Dad's Klepper Aerius II Folding Sailboat

Starting Out as Sailors

I’m a sailor for a bunch of reasons, and first because Dad was. Dad started sailing in high school. His older brother Stuart somehow got a sailboat and a slip to keep it in. (The slip was on the Minneapolis lake known but briefly since the beginning of time as Bde Maka Ska, but during the brief entirety of both Dad’s and Stuart’s lives they only knew it as Calhoun.) I don’t know how my uncle Stuart attained the boat and slip. (There must be a story.) Growing up, I heard about Stuart and Bruce working together restoring the boat—a scow, they said—and sailing it on Calhoun. Uncle Stuart admitted to me near the end of his days that he never cared about sailing the way Bruce did. They did work together on the boat, but they had different motivations. Bruce took it out to learn and practice sailing, alone or with friends. Stuart liked the boat because it had a small cabin below deck. “A great place to take girls,” he told me. (I believed him, but sometimes I wonder what kind of scow, affordable to a couple of teenagers in the Fifties, would have a cabin below deck? There must be a story.)

Dad got his own sailboat around 1970: A Klepper Aerius II folding kayak. The Klepper required no slip. Disassembled, it fit into three canvas bags, easily stowed in a hallway closet. I remember when Dad carried the bags into the house. He had called Mom from the Minneapolis boat show to tell her he’d bought a sailboat! She was surprised (and relieved) to learn he had packed his new boat inside their Plymouth Fury III sedan. The Klepper consisted of wooden ribs and a folding deck that linked together and expanded inside an inflatable canvas skin. Assembly took about fifteen minutes (with some practice) and thirty to sixty minutes (with some children). On the basement floor we practiced assembling the Klepper, ran the sheets for the main sail and jib, and waited for summer. When summer came, we practiced on the front lawn.

Uncle Stuart and Aunt Bev and our cousins Nancy and Mike had a cabin on Lake Le Homme Dieu in Alexandria. Until Mom and Dad bought their own cabin, we vacationed with them each summer. Uncle Stuart watched us assemble the Klepper on the beach. This was no practice: We were ready to sail! It was a cool sunny day and there were some whitecaps on the lake. Dad and Stuart pulled the Klepper onto the water and took it out for a short test sail. I watched them glide away, run downwind a little, then tack around and sail right back again. They coasted onto the sandy beach, and I was thrilled when Dad grinned at me and said “Let’s go!” I wore one of those boxy orange life jackets. Dad was in the rear seat because that’s where the foot paddles controlling the rudder were, so I climbed over the gunwale into the front seat. Stuart shoved us out and I clutched the jib sheet, remembering what Dad had taught me about pulling it in and out to move the front sail to either side of the boat.

I understand now that a Klepper will sail upwind surprisingly well, but controlling the jib requires some practice. It also helps to have some weight up front to keep the bow lower on the water to prevent the wind from batting it away. I had neither the weight nor the jib control that Dad needed at the pointy end of the kayak on that windy day. I didn’t know anything at all about sailing. I know Dad must have assured Mom it would be fine, taking me out on such a windy day, and I know it’s one of my favorite childhood memories. It’s easy now to understand how we got deep downwind, beyond sight of the cabin at the far end of Lake Le Homme Dieu. I wasn’t aware if we were in any kind of danger. I just knew we were finally really sailing, and Dad was smiling the way he did when he was truly enjoying life and the world was beautiful.

Now I imagine we could have headed for shore, lowered the sails, and walked home, pulling the kayak along in shallow water. Instead, we kept trying to aim the boat upwind. The bow was riding high, and the wind kept shoving us to one side or the other. I gripped the jib sheet, tried to make the sail stay on the side of the boat Dad wanted, but I couldn’t control it and suddenly the sails just whipped off where they wanted, tipping the Klepper over. Water gushed into the boat and we were swimming next to it—Dad treading water and I bobbing in my boxy orange life jacket, still clutching the jib sheet. It was long and I could feel the rope tangled between my legs.

I remember bobbing there beside the boat, the sails flat on the water, feeling glad I had the life jacket. Dad tried to force the kayak upright again, to get the sail up off the water. He lifted himself up to push down with his full weight on one side of the boat to turn it upright, but the jib sheet was wrapped around under the boat and tangled around my feet and my life jacket. When Dad pushed on the boat’s gunwale to turn it upward, it rolled on the water and the tangled sheet pulled me downward. I remember he looked confused, trying to figure something out—the boat should roll up easily like it said in the manual. I remember wanting to tell him somehow that he was working against the buoyancy of my life jacket when he pushed to roll the boat upright, because it was pulling me down. I couldn’t explain that to him because I didn’t have the necessary vocabulary. Also my face was underwater.

Dad figured out what was happening before it became a bigger problem. He untangled me from the jib sheet and helped me get back into the Klepper, which felt safer even though it was full of water. My teeth were chattering, but the water in the boat felt warmer than the lake, and I could scrunch down out of the wind.

I remember seeing Uncle Stuart’s pontoon coming for us, bashing across whitecaps. I remember Stuart lifting me up to the pontoon’s deck and wrapping me in big beach towels. He yelled to Dad about Doris sending him out to make sure we were okay. He helped me to squeeze down into the pontoon boat’s empty live well that had Styrofoam walls. Dad and Stuart got the sails and mast off the Klepper and onto the pontoon. They worked together from the pontoon to lift and roll water out of the Klepper. I remember thinking the live well was a pretty good idea. I remember shivering a little less and watching the de-masted sailboat bounce back and forth between the wakes at the end of a rope while we motored back to the cabin.

I remember all of this as one of the happiest days ever, when I was just a boy out sailing with my dad.