THE EVENING SAIL

The Evening Sail is two hours on a classic yacht taken out of Sag Harbor in early September as the light turns: drinks poured aboard, and the sun gone by the time she turns for home.

It exists because September, after Labor Day, is the quieter month on the water, and an evening on it asks for nothing more than a boat and the last of the light.

The Harbour

Sag Harbor developed as a working port on Gardiners Bay, and its own yacht club counts it one of “the original two U.S. Ports of Entry, the other being New York City.” Its money was whale oil. In 1785 Benjamin Huntting and Stephen Howell sent two ships to the coast of Brazil, which came home with about 350 barrels each; later voyages brought back “2,000 or even 2,500 barrels”. It was the wealth of whaling that paid for the bricks after the fires: the fire of 1817 burned twenty houses and fifteen barns and warehouses along the wharf where the oil was stored, and that of 14 November 1845 took a hundred buildings.

Its whalers went far. Mercator Cooper, of Sag Harbor, was the first person to set foot on East Antarctica, on 26 January 1853. The trade peaked in the 1840s, and the last whaler, the brig Myra, sailed in 1871 and never came home; she was condemned at Barbados in 1874.

Pleasure sailing took the harbour over. Racing was first recorded there in 1886, when thirty-four boats sailed in a regatta on 14 September. The Sag Harbor Yacht Club was founded at a meeting at the Astor House, in New York, on 17 March 1897, and in 1914 bought for its clubhouse the New York Yacht Club’s Station No. 5 on Shelter Island. The breakwater, federally funded in 1902 and finished in 1908, divides the inner cove from Shelter Island Sound. In 1988 a group of Wednesday Night Sailors formed the Breakwater Yacht Club so that they could sponsor a race of their own, the Sag Harbor Cup.

The Evening

One classic yacht, taken out of Sag Harbor as the light turns.

Two hours on the water. The drinks are poured aboard.

The hour is set by the sun, and the yacht turns for home after it has gone.

Classic yachts still sail the harbour at sunset: among them an eighty-foot schooner by John Alden, of 1930, and a seventy-four-foot Bermudian schooner that leaves from Long Wharf, at the end of Main Street. Their seasons run to the middle of September or the middle of October, and early September is inside them all.

What Is Asked

Yachting attire. Nothing is published beyond the advice given for such sails: dress in layers, with a blazer or a wrap for the cooler return, and wear shoes that are easily removed.

Nobody is pitched aboard.

The Places

As many as the yacht will take. The number and the sum are stated in the invitation.

The Court’s Harbour Lunch sails from the same harbour in August.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.