September 20, 2000
Author tries high seas research
Jerry Dennis spends time as deckhand aboard Malabar
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
"Anybody home?"
When he shouted these words up at the Malabar last April, Jerry Dennis, a self-proclaimed landlubber, got off on the wrong foot with Captain Hajo Knuttel. A professional captain and shipbuilder, Knuttel was in town for three months to repair the Malabar and make her seaworthy for her long journey to her new owners in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Dennis, an award-winning outdoor writer, has been working on a natural and cultural history of the Great Lakes. When he got wind of the Malabar's proposed journey, he immediately wanted to go along, using his experiences as the thread to bind his story together. He called the new owner and begged to come along. The new owner was reluctant at first, then sent Dennis to talk to the ship's captain.
Hence this awkward meeting with Captain Knuttel. But this short conversation was the beginning of both a great adventure and a deep friendship, as Dennis embarked with the ship on a journey through the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal and up Hudson River and the Atlantic Coast.
"He agreed to let me come along, if I was willing to work," recalled Dennis. "There would be no free rides."
Dennis told this and many other tales of his five-week journey this spring from Traverse City to Maine during a narrative and slide show presentation Friday night at the Traverse Area District Library. The first of the library's Fall 2000 Author Series, the talk drew a standing-room-only audience who also listened to a chapter from his new book.
A consummate outdoorsman, Dennis had never before sailed on a tall ship. The replica of the 1800s schooner, the workhorse of the Great Lakes, captivated him. He noted that in the second half of that century there were thousands of them plying the lakes with cargo and passengers.
The ship sailed on May 17 with a crew of five, two paid crew and two other volunteers. Along the way, other crew members joined up for a week or two, including a sailor from a Great Lakes freighter they met in Albany, who remembered the Malabar from his days at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy.
"All of us fell in love with this boat and with tall ships in general," said Dennis, who noted that Captain Knuttel helped build the ship back in the early 1970s. "Everywhere we went people knew the Malabar. As we drove along I-90 in New York, truck drivers would honk and wave and when the Amtrak train went by the engineers would give us 10-12 honks and wave."
The trip was really a crash course in sailing as Dennis and the other tall ship novice, Harold Kransi of Battle Creek, learned the intricacies of knots, wind, sand bars and heavy lake traffic. Getting lost in Detroit, running onto a sandbar, dodging freighters and weathering a severe storm off of New Haven, Conn., were just a few of the adventures the crew faced.
Kransi, a retired Navy chief petty officer, was amazed at the old-fashioned methods of sailing.
"Handling the lines was an art and to learn all that was absolutely mind-boggling," noted Kransi, who, like Dennis, was determined to go on the trip after reading about it in the paper. "It's like one of those geometric puzzles you just have to figure out."
The ship ran on motorized sail during the trip until it reached the end of Lake Ontario. To go through the canal system between Lake Ontario and the Hudson River in New York, the boat's masts had to be removed because the low bridges. Both ends of this operation amazed Dennis.
"I worked in construction for many years, shoveling dirt for a living, and nothing I have ever done was harder than taking the masts off the ship," Dennis said. "This was an amazing ship."
Once in Bar Harbor, Maine, Dennis bid farewell to his new friends and the Malabar, which was swinging from a sling in a dry-dock for a Coast Guard inspection.
"The last night there we slept on the boat in the slings," Dennis said. "It actually felt strange not to be rocking."