Green Goddess

Cruising Artemis, a newly built canoe-sterned gaff sloop, off Martha’s Vineyard.

- Sam Llewellyn

Martha’s Vineyard is a tidy, seagoing sort of place, not much given to emotion. The four miles of tide-racked water that separate it from Woods Hole give it the tough, self reliant air peculiar to good islands, and the handful of people sprawled over the rexine seats of the big ferry look tired after a dull day at work. However, when the ship sticks its art deco nose into the Vineyard Haven bay between the twin peninsulas of East Chop and West Chop, it is possible to imagine that there is a hum of excitement in the air.

Partly this is because the annual fishing derby is in full swing, and anglers are hauling striped bass and bluefish out of the rips that chew at the lumpy corners of the island. But mostly it is because last week Gannon and Benjamin launched the canoe-sterned gaff sloop Artemis. I am not unexcited myself, as Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, the owners of the new boat, have invited me all the way across the broad Atlantic for a sail.

Next morning a light but perceptible breeze is blowing into the bay. Artemis is tied up at the jetty in front of the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway, a surprisingly compact building on a sandy shore dedicated to the building and parking of boats, many of them wooden. At the seaward end of the jetty Nat Benjamin’s impeccable schooner Charlotte lies flanked by two big wooden ketches. Beyond them, the gigantic schooners Alabama and Shenandoah lie at their moorings. As all the world knows, Gannon and Benjamin are among the princes of US wooden boat building, so it is no surprise that