The pine forests thicken along the shores as one walks south down Enare See, and the lines of the tree-changes are very clearly defined. The shores are for the most part low-lying, and in many places the trees stand up gaunt and dead for miles at a stretch. For a stranger the navigation here would be a thing impossible. The islands twist and turn and crop up in every direction. Reefs spring up from deep water, and stay just awash. We would frequently run down to a line of creaming surf, open up some passage and slip through it, and then haul our wind and stand along between two lines of reefs with not a dozen inches of water under the keel. In places the great lake was a regular stone-yard.
Our boat was wonderfully handy. In build she was well rockered, with a good beam, but had very fine entrance and a clean run aft. She was of the regular viking build and rig, and from the English ideas of spars and canvas, it was a matter of wonder how she could sail at all anywhere except dead before the wind. A casual onlooker might have classified her as belonging to the lug-sail type, but that emphatically she was not. Her mast was stepped amidships, well set up by forestay, and by a couple of shrouds on either gunwale. When the sail was hoisted, the halliards and the down-haul were brought well aft and made fast to a thwart to serve as backstay. But it was this sail which was the wonderful part of her. It was not a lug at all, but a true square-sail with the halliard bent on to the very centre of the yard, with tack and sheet interchangeable, and with braces to each yard-arm. It was just such a rig as the Northman used when he came to ravage the English coasts. It was the sail which drove the Roman galley. It was the identical sail which the Phoenicians were using when the Londoner went out to dinner in a suit of neat blue paint, and brought his own stone axe to crack the bones.
Going free, and with sheets well-started, this sail had enormous lifting and driving power; and with tack bowsed down to the weather hause-hole, and the sheet flattened aft, our boat would look up to it as close as Norfolk una. The tiller worked with a joint so as to clear the stern-post, and pushed fore and aft after the manner of a single yoke-line; and every time we went about, this tiller was shifted over to the weather side. The gear, too, was of necessity cumbersome, and on no sort of day could she be called a one-man boat. But she was splendidly dry, and we were not without giving her one or two stiff tests. We carried a breeze with us all the time we were on the lake, and once or twice, on the large patches of open, we met that short, steep sea, common to this class of waters, which for a small boat is the wettest sea on earth. She went over it like a cork--she had magnificent lifting power--and at the same time she did not lose her way.