21' Alden Indian Sloop (1923) - HIGH TIME

HIGH TIME, a John Alden Indian daysailer, Hull No. 5, almost certainly the oldest member of her class still sailing.

The advent of one-design sailboat racing around the beginning of the last century added real-time drama to on-the-water competition because class boats were essentially built to be identical, leaving it to the skipper and crew to outperform their rivals. That led to close-quarters sailing and daring moves to steal the wind from a matching boat without making physical contact or violating the rules of right-of-way.

A fine example of one-design boats was the Massachusetts Bay Indian, a 21-foot, centerboard daysailer designed by the famed John G. Alden and Sam Crocker, a highly respected designer working for Alden at that time. The Boston Globe offered a hint of the new racing tactics of Indians in a report of the down-to-the-line contest between “the two leading boats of the Marconi class of Squantum Yacht Club,” identified as Naiad II and Hermit. The small fleet of recently built Indians was “sent over a seven-mile course to Long Island, to Nut Island and home, giving them a long last leg of windward work, the newspaper reported. “The Naiad II and Hermit had a battle royal for the finish, the Naiad leading by a bare 20 seconds.” That was Sept. 7, 1924, and the boat named Hermit was later renamed Hi-Time, then HIGH TIME.

As a Missouri farm boy transplanted to the East Coast with no say in the matter, I was introduced to sailing in the 1950s by my father, Max Putzel, who had longed to go sailing again, decades after he had been introduced to the sport as a college student in the early 1930s.

HIGH TIME was the first boat I ever sailed. I was 13. The previous winter, I got to tag along while Dad shopped for an old boat, and he found a well-used Indian for sale in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. He didn’t know her provenance, but guessed she had come from one of the yacht club fleets along the Rhode Island and Massachusetts coasts where the class had been popular since the early 1920s. She had a red No. 5 on her mainsail that my father thought was her hull number, but boats didn’t have unique VINs back then, and it was difficult to check. At the time we were looking, yacht clubs were replacing their Indian fleets by faster, next-generation Stars, Lightnings, 210s, and the like. This boat’s name was Hi-Time, but we didn’t know if it was original. Dad said it was bad luck to change the name of a boat, that it might anger Poseidon, God of the Sea (AKA Neptune). A university English professor, he decided the gods would forgive him if he corrected the spelling, so she became HIGH TIME. We took possession in Old Saybrook and headed for the open water of Long Island Sound and a mooring in the town of Milford, 40-some miles up the coast toward New York. Within an hour or so, we had encountered our first squall, ripped the aging canvas mainsail, lost our chart overboard—and found safe harbor in Clinton, making all of ten miles from where we had cast off. It was about 1956, and for more than a decade, my family sailed that boat in good weather and bad, calm water and storm-driven breakers. My sister Bonnie still remembers being wrapped in a tarp and tucked under the foredeck as a 4- or 5-year-old as fresh seawater poured in over the combing and into the boat as HIGH TIME pounded through the fickle waves of The Race and headed for Great Salt Bay on Block Island. Along the way, they lost an Old Town canoe they had planned to use as a dinghy to go ashore on the island. (The canoe was returned sometime later by a sea-going good Samaritan).

If the adventures of HIGH TIME are any indication, the Indian was—and is again—an extraordinarily seaworthy craft. Just because we didn’t know any better, my sister Blanche and I sailed her across Long Island Sound from Port Jefferson to Milford in a full gale that neither of knew was coming until it smacked us as we turned for home.

HIGH TIME fell on hard times in the 1980s, when a member of the family capsized her on a long, international lake between Magog, Quebec, and Newport, Vermont. She split open some seams in the lapstrake hull and was towed to a boathouse, where she languished for decades, waiting for someone to put her back in the water. That time came in 2013, when The Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid, Maine, accepted her as a restoration project for its Apprentice Class of 2014. She was relaunched at Bittersweet Landing Boatyard in the Gut at South Bristol, Maine, on June 23, 2014.
A description and more photos of the apprentices’ at work is available at: https://mp.smugmug.com/Boats/Return-of-High-Time-2014/.
Seven years after the restoration and relaunch of HIGH TIME, a mysterious email message arrived at the desk of Alicia Witham, executive director of The Carpenter’s Boat Shop.
“High Time, Mass Bay Indian #5, originally called Hermit, was owned by George F. “Gus” Newberger ca 1926-1933. This was one of the original Squantum Yacht Club Indians a year before the Mass Bay Indians were formed, hence the low #5. It was owned by several SqYC members after that up thru 1946.”
The director forwarded the message to me, saying, “I think this person is looking for you.”
The writer was Kenneth Rolt, who almost certainly is the most knowledgeable person on the planet about Alden Indians. The son and grandson of craftsmen who built Indians, Rolt set out to track down any Indians he could find, and he built an archive of newspaper clippings, photographs and records he traced to 80 of the 103 Indians that were built.
He not only was able to confirm that the No. 5 was, indeed, the fifth Indian built, but he concluded, “As far as I know, it is the oldest survivor of the class.”
HIGH TIME is presently owned by Michael Putzel of Washington, DC. She is stored in winter at The Carpenter’s Boat Shop and moored on the Damariscotta in South Bristol during sailing season.