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In 1921, some nautically minded members of the Chatham Country Club, the forerunner of Eastward Ho!, formed the Regatta Committee to promote sailing on Pleasant Bay. They commissioned from a Marblehead shipyard a fleet of 19 Baybirds, which were eighteen-foot gaff-rigged sloops with a centerboard and jib. When completed, the boats were towed in a single string across Cape Cod Bay and along a fog-shrouded North Beach to Pleasant Bay. At first, many families hired local fishermen to serve as crew and to teach their children how to sail and race. In the early years, the President's Cup was awarded to the boat and crew that did the best in a series of five races. Baybirds were raced at CYC by members, and then by the camps, until 1988, when the last of the sailing camps closed.
The Regatta Committee flourished until 1927, when the Country Club decided that sailing and sailboat racing were not central to their activities. Members of the Regatta Committee continued to be committed to sailing, however, and went on to found two rival yacht clubs; one on Pleasant Bay, which became the Chatham Yacht Club, and the other on a bluff overlooking Stage Harbor, which was named, appropriately, the Stage Harbor Yacht Club. For many years, the only property of the CYC was a dock jutting out into Pleasant Bay. Indeed, until 1946 the location of the dock shifted back and forth between the McClennen beach and the beach beneath the Eastward Ho! Clubhouse. For a short period during World War II, club members raced out of Bassing Harbor, just south of Pleasant Bay proper. Annual meetings were held either under the pine trees on the golf course or in members' homes
By 1938 many of the original families had lost interest in racing and so a group of young sailors who had been holding impromptu races in North Chatham was induced to join the club. They brought with them a motley collection of boats. In 1941, a new boat, the Mercury, was introduced, but among the thirteen active racers there were seven different classes of boats. A handicapping system was born. With the advent of the Second World War, the Club had its first two female commodores, Caroline Rogers and Corinne Benson. It was about this time that the tradition of awarding prizes of silk-screened pennants was initiated.
After the War, enthusiasm for sailing and racing was reborn. Spalding Dunbar, a Chatham resident, designed and built the Whistler, which was selected in 1947 to replace the Mercury. Members of CYC and Stage Harbor Yacht Clubs bought thirty Whistlers. In order to further promote sailing and racing on Pleasant Bay, two enthusiastic teenage volunteers, Charlie Leighton and Julie Lane, started a "Shore School" in the mid–'Fifties to teach sailing and racing to the children of members. Classes met on Thursday mornings, and children as young as four were taught in borrowed boats by an all-volunteer staff of teenagers. At about the same time, in 1955, Arthur Peterson and John T. Ryan negotiated with Eastward Ho! to rent land so that the Club could build a small clubhouse. The Saturday CYC races attracted some of the local summer camps – Avalon, Pleasant Bay, Quanset, and Viking. On an average Saturday in the 'Sixties sixty or more boats competed; a number which included new fiberglass fleets of Day Sailors, Sunfish, and Rhodes 19s.
In the mid-'Sixties, the all-volunteer staff of the Shore School gave way to the Club's first hired Sailing Master. Since then, the Shore School staff has grown as enrollment increased. The sailing program expanded first to two mornings a week, then to four mornings and three afternoons. It was not until the mid-'Nineties, however, that the beginning sailors were taught by paid hands.
While initially instruction was carried out in borrowed boats, in 1987 the Club purchased, through the generosity of several families, six Vanguard 420's, which are still in daily use today. At present, the Club owns ten 420's, several Sunfish, one or two Optimist dinghies, two Boston Whaler powerboats and an inflatable. The vast majority of instruction continues to be carried out in borrowed boats. The sailing school could not exist without the ongoing generosity of club members in this area.
Over the years, the types of boats racing at Chatham Yacht Club have changed. Baybirds and Whistlers have all but disappeared, and Mercuries, while still in use on Pleasant Bay, are no longer a CYC fleet. Today, CYC fields racing fleets of Marshall 18 catboats, Day Sailors, 420's, Sunfish, Beetles, and Optimists.
The spirit of volunteerism is the one element that has remained constant throughout the history of the club. While the ethos of the late twentieth century necessitated the shift to paid instructors, volunteers within the club handle every other club activity, from maintenance to patrolling to refreshments. Indeed, the club encourages individual initiative in the service of promoting racing on Pleasant Bay. In the fifties, a group of working college students sponsored the "Workmen's Series" on Wednesday nights, in the sixties, free spirits initiated the Down Channel Race, during which any means of propulsion (except motors) was acceptable, and, in the last two decades, enthusiastic parents have started the 420 and opti fleets. |