Show Me the Ropes

I arrive at the Pelican Yacht Club in Oscar, Louisiana, on a breezy morning in late March. Wind, I quickly learn, is not a constant. Today’s is blowing out of the southwest at eight to ten miles an hour—its intermittent gusts revealed by a flag snapping energetically above the bank of False River, at the southerly end of which the town of Oscar stands. Today, the surface of the lake resembles a midnight-blue tiger, fat stripes running perpendicular to the breeze—pale in the lulls; darker and wider when a gust whips through. When in motion, a body senses “apparent wind,” explains club commodore, Blaise Bourdin. But standing still, it’s “true wind” we feel. To determine the true wind’s direction, Bourdin directs me to turn until I feel the breeze grazing both my ears at once. “I can tell by my skin,” grins Louis Thibodeaux, at age seventy-eight not even the club’s most senior member. (“That’s Bill Herke,” says Bourdin, “who at 88 shows up to every meeting and sails his 23’ North American Spirit named ‘Sandpiper.’”) His blue paisley shirt tautens as he extends a forearm. “I feel it in the little hairs on my skin.” 

Thibodeaux, an LSU professor emeritus of chemical engineering; and Bourdin, a professor of mathematics at LSU, trade knowledgeable observations about the day’s wind informed more by their decades of experience on the water, rather than from anything learned in the classroom. Thibodeaux, a Church Point, Louisiana, native, was bitten by the sailing bug at age 40, when he was working in Arkansas. Bourdin, who grew up in France, has been messing about in boats since the age of five, when he was introduced to the sport when visiting his family’s vacation home in Normandy. But all assembled at the yacht club, which was relocated from its longtime New Roads location in August 2016 after losing its lease, can tell that today’s wind is favorable for a late-morning sail. The hairs on my own arms stand to attention (with a northeastern slant).

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Power boats and pirogues may be more the norm on Louisiana waterways, but sailing vessels still ride high in the state’s maritime history. The Southern Yacht Club, established in Pass Christian in 1849 before moving to New Orleans in 1857, is the second oldest in the country after the New York Yacht Club. Pelican Yacht Club opened in its original location in 1962 and earned a reputation around South Louisiana for the high standard of its sailing, and for an annual regatta. U.S. Olympic Sailing coach Luther Carpenter, who has coached athletes to five Olympic medals in his twenty-five-plus years with the team, grew up threading small sailboats between the Bass Trackers and jet skis that are more common craft on False River. But recent years have brought more challenges—the club lost its lease on private land, members lost homes to the massive floods of 2016, and Pointe Coupee Parish has dredged and drawn down False River three times to eliminate sediment buildup. (Sunlight can now reach the lake bed but so too can the keels of large boats like Thibodeaux’s Catalina 22.) “The first drawdown took place just after we moved to our new location,” says Bourdin, “So picture this: We lost our clubhouse, moved to what was just a parking lot, the flood took several of our members’ houses, and the drawdown made it impossible to sail during the best part of the year …” But the sailors who’ve remained with the Pelican Yacht Club (membership dipped sharply from over fifty dues-paying members down to twenty-something) are resilient—and pleased with the clearer quality of the water as they tend to their watercraft. Blessedly, this year’s drawdown was cut short in January, rather than March, clearing the way for today’s adventure. The morning wind keeps nudging us toward the water’s edge as if to say, You’re not gonna miss this, are you?!

The yacht club’s new redoubt abuts The SandBar, a sports bar and grill as well as a hub for boat rentals and beach volleyball. On land, the Pelican Yacht Club currently extends to little more than a storage shed for life vests. Floating docks and an improved ramp are in the works, and the atmosphere now suits leisurely pursuits more than competition. “We will be what our members want us to be,” says Bourdin. During college and grad school, Bourdin worked as a certified sailing instructor. Here at Pelican Yacht Club, he serves as unofficial coach to new members, who can learn on the club’s boats before investing in their own. A dry-erase board hanging on the shed’s wall displays member Odette Ryder’s crisp illustrations of the parts of the sailboat (bow, stern, rudder, tiller, etc.) and the points of sail (the sails’ ideal angles in relation to the wind and the boat’s course). The craft arrayed along the shore—including the club’s Flying Scot, Hobie Cat 14, and Vagabond 14, Southcoast 22, and a gleaming white-and-yellow Sunfish newly restored by member Jeff Cobb—look poised for action, just a hoisted sail and a manned tiller from freedom.

The morning wind keeps nudging us toward the water’s edge as if to say, You’re not gonna miss this, are you?!

For our first outing, I clamber aboard the nineteen-foot Flying Scot with Bourdin and Nikita Kuznetsov. A kinesiology professor at LSU, Kuznetsov gets to work by riding his bike along the banks of the campus lakes. The newcomer to Louisiana wanted more opportunities to interact with the region’s waterways. He found the Pelican Yacht Club online earlier this year and is now several sessions into learning the ropes. Aboard the Flying Scot, Kuznetsov and Bourdin take turns manning the tiller and trimming the sails (the jib and the mainsail) to make the most of the wind’s spring potential. We set out to the west, then chart a course northwards up False River, which isn’t a river at all but an oxbow lake, lopped off from the Mississippi River in 1722. Its C-shape and generally light winds make False River a safe place for beginners, while the curving course of the lake challenges veterans like Bourdin and Thibodeaux to make the most of the relationship between water, wind, and the land-based obstructions that block it. “Sailing is the perfect intersection of the physical and intellectual,” says Bourdin, which might explain the presence of so many professors out on the water this day. “It requires enough of your attention that you’re unable to think about anything else. Nothing relaxes me more.”

As he reacts to each gust and lull, Bourdin narrates his responses to Kuznetsov and me. The three of us sit in a row, our six feet braced along the centerboard, our weight acting to counterbalance the boat against the wind’s pressure in the sails (a.k.a. putting some “meat on the high side”). Our heft, acting in concert with the centerboard, keeps the boat from heeling over to leeward (away from the wind). Thus we make our way forward. Bourdin sailed from childhood until grad school, in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Ten years ago, he found the Pelican Yacht Club and picked up his hobby again after two decades’ dormancy. On his first sail back, Bourdin coached himself aloud until he saw his hands pick up where they left off. “Muscle memory took over,” he explains.

We return to the club, and I exchange the Flying Scot for a berth on a different vessel, Thibodeaux’s Catalina 22. “Meet Flo!” he roars from the deck as I approach. (Thibodeaux charged his grandkids with naming her; worldplay and brevity won out. “I wasn’t gonna fit ‘Thibodeaux’ on the side of the boat,” he laughs.) On Flo’s brick-red port side, a painted, heavy-lidded eye artfully masks repaired damage—evidence of some past collision—and I wonder what the venerable old sailboat has seen as I climb aboard. Thibodeaux passes me a mandarin orange and we eat companionably while he directs Bourdin and Jeff Cobb in hoisting the sails. Thibodeaux’s recovering from a recent bout of a pneumonia and taking it easy, but Cobb’s eager for experience anyhow.

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“I just can’t wait to get out on the water by myself,” he says as we finally cast off. A financial planner from Baton Rouge, Cobb came to boatbuilding while scoping out plans to build “the ultimate tailgating trailer.” While that spacious sportsfan conveyance hasn’t yet materialized, Cobb has now hand-built two wooden boats, working from plans by Glen-L Marine, and become a regular at the Madisonville Wooden Boat Festival. Earlier this spring he turned his attention to the Pelican Yacht Club’s battered old Sunfish. Cobb estimates he spent a hundred hours patching leaks with epoxy and restoring the boat’s gleam. On a calmer day than today, he’ll take the bright vessel on his first solo sail. “Building boats doesn’t qualify you to sail them,” he says. But today he’ll be at the Catalina’s rudder while Thibodeaux trims the sails.

The wind comes across Flo’s port side, bellying her sails out to starboard as we bear away from the club on what I learn is known as a “beam reach.” Cobb mans the rudder, while Thibodeaux maintains a sure-handed grip on the lines. Flo’s full keel provides enough stability that the boat won’t teeter like the Flying Scot does. We relax, the three of us in a circle with no need to throw our weight out to windward to counterbalance the boat. But I gather this easygoing outing is not quite what either man has in mind when he yearns to get out on the water. (Thibodeaux’s eyes are brightest, later, when we have to circle the dock twice with just the jib up due to a miscommunication. No one here is particularly shamefaced about mistakes.)

As Flo circles the lake and the wind plays across our faces from new directions, Cobb talks again about his upcoming solo voyage on the Sunfish, which I can see glittering back on-shore. “I’ll be ready next time,” he says, resolute. “To be out there alone on the water … it’s going to be fantastic.” 

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This article originally appeared in our May 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.