When the voice says “go,” you really should GO.

And then my luck kicked in, as it was too late for another full tour to happen, so Mr. Drake offered to take me through the first part of his tour again… “I’ve got a good bit about the early clipper ships… You might like that.”

I did, especially when much of said tour segment turned on the story of a 19th-century naval architect, Donald McKay, who is possibly my best-known direct ancestor. (There’s no way to be sure. We have the same name but there are six or eight different groups of McKees, McKays, MacKays, and all the other variants, and there aren’t any verifiable records in my lineage. As I’ve mentioned before most of the people in my direct McK line are dead and were pathological liars, so…) But the possibility gave us a connecting point, and yes…. Mr. Drake DOES have a good bit about the early clipper ships…

Here he is with the Flying Cloud, an early New York-to-California McKay clipper and one of the finest of her kind. She still holds the New York-California record for a sailing vessel around Cape Horn, the southern end of the New World. (This was before the Panama Canal and nobody’s built a ship capable of making a run for the record in a century or more, so it’s probably safe to call this one permanent.)

Behind him is another ship of the era, the famed Cutty Sark, which Mr. Drake describes as a “near clipper ship,” but unfortunately neither of us have enough technical background to understand why she’s not classed as an actual clipper. I shall have to learn this someday.

Here’s the model, though.

I hung around for, oh, an hour after, talking boats, models, memories, and books – these guys are all readers and historians, and most are specialists in one aspect of marine life or another – there’s an old oilfield guy, and a sailing master, and a navigator, and a chandler… and in general all my kind of people with great stories. Eventually the managerial types decided to leave, and Mr. Drake and another docent and I were still on the porch going back and forth. It started to get dark and it started to rain and we all decided we’d best get on with things.

I shall return.