21' Alden Indian Daysailer (1923) - HIGH TIME

Source: Alden plan #148
Designed by John Alden [also credited to Sam Crocker, who worked for Alden at the time]

LOA – 21’2″
LWL – 16’9″
Beam – 6’4″
Draft (centerboard up) – 18″
Draft 
(centerboard down) – 3’6″
Displ. – 1,200 lbs.
Sail Area – 196 sq. ft.

Alden Indian Hull #5 is, in all probability, the oldest member of her famous class still sailing. She was in the first tranche of the new one-design class of Indians built specifically for the Squantum Yacht Club beginning in the early 1920s. Named Hermit by her original owner and HIGH TIME decades later, the fifth Massachusetts Bay Indian has been restored and is ready to go back in the water 100 years after she was built.

The graceful, 21-foot centerboard sloop distinguished herself racing for members of Squantum Yacht Club for more than three decades. When the club’s aging Indian fleet gave way to more contemporary designs and lighter, low-maintenance materials, the classic Alden wooden boats were sold off to other clubs or private owners. Hermit went to a buyer in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, who sold her in about 1955 to my father, Max Putzel, an English professor at the University of Connecticut. Her name had been changed to Hi-Time, and her provenance was unknown to her new owner, although he always suspected she had come from one of the yacht clubs south of Boston where several clubs had raced Indians. He knew sailors considered it bad luck to rename a boat for fear of insulting Poseidon, but he figured the God of the Seas would forgive him for correcting the spelling. She became HIGH TIME and almost immediately found a new, sometimes foolhardy mission, exploring the waters and islands off Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York.

We took possession in Old Saybrook and headed for the open water of Long Island Sound and a mooring in the town of Milford, some 40 miles up the coast toward New York. I was 12 or 13 and, having recently arrived in New England from a Missouri farm, had never actually sailed aboard a sailboat. 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 that morning. For many years, my family sailed that boat in good weather and bad, calm water and storm-driven breakers in the sounds of Long Island, Fishers Island and Rhode Island. My sister Bonnie still remembers being wrapped in a tarp by her parents at 4 or 5 years old and tucked under the foredeck as fresh seawater poured in over the combing and into the boat. She expected HIGH TIME would capsize at any moment as the sturdy old boat pounded through the fickle waves of The Race and made Great Salt Bay on Block Island before dark. 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 later by a sea-going good Samaritan).

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 when The Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid, Maine, accepted her as a restoration project for its Apprentice Class of 2014. (A slideshow of the restoration work is viewable at https://mp.smugmug.com/Boats/Return-of-High-Time-2014.) She was relaunched at the Gut in South Bristol, Maine, on June 23, 2014. With new sails and centerboard trunk, readily movable ballast, and she handles better than I remember and leaks practically not at all.

The early history of HIGH TIME was a mystery before Kenneth Rolt, a son and grandson of craftsmen who built and raced Indians, found restoration pictures of her on the Carpenter’s Boat Shop website and connected the boat’s past to her present. Having traced the stories of nearly all the 103 Massachusetts Bay Indians built, he concluded: “As far as I know, HIGH TIME is the oldest survivor of the class.”

Now, after nearly 60 years in the family, it is time for another lover of classic wooden sailboats to take HIGH TIME into her second century.