The following is a true story from my youth and that of my two bothers...er, brothers:

       A thousand dollars was a lot more money then than it seems to be now. When we were growing up, a thousand dollars could buy a nearly-new car or be the down-payment on a house. And the prize in the decennial Adams County Cup sailboat race was a thousand dollars.

        We weren't the top-notch sailors that would be needed to win the race. We weren't members of the Yacht Club, and we didn't have the hundred dollars non-members had to pay to enter the race. And of course we didn't have a sailboat.

        Nevertheless, Ted thought that we should try. He said that we could sail up to the starting line just as the cannon boomed the beginning of the race and then they couldn't stop us from racing. And when we won they'd have to give us the prize, because we would be the winners. We could pay the entry fee from the winnings.

        Naturally the boat would have to be built in secret, but it would have to be near to the water so that we could sail to the Bay easily. The Swamp, then, was the obvious place for our secret boatyard.

        The race was the second weekend in August, and we began building out boat in early March. Actually, we'd started in early January, making a boat out of snow. We thought that it would be faster than any other boat because snow is frozen water and we'd be sailing through water, so there wouldn't be any resistance to our boat and we could beat everyone in the race who had a wooden boat, or fiberglass, or anything.

        Unfortunately, our boat melted and we had to build one out of wood.

        Our keel was made from 2-by-4s we salvaged from an old house that was being torn down. In fact, most of our boat came from the wood of the old house. We'd walk to it on a Saturday morning when the people tearing it down weren't there and take whatever we needed from the pile of scrap wood. We knew that it was scrap because we'd ask them, and they had told us to "help ourselves to the scraps."

        It was too hard to bend the 2-by-4s into a curve for the bow, so we just cut angles on a couple of pieces and nailed them together. It was also difficult to bend the boards which we used for the sides, so we just sort of angled them too. The side boards were really hard to put on because they were so short and we had to use so many of them.

        The bottom was easy. We just followed Ted's advice and nailed a bunch of boards on without worrying about the outline of the sides of the boat. When they were all nailed in place we trimmed off what stuck out over the shape of the boat.

        Ted said that we needed tarred oakum to caulk the boat, but we didn't have any and didn't know what it was. So Tony and I stuck lots of dried grass and mud into whatever cracks and holes we found. Of course, we didn't use that on the bottom because we knew that it would wash out. On the bottom we put a nice, thick coat of concrete.   Tony expressed our thoughts when we said, "Let's see that wash away!"

        When the concrete had dried we stepped the mast. This means that we put it into the hole that the mast goes into and nailed it in tight.

        Stepping the mast wasn't easy, either. Our mast was the straightest tree we could find that was also long enough to be a mast, but was still short enough to work with. We finally used a dead tree about twelve feet long. It was pretty straight, too.

        Sails were easy. Grandma had brought some old canvas awnings with her when she moved into our house. We didn't use them and she said we could have them when we asked her for them. They were pretty, too: red and yellow stripes with scalloped bottoms.

        After the mast was stepped and the sails readied, we painted our boat. Ted painted his part green, Tony painted his part blue, and I painted my part yellow (to match the stripe in the sails). Naturally we didn't paint the concrete bottom because nobody would see the bottom unless we sank, which we weren't about to do.

        And then, one June afternoon, we launched her (boats are always referred to as "her"). Ted bought a bottle of Kayo Chocolate Soda to break over her bow as he said, "I christen thee" and he got as far as the "I christen thee" when we realized that we hadn't decided on a name for our boat. So we sat down and shared the soda while we decided on a name. We figured that the reason for a christening was to break the bottle, which was to see if the boat was built well enough to break a bottle on, and we didn't need to waste the soda if all we needed to do was to break the bottle.

        After some little debate, Tony and I convinced Ted that our boat should be called "Queen Anne's Revenge" (after Blackbeard's boat) instead of "Petunia." He agreed, so we let him up. We decided to call her "Revenge" for short.

        We'd planned well when we built "Revenge" because we built her along side of a stream. Mom was always telling us to think ahead and we had!

        Launching "Revenge" was supposed to be easy, since there was a stream close by and all. It wasn't -- she weighed a lot more than we thought! But after two days she was afloat, and we were glad school was out so that we could spend the time we needed with her.

        She filled the stream nearly bank to bank, and it wasn't possible to float her to the nearest larger body of water. We tried, too, but whenever one of us got into her her bottom came to rest on the bottom of the stream. So we tied ropes to her bow and pulled her along. We knew, of course, that we'd be okay when we got to deeper water.

        "She sure pulls hard," said Tony.

        "Aye, that she does, matey," I agreed nautically. "But when we've got her afloat and the mains'ls mizzened and the gunnells are off to larb'rd, why, blast me barnacles, but we'll be bending the sheets off the jibs'l!"

        "Right!" Ted agreed. "Whatever you said. Whatever it means."

        And then Ted said that he knew why she was pulling so hard.

        "Simple," he explained. "You guys coated the bottom with concrete. You had to leave rough spots, right? So what we need to do is to smooth the concrete and she'll just zip along! It'll give us an edge in the race, too!"

        "Hold it!" Tony exclaimed. "Right now the banks along the stream are six feet high. The water is six inches under the boat. I, for one, am not going to pull "Revenge" up the bank to work on her bottom, or try to dive under her with a piece of sandpaper!"

        "Come on, be a sport," I urged. "I'll hand you the sandpaper if you'll dive under the boat to sand the bottom. I'll even stand in the boat to help you when you're under her."

        "No!" said Tony, and I knew that he meant it.

        Ted said, "We don't have to do any of that. Sandpaper is just sand, right? And there's a pool of quicksand right ahead. It's deep enough to float "Revenge" so all we have to do is put her in the quicksand and sail her across to the other side. It's about a half a mile straight across, or about two miles if we drag her around the edge. So we sail her across, testing her seaworthiness with the voyage, smoothing her bottom and saving ourselves from dragging her an additional two miles!"

        "I dunno," I said.

        "I dunno," Tony said.

        But by the time we got "Revenge" to the edge of the quicksand pool we were all for sailing her across. The breeze was brisk and scudding puffy white clouds across a bright blue sky. "Revenge" floated easily on the quicksand, her green and blue and yellow (and brown and white and red and black -- we had run out of paint) hull brave against the green of the Springtime trees. We jumped aboard (carefully) and before you could say "Jack Robinson" (assuming you wanted to say it) we had the sails up and were skidding across the surface of the quicksand like a duck!

        And she worked well, too! Oh, sure, we had some few problems to work out but we knew that was to be expected on every new boat. And once we convinced Ted that the rudder really did belong in the back of the boat instead of at the bow, why, there wasn't a boat to beat her in the entire Swamp!

        We lounged back, letting the wind do the work, listening to the grains of sand smoothing the hull of our racing sloop.

        "This sure is the life, isn't it?" asked Tony.

        "This sure is the life, isn't it?" asked Ted.

        "Why has the wind died?" I asked.

        And slowly we lost way and became becalmed in the middle of the biggest, deepest quicksand pool in the entire Swamp.

        "Now what'll we do?" asked Tony, after the wind hadn't blown for a couple of hours.

        "Let's eat lunch!" said Ted, brightly.

        "It's on shore. Bring mine back too, when you go get yours," I replied.

        "Oh," Ted said.

        "I know!" Ted exclaimed. "Mike's the best swimmer. He can swim to shore with the anchor rope in his teeth. Then he can tie it to a tree and pull us in!"

        "Let's let him swim to shore with the anchor in his teeth," Tony said.

        "Let's let Ted swim to shore," I said. "After all, sailing across was his idea."

        "There's merit in that," Tony agreed.

        "Wait!" said Ted. "Let's throw out the anchor!"

        "Why?" asked Tony. "We're not moving now."

        "Because then we can pull on the anchor rope and we'll be pulled forward to where the anchor is. And then we do it again and again until we reach shore!" explained Ted.

        "Great idea!" said Tony, and tossed the anchor about a hundred feet forward of the bow.

        "It would have been an even better idea for Ted to have tied the rope to the anchor," I allowed.

        "Nice splash, though," Tony observed. "I wonder how big of a splash Ted would make."

        Time went by and finally I asked them for their shirts.

        There was a some skepticism expressed after I explained my plan, but since neither of them had a better one we put it into practice.

        I tied two pieces of wood into an "X" and rigged the shirts (I used mine, too) to it. Then I tied a short piece of rope to the front of the "X" and a weight to it. The rest of the anchor rope was tied to the middle of the other side of the "X".

        "How quaint," observed Ted, "a sea anchor. If a storm comes up we'll be thankful that we have it."

        But I threw it from the bow, not from the stern, and when I pulled on the anchor rope the shirts resisted the quicksand just enough for us to move the boat forward! After the first five or six tosses Ted and Tony caught on and helped. In another hour we were getting near to shore.

        "Has it seemed to you," I asked Tony, "that the boat is getting harder to pull forward?"

        "It has," he responded.

        "It is getting harder," said Ted. "There's a hole in the bottom which has been leaking for the last ten or fifteen minutes. I didn't tell you guys before because I didn't want to worry you."

        Boy, was there tossing and pulling after that! But the boat was getting lower and lower and harder and harder to pull forward, and we were getting more and more tired. Finally, Tony and Ted fell to the deck exhausted!

        "Leave me to the quicksand!" said Ted faintly. "I'm the captain and I'll go down with my ship."

        "Who's the captain?" asked Tony. "I'll be going down with my ship!"

        "I'm going ashore," I said, and stepped off of the bow!

        They jumped to their feet crying "He's crazy! He's jumped overboard!" and they rushed to the bow.
        
        And there they saw me, standing on dry ground and watching "Queen Anne's Revenge" slowly sinking by the stern into the quicksand.

        "Care to join me, gentlemen?" I asked graciously.

        We did salvage our shirts, even though they were pretty well used up, but "Revenge" slipped into the depths below a few seconds after Ted and Tony came ashore. She rests there today, part of the vast flotilla of vessels which have through the ages came to rest in Neptune's realm.