminder that much aboard BRILLIANT remains unchanged, even after 93 years of operation. Though she’s older now, we’re not so different from the sailors who first took her across Long Island Sound, throughout New England, across the Atlantic, and back.

Launched in 1932 from the Henry B. Nevins yard on City Island, New York, BRILLIANT was commissioned by Walter Barnum and designed by Olin Stephens when he was just 24 years old. Conceived as a fast, oceangoing auxiliary schooner, she was an ambitious project at the height of the Great Depression. Her construction provided rare and welcome work for a team of highly skilled shipwrights, and the result was a vessel of exceptional quality and endurance and one that remains remarkably original more than nine decades later.

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