BY&SC by Hamlin O’Kelley

 

It being the week of the summer solstice, just know that for many years during these highly lit days, my brothers and I along with an entire gaggle of unruly children spent many unsupervised summer days at the Beaufort Yacht & Sailing Club

Especially at the pool

An Olympic sized pool complete with deep end with high dive and low dive, a fiber glass slide, and a shallow end with steps along with a baby pool for the young ones still under the supervision of mothers and babysitters

That baby pool once held a baby shark caught by the then manager of the BY&SC. The shark just swam round and round in that overly chlorinated water until said manager could return it to the Beaufort River

We spent so many hours at the Yacht Club as we all called it

From the time it opened at 10:00 a.m. until retrieved by parents, generally after 4:00, and, if we were lucky, sometimes not until closer to 6:00, we wore that place ragged

Did we reapply sunscreen?

Did we have nutritious snacks at our disposal?

Did we have adults to guide us and make sure we were behaving?

Did we hydrate?

All negative

We had quarters with which to buy bottled cokes which we drank on concrete paved decking in barefeet not worrying one wit about broken glass

Icy cold Grape Fanta in a glass bottle slakes thirst like nothing else

We had a bag of sandwiches and chips and more quarters to buy snacks out of the Tom’s snack machine, which, if your hands were wet and the concrete decking was wet, you could get a cheap thrill of mild electric shock as you pushed E24 for your pack o’ nabs to be ejected into the holding bin at the bottom of the vending machine

On rare occasions a parent would send a watermelon for everyone to share. And I do mean rare

We all had crispy noses and often had to wear t-shirts in the water over our sunburns

Even those of us Beaufort kids with darker hair would have had it lightening in the many hours of sun exposure. Those of us with lighter hair would have had it greening lightly from the chlorine

And, oh, the chlorine

At the start of every summer, we would all develop pool toe from our non-summer feet spending hours wrinkling in the water only to scrape them on the hard concrete bottom of the pool and the decking around said pool after chlorine thinned the skin. We all bled from our big toes during those late days of May while the water was still cool and callouses had yet to form

I can still smell the chlorine

I can still smell the cigarette smoke of some of the mothers sitting nearby reading Time and Newsweek and People magazine giving benign neglect to their children and friends

I can still smell the Coppertone

I can still smell the mildew in the bathrooms with changing areas

I can still feel the algal slick board on the outside shower which we were all required to use prior to entry in the pool

One late summer afternoon, The Beaufort Gazette’s own version of Jimmy Olson, Bob Sofaly, snapped a shot of me and my brothers in the spray of that shower with the late sun glinting off the drops of the shower.

We made the front page of that fish wrapping the next day. My parents have the original photo

Being on the Beaufort River, the Yacht Club had a sailing program and a full ramp for launching boats of all kinds and a large dock with pier heads with two large floats

We would run from the pool to the dock and go diving and jumping off the end of the pierhead into the deep water of the river only to climb out and head back to the pool for a freshwater dip

Who was watching us?

Well, the teenager life guards sure weren’t as they were long suffering in having to deal with the children of their parents’ friends jumping in and out of the water, running at all times only to be whistled down with shouts of “NO RUNNING!”

I could give you an entire list, but let’s just say Helen, Martha, and Jim were some of our favorites as they only blew their whistles when it was absolutely necessary

There were others who were tyrants on the deck in their wooden chairs. I’ll not say who but does anyone else remember a certain BD whose anger smoldered daily? “QUIT RUNING, YOU KIDS!”

During those summer days, there was a radio near the pool phone. It was usually tuned to I95 in Savannah.

I still remember the Yacht Club’s old phone number. Back then, if a friend was not at home that friend’s mother was likely to say, “Just call the Yacht Club”

Our parents always called us at that 524 number to leave us messages

“Hey, Helen, may I speak to Hamlin?”

Invariably, a lifeguard would scream across the way, “Hamlin!!! Telephone!!!”

And, sure enough, you’d cross the decking to answer the pressing question from a friend, get that instruction from a parent, relay a message from someone to someone else, and, usually dripping wet, all to get another one of those mild tingles in the arm from the radio line and the telephone line

Guess it was just part of the deal

Cheap thrills brought to you by SCE&G and a lack of grounding

The pump house had closed doors and was next to the alcove where the phone stayed and the radio played. When the pump house doors were open, we were all able to see the sign that said, “PLEASE DON’T EEEE IN OUR OOOLE…SEE…NO P IN IT” or was it “WE DON’T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET, DON’T PEE IN OUR POOL” Either way, neither sign worked

Hence the shocking amounts of chlorine

Or the pool being shocked with chlorine

And, it’s where Charles DeLoach taught me to swim. Covered in baby oil and brown as a berry, Charles was the most patient of swim teachers.

He died in 1992

We all went to his funeral

Even though he hadn’t lived in Beaufort for years, his Yacht Club charges showed up to honor one of our favorites

And, really, the BY&SC was our favorite place to be

Every year as our yearbooks came out in the spring, we would sign in the back LYLAS, LYLAB, 2QT2B4GTN, RHTS, I signed your crack, and See you at the BY&SC

Because we saw everyone there

The whole town it felt like

And, with such a large number of children there ages 1 to 18, there was always something to do

Marco Polo in the shallow end

Races from one end to the other

TV Show

Categories

The most viscious games of Sharks & Minnows in the deep end. Touch the drain at the bottom of the 12 feet and you were safe….might drown and ears might burst from the pressure…but at least you were safe

Our Sharks & Minnows games lasted forever with the opening rounds seeing minnows dive and jump and land on each other during initial crossings across the deep end…long running dives could get you at least half way across the deep end to the sound of a lifeguard’s whistle and a “DO NOT RUN” shouted at you

Diving contests were the real deal with a low and high dive

Preacher seats

Flips

Jack knives

Double flips

Watermelons

Sailor dives

Gainers…half gainers

Can openers

Pencils

Belly flops

Back flops

I don’t think there’s a person who went to that pool between 1976 and 1986 who didn’t belly flop or back flop off of that high dive in an attempt to do something rad like a double flip

I landed on my back one time to a huge splat and thought I had died. Did anyone check on me? Nope. Just shouts of “MOVE, WE’RE TRYING TO DIVE!!”

In fact, no one seemed to check on anything except the chlorine levels, kept at the highest of the high

Did anyone check to see if the fiber glass sliding board had been sufficiently sprayed down with water before we went down it?

Never

Situated in a corner farthest from any lifeguard chair, you took you bare skin in your own hands if you decided to go down the slide without checking to see if it had been properly conditioned with pool water prior to your climbing the steps

Both the Epi and the Dermis of many a youngster were left on the hot side of that slide

At least once a summer, some kid would go over the side of the slide and land on the pool decking, and, yet, there were few injuries

No backboard pulled out

No neck braces used

The BY&SC had a clubhouse of sorts, too, which was really just a big room with a hall with restrooms off of one side and a kitchen off the other side and a large covered porch facing the river

One summer afternoon, one of our pals discovered huge boxes of non dairy individual creamers left over from some event just sitting there in the kitchen. No refrigeration required

He got the bright idea that we could use the creamers as weapons and squirt them at each other in a a full on battle on the lawn

The Great Creamer War of 1983 commenced

Boys and girls of all ages gathered between the clubhouse and the dock and squirted creamers at each other. Covered in that white oleaginous milk substitute, we all laughed and hollered until the manager found out and screamed at us, “What are y’all doing?”

Of course, this being the same manager who put a shark in the baby pool

Well, those of us of older years high tailed it back to the pool, off the dock, into the boathouse, around the back of the clubhouse leaving the younger warriors to clean up small plastic packs empty of their oily contents

As one of the scofflaws who ran and was not caught, my parents later chastised me, “Why didn’t you help them pick up the creamers?”

Creamers? What creamers? There was one? Who? Me? Never heard of it?

Plausible deniability all round

The instigator of The Great Creamer War of 1983 wrote an apology letter and appeared before the Board in contrition. He was allowed to return to the Yacht Club

That was typical of the Yacht Club: constant expiation of sins

The place was a co-ed Lord of the Flies meets Caddyshack meets an Esther Williams musical – since everyone was in a bathing suit and could swim the English Channel

When I went away for high school, we were required to take a drown proofing class as part of our physical education program

Drown proofing?

By 1987, I was completely drown proof after 15 years of the BY&SC

Hell, I’d been held under water for at least a minute or two by kids 4-5 years older than I when we were annoying or tried to steal back the rafts and inner tubes they had stolen from us which we had stolen from them which they had stolen from us

And, I’m not just talking about older boys, either. The girls at the Yacht Club were just as tough. They had to be.

The Club had a Junior Activities program for many summers, too. Basically a day camp for a week or two. We passed written tests on sailing. We showed proficiency with knots. We played tennis. We swam. We sailed. We goofed off

Our tennis instructors were always disaffected youth whose parents made them get summer jobs. The Two Roberts were our favorites. Both named Robert, they spent more time hitting us with tennis balls and ripping cigs in the shade than actually instructing us. We thought them cooler than Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe because, well, they left us alone. I still tell one of them to this day how much we hated them, but not really. He still tells me how much he and Robert hated us, but not really

We all learned to sail on Sunfish at the Yacht Club, usually in twos in each boat

We loved to turtle and then right the ship with our feet holding the dagger boards as we pulled on the sheet lines and yanked our vessels back to sail

After Sunfish mastery, if you could demonstrate not just sailing proficiency but passed the written tests and knot tests, then you could take out the Lasers or the Widgeons which would require a crew of three

One boring summer day at the Junior Activities Program, our pal Christopher Gibson decided that a group of us could take out the Widgeons. We told no one. So, Christopher Gibson, Hayes Williams, John Dukes, Billy Besterman, Jeff Riordan and I decided to have 3 of us each in a Widgeon.

We pushed off from the docks in an outgoing tide with no wind, hence our boredome

With NO wind

NO WIND

Pancake flat

Hot and still

Not a breeze to be bought in 5 square miles

Stuck in irons

So, what did we do in the Widgeons?

We rafted up together, jumped in the river, tied ropes around our waists and made make shift rope swings using the masts and not realizing we could have made accidental nooses. The indelibility of youth

We didn’t think twice about the fact that we were drifting east pretty fast

Luckily, one of the people who worked at the camp noticed the Widgeons were missing

Again, he noticed the Widgeons were missing

Not a soul noticed we were missing

After about 45 minutes and our drifting almost past the southern end of Parris Island, Mark, the camp employee, came down the river in the Club’s Boston Whaler to retrieve the Widgeons. Wayward campers were a bonus.

His sister, Kim, ran the camp

“Kim is going to KILL y’all” he told us

I think we all mooned him in response to that statement

And then fell on the decks laughing

“We had some difficulties with the jib” someone retorted to Mark

And then fell on the decks laughing

Sure enough, Kim wanted to kill us

“Boys! Those Widgeons are new this summer! You could have lost the Widgeons! I’m calling each of your parents about this!”

Now, Kim had been one of my family’s babysitters. I knew her well

I raised my hand

“What, Hamlin?” she snorted

“Well, Kim, mom and dad are at The Grove Park in Asheville. I’m staying with the Williams.”

Giggles all round.

Then, fell on the ground laughing

It’s important to know your audience.

“I’m staying at the Williams,” I said through chuckles and tears

“Quit laughing!” Kim yelled. “This is not funny. The Widgeons are new!”

She was beyond mad

We could have lost two perfectly good Widgeons after all

None of our parents were mad at us, they were mad at such lax behavior on the part of the Yacht Club not keeping watch over their campers. No mothers came to pick us up that day.

Instead, the fathers descended upon the Club.

When Hayes’s dad and John’s dad, both lawyers, came to pick us up, they chastised Kim and crew for letting us boys get the better of them. Jeff’s dad was a Colonel in the Marine Corps. He gave Kim a dressing down. Billy’s dad was a doctor who explained the risk to our life and limb. Chris’s dad owned an insurance agency who went over the liability issues.

My dad was in Asheville

They didn’t raise their voices, they just said that boys would be boys and the Club needed to keep better watch over its campers.

It was the first time that I saw a parent go to bat for a child against the party truly most to blame

Did we all get in trouble? Of course, but at least the parents weren’t mad at us

But, they, too, were glad we didn’t lose two perfectly good Widgeons

With love to all you Yacht Club kids.

G. Hamlin O’Kelley is an RCS contributor and a fine gentleman.  We’re lucky to have his work grace our pages.