Bliss on Biscayne Bay

I drove down to South Miami to escape the snow during the winter of 1970, landing in Coconut Grove.  It was here I met Alan Bliss, who ran a sailing school and boat rental on Biscayne Bay.

Seduced by sunshine and palm trees I ended up staying for over a year, becoming one of Alan’s sailing instructors and general fixer-upper. This latter function consumed the majority of my time as his motley fleet was in a deplorable state of disrepair.

Captain Bliss

I remember one time we had a group of kids from a local high-school taking lessons. I’d managed to get my lot back to the dock in one piece and was standing there watching as the other boats returned.

One of the vessels—a 21 ft. Victory—came frothing down the bay with a strongish following wind and a student at the tiller. Dave Bleakly the instructor was struggling on the foredeck trying to get a jammed headsail down when suddenly the boat veered off to the side and went crashing into a vessel sitting peacefully at its mooring. The Victory bounced off this one and went slewing into another.

Scraping free of its second victim, the boat-full of students went charging off in search of fresh prey. At this point, Dave abandoned the head-sail and went racing aft. “Give me the f-----g tiller,” he yelled, leaping toward the cockpit.

The helmsman stood up and calmly  handed it to him—a useless stick of wood now that the rudder had dropped out of the boat. Equipment failures such as this were not uncommon in the Bliss fleet.

Alan’s personal vessel was in a comparable state of repair. It was called Harm’s Way and certainly lived up to its name with its owner at the helm.

The Columbus Day Regatta is held each year in early October on Biscayne Bay. It is a weekend when it seems every vessel in Miami is out on the water. Alan and I went out in Harms Way to compete in the yacht race.

Some sailors raced regularly while others had no experience whatsoever in competition and were absolutely clueless in regard to racing rules—an obvious recipe for disaster. On top of this, the wind on the day I speak of was fluky, resulting in vessels of all sizes arriving at the first mark in a clump.

I was on the fore-deck struggling to set up a spinnaker (with the bent, broken and frayed equipment common to Alan’s vessels) and all I could hear from every direction were angry shouts demanding right-of-way and buoy-room, the crunching of hulls coming together and strings of furious expletives.

By some miracle we managed to round the mark unscathed and I hoisted the spinnaker for a downwind leg of the race. As every sailor knows, once the spinnaker goes up it is imperative for those in the cockpit to haul in the sheet so the sail will fill.

Well, there was only Alan in the cockpit and the sheet was not being attended to…with the result that the light sail wrapped itself around me. And Alan was completely ignoring the rude words I was shrieking at him through the cloth. Suddenly the boat lurched over.

Struggling free of my sailcloth cocoon I found Alan to be in a state of distress. Both his hands grasped the bow of another vessel that had ridden up over our gunwale and pinned him to the far side of the cockpit. I dashed aft and the two of us managed to shove the other boat clear.

As soon as we’d done this, Alan began shouting at me to get the sheet on. He appeared totally unfazed by the incident, a fact that led me to assume occurrences of this nature were not uncommon in his racing career.

Despite the calmness one might associate with his name, sailing on one of Bliss’ boats was rarely a relaxing experience.