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A slip to be tipped in at the front of

THE POND-YACHT
A Plain Handbook for the Weekend Skipper

Errata & Corrections — Slip No. 1 — issued by the author's own hand
to the holders of the first forty copies

A handbook ought to be right, and mine went out wrong in a number of small particulars I cannot let stand. None of them will sink your boat, but one or two will lay her on her ear, and I'd sooner you heard it from me than from the water. Strike these through in ink and read as corrected. With my apologies and my thanks for your patience. (Tap a line once you've set it right — the count in the corner keeps me honest.)

  1. Page 6, line 11 — for two ounces read two pounds. The keel-weight figures right through Chapter III were transposed when I cut the stencil; wherever a ballast weight is given in ounces, read pounds. A boat trimmed to the printed figure carries no sail at all, and three of you have written to say as much, very kindly.1
  2. Page 7, line 2 — for lignum vitae read yellow pine. I overstated the case here. Yellow pine carves truer for a first hull, holds an edge under the gouge, and costs a tenth as much. Save the lignum for the keel shoe if you must have it.
  3. Page 9, lines 18–31 — delete entirely. The whole paragraph on pond etiquette (Give way always to the boat on the starboard tack…) is printed here a second time, having already had its say on Page 8. The duplicator is half to blame and I am the other half. One telling is plenty; the courtesy holds none the less for being said but once.2
  4. Plate IV (the steering-vane rigging) is bound in upside-down in the first forty copies. Please invert the page before consulting it: the trim-tab hangs down from the boom, not up, and the linkage that holds the boat to her course reads quite backwards the other way about. I caught this only after the binding was sewn, and could not face unpicking forty spines.
  5. Fig. 2 was left out altogether — the block simply never went under the stylus. It should have shown the keel in section: a long shallow fin, the leading edge rounded and the trailing edge brought to a near knife, the lead let into a slot in the bottom third and pinned with two brass rods. You have it here in words; I ask your pardon for the missing picture.
  6. Page 12, line 7 — for sixpence the pair read a shilling the pair. The chandler has put his brass deck-cleats up since I priced them. Not my error so much as the world's, but a correction is a correction.
  7. URGENTPage 21, line 4 — for starboard read PORT. This is the one fix I beg you make before you next sail. As printed, the right-of-way note would send two free-sailing boats straight at one another on opposite tacks. Mark it in red ink at once. I have lost sleep over this line.3
  8. Page 14, line 3 — for halyard read forestay. A small thing, but the rope I there call the halyard does no hoisting at all; it stays the mast forward. Call a stay a stay and your boat will understand you better than my prose did.
  9. Page 16, line 9 — STET. A club-mate of mine insists the rudder must be hung on the sternpost itself, and would have me change the line that reads the rudder hung a little inboard of the sternpost. I have left it exactly as it stood. That is how my own boat steers, and she has never once griped her helm in four seasons. With every respect to him, this was never an error and I will not call it one.
  10. Page 18, line 22 — for a thimbleful of beeswax read a thimbleful of tallow. Beeswax goes hard and tacky in the cold; tallow keeps the sheet-eyelets running sweet on a frosty Saturday morning.
  11. Page 19, line 5 — for three suits of sail read two suits of sail. I was showing off. A working suit and a light suit will see the weekend skipper through every wind the park is likely to give him.
  12. Page 23, line 14 — for Mere closes at dusk read the keeper locks the boat-house at dusk; the water is yours as long as the light is. A point of fact, and a happier one.
  13. Page 1 — the little sailing-boat drawn on the title page, with the sun put in the corner, is by Margot, age 4½, and is entirely correct as printed. I would not alter a single line of it for the world, and mention it here only so no one mistakes it for a fault.
Errata to the Above Errata
  1. In Correction 6 — for the chandler has put his brass deck-cleats up read cleats. I had typed celats, and the duplicator, faithful as ever, ran off forty of my mistake. A correction with a misprint in it is a poor sort of correction.
  2. Correction 2 is withdrawn. On reflection — and after a second hull split on me along the grain — yellow pine is not after all to be preferred for the first boat. Read the original lignum vitae as it first stood. I was right the first time and ought to have trusted myself. The book is hereby un-corrected on this point.

And one line more. In withdrawing Correction 2 just above I wrote a second hull split on me. It was the third. I should not like even my errors miscounted.

1.Two pounds of lead is a great deal to read where you expected two ounces, and I felt the weight of every misprinted figure. For a hull of sixteen inches on the waterline I run the keel to two pounds and four ounces of plumber's lead, melted in an old enamel ladle on the kitchen stove (with the window open, and your good wife's blessing first secured). Gun-metal will do at a pinch but it costs the earth and sits no lower in the boat.4
2.Since the etiquette paragraph has now been printed twice and deleted once, the careful reader will wish to know it survives exactly once, which is correct. Give way to the boat on the starboard tack; do not wade out after a becalmed yacht if a child is sailing near; and when two skippers reach for the same drifting boat with the same long cane, let the older man have it — he has waited longer for so little.
3.I have raced free-sailing boats on this water since I was a boy and I have never seen a real collision, only a great many near ones, each of them my own fault. Set your boat off, walk briskly round the rim of the Mere to meet her at the far bank, and pray your steering-vane holds the course you trimmed her to. Half the joy of the thing is that once she leaves your hand you cannot help her; you can only have rigged her well.
4.A correction to Footnote 1: I there call it plumber's lead. It is more properly milled sheet lead, such as the roofers use, which melts cleaner and with less dross. I leave the homelier name in the text above for those who, like me, learned the word at the plumber's counter before ever they learned it from a book.
Set right by hand this Thursday evening,
that the book might be true before Saturday's racing.
Yours in the hobby,
— E. W. H.
— corrections, page i —