THE HARBOUR LUNCH

The Harbour Lunch is a day in mid-August aboard a classic yacht the Court takes out of Sag Harbor, for sixteen members: no destination fixed, lunch served aboard at anchor, and the afternoon spent going where the wind does on the bays between the two forks of Long Island.

It exists because the Peconic Bays have, in the words of one account, “calm waters in summer, and regularly favorable afternoon sailing winds”, and a day on them needs no plan.

The Whaling Port

Sag Harbor was settled by English colonists sometime between 1707 and 1730, the year its name first appears, on a bill of lading. Historians say it was named, as Sagaponack was, after sagabon, a tuber the local people grew. It grew up as a working port on Gardiners Bay, and Main Street, laid out in 1745, still winds south the way it did to avoid the marshes.

By 1789 the village had more tons of square-rigged vessels in commerce than New York City, and on 31 July that year Congress made it the first official port of entry to the United States, with the first custom house on Long Island.

Its fortune was whale oil, burned in lamps. Whaling peaked in the 1840s, and Melville sent Queequeg there: “Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.” The Old Whaler’s Church opened in 1843, and its steeple of 185 feet made it the tallest structure on Long Island; the hurricane of 1938 brought the steeple down, and it was never rebuilt. In 1845 the whaling merchant Benjamin Huntting II built a Greek Revival house with a roofline of alternating flensing knives and blubber spades and whale jawbones at the door; it is now the Whaling Museum. The trade collapsed after 1847, the oil strike at Titusville in 1859 ended it, and the last whaler, the Myra, sailed in 1871.

The harbour stayed. Long Wharf was reinforced with concrete in the First World War, when the E. W. Bliss Company tested torpedoes in the harbour and Thomas Edison came to watch. The Sag Harbor Yacht Club was founded in 1897 at a meeting at the Astor House in New York, and in 1914 bought its clubhouse from the New York Yacht Club, which had used it as a station on Shelter Island, and barged it across. John Steinbeck lived in the village from 1955 until his death in 1968, and began Travels with Charley there.

The Day Aboard

Sixteen places, on one classic yacht with her captain and crew.

The party meets at Long Wharf, at the foot of Main Street, at eleven, and the yacht leaves when the last member is aboard.

No course is set. The captain reads the wind in the morning and takes the yacht where it serves: out into Gardiners Bay, which runs some ten miles between the forks to Gardiners Island, or round Shelter Island into the Peconics. In the War of 1812 the British fleet gathered in Cherry Harbor before sailing to burn Washington.

Lunch is served aboard at anchor, in whichever cove the morning has reached.

The afternoon is for sailing, with the wind. The yacht is back alongside by six, and those who wish walk up Main Street to the American Hotel, a few minutes from the water, whose building dates from 1846.

What Is Asked

Yachting dress: a blazer or a linen jacket, and a jersey for the afternoon on the water.

Soft soles, or bare feet, to spare the deck. Nothing that blows away: no wide hats, no loose scarves.

The captain’s word is final aboard.

Be at the wharf by eleven. The tide does not wait, and neither does the yacht.

Nobody is pitched aboard.

The Places

Sixteen. It is as many as the yacht will seat at lunch on deck.

Members are written to in May.

The sum is stated in the invitation and covers the yacht, the crew and lunch aboard.

From Manhattan, the Hampton Jitney serves Sag Harbor directly, or by shuttle from Southampton; the nearest train is at Bridgehampton, on the Montauk Branch. Nantucket Race Week is sailed in the same month.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.