Finn Lore

Finn Lore

Peter asked me to write about what makes Finns, and especially certain Finn sailors, so legendary in the sailing world. He suggested that I look at a column Corky Caroll writes about the early days of surfing in California. For you non-surfers, Corky Caroll was a champion surfer and local Orange county beach wave-rider known to all along the SoCal beaches. Caroll defined much of the “laid-back” character of surfing. The philosophy of the time could be defined by the occasion that I met Corky, years past his prime when he was doing surf reports at a San Diego radio station, and would drive along PCH to the recording studio in the early morning. This was before Caroll and other SoCal surf pioneers founded the first surfschools, which have now become the mainstay of popular beaches. It was a dark night and I was hitchhiking from near Doheny to Leucadia. Carroll picked me up in his Ford Econoline and we chatted along way about weather. He was really low-key but definitely established in what the current generation calls “his creds”.

Year later, Henry Sprague showed up at my house, an out-of-shape grownup who’d hadn’t sailed a Finn in a decade and a half. The famous Andy Kern of Chicago had moved from the Midwest to find Sprague, rescue him from oblivion, and give him a Finn to sail. That first training day Sprague fell asleep on my living room floor still in his wet sailing clothes, worn-out from a normal Spring day on the Richmond Southhampton.

Now the Finn sailors of this generation know Henry as alternating personalities between Super Henry, the kid who port-tacked the fleet at the 1974 Gold Cup on the way to winning the USA’s first FGC, and the pure-evil maniac portrayed in a YouTube video that circulated the summer before most recent Olympic Trials. Nobody knows for sure the true Henry, but when I was a teenage Sabot sailor in Ventura, Sprague was a regular fixture in the sailing rags of the day. He’d been put on a trip to Europe to sail Finns and came back to make the monthly-regatta meeting circuit to talk about the trip and fundraise. That’s how it was done in those days.

Now that we’re looking as a Finn class to how to fundraise, ideas that blast from the past that make sense today are like Carroll’s sailing schools and Sprague’s yacht clubs talks. And picking up Finns sailors that are hitchhiking to the next regatta.

At the beer bash/AGM, a conversation about Mexico led Peter and me to remember the columns that Jack Smith had written about building a house there. So this is the column about one Finn character—there’s others whose exploits are printed about in the archives of Finn Solos and Finnfare that go back to the Sixties. Reading them and hearing the stories about them around the regatta circuit, when put together, help define the unique character of Finn sailors. Lots of you out here have collections of these periodicals—what stories do they bring back to mind?

--CH

USA 32