One of my hobbies is sailing, which is a bit unusual for someone who lives in the middle of Mississippi.
It comes from my mother, Celia Blanch Buntin Emmerich, who grew up in Gulfport where her father, Bob Buntin, was an attorney and later a municipal judge.
Bob Buntin grew up in Charleston, where his father was a “planter,” as they called farmers back then. His father died in one of the Delta’s last yellow fever epidemics. On his deathbed, he made his son, Bob Buntin, my maternal grandfather, swear that he would never farm and become a lawyer.
Bob Buntin followed his late father’s advice and went to Ole Miss where he was quarterback of the football team in 1918 or so (even though he was barely five feet six inches tall). He earned his way through college by boxing as a welterweight in Memphis under an assumed name so his mother wouldn’t find out. He also divested many a rich Delta frat boy of his spending money playing poker and gin rummy.
World War I interrupted his post secondary-education where he became a test pilot. Planes were a new military tool back then. Out of 25 test pilots, only he survived by curling himself up into a ball shortly before the plane crashed. The thought has often occurred to me that I really shouldn’t exist.
After the war he returned to Ole Miss where William Faulkner hired him to teach him to fly since Faulkner had deluded Oxford into thinking he was a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Faulkner was impossible to teach but my grandfather was able to steal Faulkner’s girlfriend away from him, the beautiful Mary Elmore, pride of Oxford, who became his wife and my maternal grandmother. (All of this is recounted in the book Wing Walkers by Taylor Brown.)
Bob Buntin graduated from Ole Miss law and he and his new wife took an offer to join a small law firm in Gulfport.
My mother, Celia, was a sickly child and nearly died as a young girl. I remember feeling the huge holes of carved-out bone behind her ears where the doctors tried to extract her intransigent ear infection. She spent two years in the sanatorium in Magee.
Celia refused to die, regained her health and took up sailing. She would sail all the way to Ship Island by herself on her little sailboat. She had spunk. Not long before her death she trekked the Himalayas by herself and a sherpa after my father had passed away.
I remember my father told me, during their courting years, he visited her in Gulfport to meet her family. She was out shellacking her sailboat, work clothes on, in the hot sun. “Now that’s a woman with determination and a work ethic,” he thought to himself.
As a child, wherever we moved, we had a little sailboat. Mom would find a body of water, put the boat on a trailer and off we’d go for a family sailing outing.
In high school in Greenwood, I would take my friends out to Grenada Lake on the Dolphin sailboat. We would deliberately tip the boat over to make it a swimming platform. I had learned the technique for getting the sail back up out of the water. I remember being so mad once when a Grenada patrol boat insisted on tugging us back to shore even though we told him everything was fine.
I also remember getting back from one Grenada sail and discovering the boat was no longer on the trailer. But we found it on the side of the road, undamaged, in a big bed of kudzu.
As fate would have it, when I moved back to Jackson from New York City in 1990 I made friends with Bob Crisler, who remains one of my best friends today. Turns out he had a sailboat.
Bob and I often reminisce about those days sailing on the reservoir. Life was so carefree. We had the world on a platter.
A northeaster damaged a bunch of sailboats, and Bob got a great deal on a 27-foot Oday 272. Its three-foot winged keel was perfect for the shallow reservoir. He bought it with partners David Westbrook and David Seabrook. I tagged along for the sails.
They say the two happiest moments of buying a boat are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. I wouldn’t know. I have yet to buy a boat.
But over time, I did maintain the Oday 272, which could be quite a task. There aren’t a lot of shipyards in Jackson. Most of the time, you have to do it yourself. Slowly but surely, the boat sort of became mine in a de facto way.
There are perhaps 100 boats on the reservoir. I don’t think anybody sails more than me. I sail maybe 15 weeks out of the year and usually we never see another sailboat.
I keep my boat at Main Harbor with a dozen other boats. Most seem to be in a state of disrepair. Part of the problem is the scarcity of anyone to work on the boats. The boat breaks. It’s too hard to fix it. So the boat just sits in its slip building up dirt.
I don’t race. I have tried to perfect what I call the leisure sail at sunset with good music, refreshing beverages, good company and good conversation. When I’m on the boat, sailing silently with the wind, with the sun glistening off the water, listening to great tunes and talking to friends, all seems to be right with my world.
Like my 1965 Mustang, my newspaper business and many other things, I just try to keep it going one more year and then, before you know it, decades have flown by.
Some of my most frustrating moments were trying to crank the gas sailboat engine. One day, I said to myself, “I’d do better with a trolling motor.” That got me to thinking. Months later I had designed a nine-horsepower electric motor with a 45-volt NIMH battery. Works like a charm. Quiet, reliable, no stinky gas.
A few weeks ago, a storm blew down my 30-foot mast. I was heartbroken. I figured that was the end of it. I didn’t know how to get the mast back up and I’m too cheap to spend a lot of money on an old, worthless sailboat.
This is where You Tube DIY videos and AI shine. I learned about “gin poles,” which allow you to cheaply raise a mast. I ordered a 10-foot piece of three-inch diameter aluminum pipe from Kentucky, put eye bolts on it and used a seven-inch U-bolt to mount it to the base of the mast.
With my trusty partners, Peter Corson and Kemal Sanli, we stabilized the mast in our custom-built mast crutch made out of nailed 2x4s. We secured the mast and gin pole with straps and ropes and used a chain hoist to raise the mast. Miraculously, it worked and the mast came right up.
Every time I sail, I make my passengers sing the family sailing ditty handed down to me by my mother. As I wrote this column, I used AI to discover this song “belonged to an old camp song sung by “Skipper Tucker” a counselor at Camp Kittiwake, a summer camp that was located on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the 1940s and mid-20th century.”
The only record of this ditty is in the 2022 obituary of Hattiesburg native Patricia Nell Lewis Hughes who loved the coast and sailing. Her obituary stated, “At any time, with very little prompting, she would launch into a lively chorus of her beloved sailing song.” I bet she and my mother were sailing buds!
If I have a lingering death, I am going to demand my family wheel in a TV monitor and I am going to replay my 200 different video recordings of me singing this song on the boat forcing my sailing mates to sing along.
On a beautiful 75-degree day on the reservoir with a steady 10-knot wind, listen for these lyrics to be wafting on the breeze:
"Sailing winds are blowing, calling you and me, telling tales of new worlds far beyond the deep blue seas...Speed our ships with courage, Sails unfurled at dawn. High winds, low winds, breeze or blow winds, we sail on!”
