In 2013, fans of the Shields sailboat celebrated the 50th birthday of their favorite fiberglass 30-foot one-design. The first Shields arrived in Newport in 1963 with a donation to the Naval War College by Cornelius Shields, Jr., who had commissioned 20 boats to train cadets at various service academies. Corny ordered his own boat, Aileen, with the first delivery, and so did one other individual, William Manice, Jr., that year’s incoming commodore at Ida Lewis.
Records are incomplete for those early years, but we know Commodore Manice’s boat was white with a light green deck and a Gloucester green bottom. Others who followed his lead included Bob Wood and Dr. & Mrs. Toland, and Fleet 9 in Newport soon became one of the early one-design Shields fleets.
Past race committee chair John Horton remembers arriving in Newport in 1966, sailing with the Tolands and then, the next year, with Timmy Dwyer and Billy Reagan. Others who arrived within a year or two were Frank Quinn and Sean Cassidy.
Past commodores Robin Wallace and Gary Lash, who began sailing Shields in the ‘70s, joined Horton to offer some memories:
Saturdays were the main race days, Wallace says. Brenton Cove was less crowded back then, and the start was usually right off the club with the race committee sighting the line from the porch. Courses began with a beat up into Brenton Cove or straight across to Fort Adams, and then upwind to R2 past Castle Hill. Sometimes the fleet even rounded Brenton Light Tower.
The fleet had five boats in the mid-‘60s, and by the mid-70s, grew to 24, most owned by club members. Participation on weekend race days was big, usually more than half the fleet, while NBYA regattas would draw 10 to 15 boats.
Unlike the past two decades, Wednesday night racing was not a big deal. Lash says. “George Winslow would go out in a Boston Whaler on Wednesdays, drop a starting pin and sit there alone with a shotgun. Needless to say, government marks were the only marks used.”
Like a family, the fleet did things together more in those days. Lash won a memorable Shields New Englands in Marion after he and seven other Newporters sailed there and back.
Wallace recalls sailing with Sean Cassidy in Banzai to Edgartown Race Week: “We made it without a chart, which he’d forgotten. We arrived in thick fog and used a winch handle and light spinnaker sheet to take soundings to enter the harbor.”
Most of the fleet launched with Billy Reagan’s crane, which was critical, Horton says. This was well before Sail Newport, and launching at Williams and Manchester was costly. Lash says spring launch time was also when everyone got a chance to look over everyone else’s boat and pick out minute details that might infringe a rule. Threats of protests were common.
On the water, there was a lot of yelling, Wallace says, remembering when Reagan threw a strike at another crew with a roll of duct tape and another time when a skipper jumped from one boat to another to smack an offending competitor. The fleet suffered some attrition at times and sportsmanship was not always at the highest level.
Horton says there was never-ending acrimony between Timothy Dwyer and Sean Cassidy and recalls more than a few lively incidents, including the time Sean illegally switched jibs during a three-day regatta and was thrown out of the event and formally reprimanded by the ILYC commodore.
The fleet partied together, of course, and Horton recalls that the house of Diana and Messmore Kendall (owners of #29 Silverheels) and the Black Pearl were the unofficial fleet watering holes.
Fleet 9 had some outstanding sailors, too, often taking the measure of Fleet 10 competitors on the next Bay over. Horton says, “One year, at the Buzzards Bay Regatta in Padanaram, Bill Shore joined Sean and me on Banzai, and we got all bullets in 15-18 knot smoky southwesters.”
The first Fleet 9 members to inscribe their names on the Shields Nationals trophy were Gordon Benjamin and Bonnie Shore in 1976 when the regatta came to Narragansett Bay. In the ensuing years, Commodore Earle Stubbs, Moose McClintock and Chris Withers also won what has now stretched to 17 titles earned by Fleet 9 skippers.
Today, the Shields and Fleet 9 remain a strength of Ida Lewis sailing, and the club supports the fleet in turn with hospitality and its excellent race committee team in a season that lasts from early May until October.
Current Ida members who own Shields include (Past Nationals Champions in Bold): Robin Monk Jr, Ted Slee, John Burnham/Reed Baer, Earle Stubbs, Kim Roberts, Dirk Johnson, Simon Davidson, Bill Shore, Gary Lash, Tom Rich, Jamie Hilton, David Kilroy, Clay/Nancy Deutsch, Turner Scott.
Author’s note: Current Shields sailors know most of the names in this story because they are on all of our trophies—and now we also know that these characters were anything but dull and boring. Of course this story barely scratches the surface of the half a century of Fleet 9 Shields sailing by Ida Lewis members.