Classicyachting.net recently recieved this wonderful story about a fromer Int 6m R yacht owner. I think the story from the former Flygefisk owner is wonderful in many ways. A little about the boat, alittle about a saling trip and a little about the life of the owner at the time! Everything a story about a classic yacht should have!

Here is the story:

I'm afraid there is not an exciting racing story to go with my ownership of the 6 Metre yacht Flygefisk in the 1960-1965 timeframe.  At the time I was an engineering test pilot at Grumman Aircraft, living in Saint James on Long Island.  The heyday of 6m racing was long over; the only vestige of Bjarne Aas's genius in current competition was in Flygefisk's little sisters, the IOD class with fleets in Bermuda and elsewhere. Flygefisk's dimensions were 38' loa, 23.5' lwl, 6' beam and 5.5' draft.

I raced her a few times in the small Setauket Yacht Club in Port Jefferson in Cruising races and generally left the competition over the horizon.  At the time I was the Project Pilot on the A-6A Intruder which in the Summer of 1962 I ferried to the Navy's Test Center in Patuxent River, MD for its Carrier Suitability demonstration. Since this was to be a 4 month duration program and I was a bachelor, I decided I would sail the boat to Pax River and enjoy the Chesapeake in my spare time.

Flygefisk was a straight three cockpit Six with nothing special installed except for an open head situated under the foredeck. She had no engine, so with two flight test engineers on my program we sailed it down Long Island Sound, down the East River and down the Jersey coast. We sailed up Delaware Bay, through the C-D canal and arrived in Annapolis on July 4th, 1962. A week later we finished the trip arriving at our private mooring in the seaplane harbor at the Flight Test Division at Pax River.

For the next 3 and 1/2 months we day sailed around the Patuxent River and Chesapeake area after work and on weekends. A very pleasant experience! That Fall I sailed her across to a wintering-over spot on the Eastern Shore. When I went down the next Spring to bring her back to Long Island I found she had developed a garboard leak and I staggered into Jim Brickell's Oxford Boat Yard where she spent the next Summer.

The following year (1964) I sailed the boat back up to a private mooring at Willets Meyer's place across from the Seawanhaka YC in Oyster Bay. At this point I was Grumman's Consulting Pilot and Astronaut Liaison on the Apollo Lunar Module Program. That summer I had some pleasant sails after work with some of the astronauts visiting Grumman. My friends Pete Conrad and Jim Lovell come to mind.

I subsequently joined the Seawanhaka Corinthinan YC in Oyster Bay but don't recall any significant racing in that area which 30 years earlier saw a great deal of activity in the 6 Metre yachts.  In July of 1965, I proposed to my wife Sally on the porch of the elegant SCYC, with the thought that if money became tight in the future there would be reluctance to give up my membership in Seawanhaka. We are now in our 42nd year of the venture. Sally was the daughter of Arthur Shuman, a well known sailor of 30 square metre yachts in the Marblehead area.

Sometime later in 1965 I sold Flygefisk and subsequently bought a Seabreeze 35 yawl which we  named Kara. We sailed her for a number of years on New York YC and CCA events. We now live on an Air Ranch in Florida and keep a 9' Dyer sailing dinghy in our hangar.

Yours sincerely,
Robert K. Smyth.

We also recived 2 images from Mr Smyth, we will publish them both here in the next image update for the site!