Black Sail East

The original Black Sail racing yard

Ralph Conratty bought this old boat builder’s property back in the 1960s when land was still cheap. The former owner had built racing sailboats for around the world races. All his boats carried black sails with a blue dolphin leaping out of a vivid red circle outline. All access to the property when purchased was from the Potomac through what appeared to be a narrow creek, thick swamp, and reverted forest.

From the Potomac, the place was barely visible on the edge of the woods beyond the wide swamp. It still looked like several old very weathered buildings and docks. One of these buildings was very large. It was tall enough for 125-foot masts with three double door systems large enough to allow large ocean-going racing yachts easy access with masts installed. It was over three hundred feet wide on the waterfront, but invisible from satellite (unless, of course, you checked it out in infrared). The docks stretched out from these large closed doors on the waterside of the construction slips were normally lowered beneath the surface of the water. The old man had been very secretive and a very successful boat builder. He regularly stunned the yachting world with his exquisite designs. Black Sail boats were still sailing, and still won more than their share of races.

The current set up

Once you arrived, the place certainly did not look abandoned. The lawns were mowed. The under side of the forest canopy was pruned, tended, and underbrush removed for a hundred yards around the buildings. But it did not look like an active port either. All visiting boats were pulled inside the old buildings to be hidden from unfriendly eyes.

There was rarely much activity outside of the buildings. Most of that was hidden under the canopy of huge evergreens—red cedar, holly, and a large grove of very old white pine. The buildings were carefully tended to look old, and little used. There were walking trails through the woods and paved walks between the buildings, but the activity wasn’t visible from the bay or the sky. All you noticed, if you looked closely, were the new glass in all the windows and the fact that there was absolutely no racking or collapsing of the very weathered wood.

The buildings were all weathered wood, board and batten cypress, near the shore and in the water. The only part really visible from the sky was the house, west of the boat slips by nearly two hundred yards. It was huge, three-storied, and covered with white narrow clapboards. It looked nothing like a southern plantation. It was too new, being built in the early 1950s after the boat builder/admiral retired from the navy.

The house

The south side of the house facing the water was liberally laced with 9-light double-hung windows of impressive size. The east and west sides had a few smaller windows scattered over the walls. The roof had three large dormers. The center of the south side was protected with a large two-story pillared porch with a flat, railed roof. The porch had been carefully screened in with the top half glassed for bug protection.

The screens also hid the view of the guardhouse built into the left side of the porch. The security and protection of this home was massive. Ralph had been working covert ops for over three decades. Much of the planning happened here. Many of the operations around the D.C. area had been water-launched from this facility.

The back entrance come out of the woods as ae concrete-paved boulevard. Now the road looked like the entrance to a French chateau, except the trees that lined the road were unpruned trees that arched over the road and met above

The back of the house was not very impressive. The large roof steeply sloped way down in back to a mere ten feet above the ground. Only the first floor was exposed—tucked under a wide portico.

There were no windows on this hidden northern side. There were three curiously low and wide dormers evenly spaced across the roof. They were filled with infrared cameras, motion sensors, night-vision cameras, and high definition video cameras plus remote controlled machine guns. RPGs and a missile battery were hidden on both sides of the house, in the two larger end dormers, each with 180° fields of fire that overlapped cross firing across the boulevard.

The Library

The library was huge. It was two stories tall, with six of the large nine-light windows stacked in vertically separated pairs across the south side. The room was nearly two thousand square feet running over fifty feet along the front of the house. The second floor was lined with books, floor to ceiling except for the south wall of windows. All empty wall space was covered with Ralph’s collection of maritime oils and aircraft portraits.

It had a balcony running around the east wall and continuing around the two interior walls. There were two doors on the north side and two more from the west into the balcony from the second floor and two huge spiral staircases in red oak leading down to the ground floor in the northwest and southeast corners of the room.

The boatyard

The large building on the waterfront was completely rebuilt inside. Only the east slip still went to the ceiling 150’ above. The other two slips were only thirty feet high, covered by seven floors of offices, workshops, and living quarters. In fact, another building had been constructed inside the old boatyard —for strength, insulation, protection, and privacy. The building normally housed twenty-five men and women — but it could hold up to four hundred if necessary.