When One More Time won the Farr 30 class at Block Island Race Week last summer, owner Bruce Lockwood attained a goal he’d sought since his first Block Island Race Week in 1967. “I’ve raced a lot of different boats at Race Week since then,” says Bruce. “We usually ended up second or third, so this was an achievement.”Bruce grew up in Ohio and spent several summers at Nassau Point, NY. “I started sailing with my folks on a large schooner when I was four years old,” he recalls. “Five or six years later, my family got a Cape Cod Knockabout and got into class boat racing on Peconic Bay. The Comet was designed around that time and we started racing them, and we had Lightning #123 that we raced on Lake Pymatuning in the spring and fall. We started sailing a 30-foot Alden gaff-rigged sloop on Peconic Bay in 1938 and had a lot of fun. We raced a Herreshoff Newport 29 named Dolphin for 53 years, including many Vineyard Races.”
In the summer of 1938, Bruce, 16, and his brother John, 18, frequently rescued a white-haired man who hadn’t mastered the physics of sailing: Albert Einstein. “He loved to sail but he didn’t know how. He had a 14-foot catboat named Tinif, which is apparently Yiddish for ‘junk.’ He’d wrap a turban around his head and throw his little dog in the boat. We didn’t pay much attention to him – we were too busy racing. One windy day, we found him in the water with the boat tipped over. We towed him to the beach, bailed out his boat and got him going again. The same thing happened again the next day, so we explained how to put a reef in his sail. He looked at it and said, ‘Oh.’ The next day, there was no wind at all and he was out there with a reef in his sail! He never looked to see where the wind was coming from – his mind was off someplace else. He lived two doors down from us, and at that time he wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt with a recommendation to build the bomb. We founded our own yacht club that year [Old Cove Yacht Club in New Suffolk, NY], and it’s still going strong.”
“I spent five years in the Navy, and we managed to do some dinghy racing. Some smart salesman at The Anchorage sold them a couple thousand Dyer Dhows and they put one on each gunboat and P.T. boat. In fact, John F. Kennedy had one on his boat. After the war was over, I found a bunch of them in a back creek in the Philippines. Someone suggested that we go sailing while we waited for our discharge, and we sailed a couple of them so far away that they never saw them again! One of our family boats burned up in a boatyard fire during the war, and the insurance money was burning a hole in my dad’s pocket. Three of his sons were in the Navy and he wanted something for us when we came back. He found a 30-foot Herreshoff that was built for the Tiffany jewelry people in 1908. We had a lot of fun with Kittiwake, and eventually gave her to Mystic Seaport... her 100th birthday party was last year.
After the Navy, I was the captain of the University of Michigan sailing team. We had the only sailing club in the Midwest and I organized the first intercollegiate regatta west of the Appalachians.” A retired naval architect and engineer, Bruce is a member of the Storm Trysail Club, Off Soundings Club (his book, Reflections: Off Soundings Since 1933, will be reviewed in an upcoming issue), Shennecossett Yacht Club and the Mystic River Mudheads. He’s done six Bermuda Races, ten Key West Race Weeks and the Transatlantic Challenge in 2005. “Forty of us from Storm Trysail chartered the 250-foot clipper Stad Amsterdam. The boat didn’t move in the light air, but we went through 22 barrels of Heineken!”
“At the moment, we have a J/22, a J/36, a Fishers Island One Design and the Farr 30. That was the 42nd boat that I’d bought or had partial ownership. Someone said, ‘You’re crazy to keep on goin’ at your age.’ I replied, ‘Let’s try one more time.’ It’s also named after a ski trail. We spend a lot of time in Vermont in the winter and most of our boats are named after ski trails. Tomahawk and Arrow are trails at Okemo, and One More Time and Plummet are trails at Mount Snow.”
One More Time’s Race Week-winning crew included Don Wilkinson, Toby Halsey, Brian Gillette, Bill Canning and Bruce’s stepsons Woody and Peter Bergendahl. “Their father was a real dyed-in-the-wool racer who taught them at a very young age. Linda [Bruce’s lovely wife] claims I married her just to get them! They steer and let me go along for the ride. We hardly talk to each other...everyone knows exactly what to do.” Another regular crew is Bruce’s nephew Bruce Oakes.
Bruce and Linda’s home in Groton Long Point, CT overlooks a salt marsh (a telescope in their living room is trained on the osprey nest in the photo) and he builds furniture and restores boats in his basement woodworking shop (years ago, he built several Penguin and El Toro dinghies). Bruce relishes the camaraderie of sailboat racing and enjoys introducing young people to the sport. “My five-year-old granddaughter Ella races with us. She once asked, ‘What can I do?’ Her father [Woody] said, ‘Sit on the stern and let us know if you see any boats passing us.’ We were the scratch boat, and after four races she said, ‘Daddy, this is not a good job – I never see any boats passing us!’ I’ve been racing all my life and I’ve done close to 7,000 races. I don’t know any better.” ✦