Dreamboats - Points East magazine

 High Idle was one of my late friend Jeff Armstrong's great passions.  He told the story beautifully in one of his long mid-winter letters For Love of a Boat.  If you follow me you know about my now 24 year affair with North River 2.  We have a house in Friendship, Maine because when I was ten years old I fell in love aboard a Friendship Sloop owned by my Dad's friend Lou Peretti in Hempstead Harbor. And then there was the 15 foot Snipe on which I learned to sail, kept up with it through college and bought another - built by Hermann Gerber on City Island - when I won my first trial.

Snipes

So that's how Don Street started out - in Manhasset Bay, L.I. But he went on to cruise Iolaire a 46 foot wooden sailboat (that word meant NO engine - the Times used to list boats for sale as Sailboats and Auxiliaries.) that he cruised and wrote  A Cruising Guide to the Lesser Antilles. The first edition was a mimeograph but it went on to appear hard bound and in paper as a classic.

Don Street - now 92 shows that it's never too late to fall in love with a boat.  So last fall he fortuitously went for a sail on the restored Arion - a Sidney DeWolf Herreshoff boat.  He wrote of his enchantment in June's Points East. A "pierhead jump" onto a classic - - Arion - Don Street - Points East Magazine

Rumination continued.  How would I re-design that perfect boat with modern materials?  His answer is My zero-carbon-emissions dreamboat - Points East Magazine .

Arion

But the editors of Points East got the brilliant idea to ask sailboat designer and artist Chuck Paine to comment on Street's vision.  Paine's answer is a brilliant, friendly critique.  Read Designer Chuck Paine's comments on Don Street's dreamboat.

- GWC July 23, 2023