Sailing Lake Superior on General Patton's yacht

Drizzle slapped against the hood of my jacket and clouds loomed over the massive ore dock in Marquette, Mich., as I arrived at the waterfront. I had an engagement with Gen. George S. Patton — or his yacht, at least. Seth Salzmann, captain of the 63-foot schooner When and If, had invited me aboard in August to sail Lake Superior, bound for the Tall Ships Duluth festival.

Days earlier, Salzmann had texted about engine trouble in Lake Michigan: "Plans are subject to change!" In the nick of time, though, a replacement part had arrived and the boat breezed through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. But frankly, the map of Superior I'd just seen in the Marquette Maritime Museum — with roughly 200 pegs representing shipwrecks still sitting in the murk — wasn't filling me with confidence.

"It was a little rough up from Green Bay," said the shaggy-haired, sun-bleached Salzmann, clambering up the boat's companionway to greet me. "Half the crew are still down there recovering."

That wasn't helping.

The smallest and oldest (and from what I'd heard, fastest) of all the boats that took part in this summer's Tall Ships Challenge throughout the Great Lakes, the sleek When and If is the 1939 creation of legendary New England shipbuilder John Alden. Patton ordered it built before he led his Third Army to victory in World War II. And though I wasn't exactly going off to war, I could sure use one of the general's legendary pep talks.

"She's graceful, but she's a warrior, just like her owner," Salzmann told me and a few locals who'd stopped by to gawk at the ship. Salzmann, 31, doesn't look nearly old enough to be a captain, but he's leased the yacht since 2010. "She was built for one reason: to sail around the world." Last winter, the When and If crew members tested its mettle at regattas in Cuba, handily beating the America, the self-proclaimed "America's Fastest Schooner." I figured they'd be mortified when they saw how I always belay ropes the wrong way around the peg.

The crew also included Tall Ships America intern Ben Shaiman. He spent his summer tall-ship-hopping, from the Brig Niagara of Erie, Pa., to the Pride of Baltimore II, to the Denis Sullivan of Milwaukee. His mother called him his first night aboard.

"She asked me, 'Are you battening down the hatches?' " he recalled. "I said, 'Don't be silly, Mom. Nobody uses battens on their hatches anymore.' "

Yacht photographer Emma Jones has snapped regattas from England to the British Virgin Islands, but even she knows the When and If is special. "She's pretty and she sails like a dream," Jones gushed, hanging upside down in the rigging like a monkey, camera angled for that perfect shot.

I took her cue, following her up the foremast, down the main and over the bowsprit. Patton's influence is everywhere — from the teak decks to the engraved wheel to the mahogany bulkheads to the brass chronometers (he ordered three, in case one failed).

The next morning, Salzmann and I watched the 6 a.m. sea smoke rise over the silvery Portage River as we took the shortcut through Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. Out ahead of us, the schooner's bow curved up in a shape reminiscent of the Gloucester fishing schooners that Alden loved.

Salzmann remembers the moment he first encountered the vessel while sailing in Maine in 1999. "She came up beside me and I couldn't keep my eyes off her," he says. Last year, he gave her a $500,000 refit and a social media makeover, turning her into a thriving charter business buoyed largely on fascination with Patton and his dream. "Old Blood and Guts" might have accomplished it himself if he hadn't been killed (suspiciously, if you ask pundit Bill O'Reilly, author of the conspiracy tome "Killing Patton") in a car crash in France shortly after the war.

We weren't due in Duluth for a few more days, and as far as Salzmann was concerned, that meant we were on vacation. He revealed our itinerary: Apostle Islands, here we come! I was thrilled, since I'd never experienced the Wisconsin archipelago. For three days, we shuffled our feet through the Singing Sands on Stockton Island, explored underwater caves, and warbled "Rio" by Duran Duran in karaoke at Madeline Island's legendary outdoor bar Tom's Burned Down Cafe. Anchored off Stockton, I worked up the nerve to shampoo in a glass of ice water — er, Lake Superior, which was actually a few degrees warmer than its usual temps. We started a bonfire near the sandstone caves of Sand Island, scaled the cliffs and blazed our own trail through the lush, silent hardwood forests, where we discovered a dwelling built and abandoned by either a fisherman or someone who really didn't want to see people. We could relate, since boating often favors the committed misanthrope.

Unless, that is, your boat is the When and If — wherever we went, we drew crowds. After burgers at the Beach Club on Madeline, a guy in a purring Chris-Craft gave us a lift back to our boat, his panting Labrador perched on the engine box. A paddleboarder invited us to try his paella. The crew of a catamaran anchored off Stockton gave us a haul of fresh lake trout and salmon for dinner.

Our new friends seemed to have the same questions: Who are you? Where are you from? How long have you been onboard? But our stories, like any good sea yarn, were always too long to adequately tell. We're all from different places. The ship moves around. And I'm just a writer, so I'm not the one to ask. I started to understand why 250,000 people pack the waterfront for Tall Ships Duluth. The life of a jolly roving sailor doesn't easily fit into any current cultural narrative (no Pokémon onboard, for one — we all checked), and that's understandably appealing.

"What is it about this boat?" I asked Salzmann on the last day of my trip. "Is it Patton? Is it Alden? Is it you?"

Over the blast of the horn and the boom of the cannon as we clipped beneath Duluth's Aerial Bridge, I took a turn at the wheel and the crew unfurled the sails in a light but steady breeze. Speedwise, the yacht was everything I was promised — we were clobbering the massive Brig Niagara and the Galeon Andalucia, and Duluthians were packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the canal, waving the tall ships in.

"In Maine, we sailed with a 90-year-old guy who'd captained the boat during a squall in 1957," Salzmann said. "He pointed up at a dent in the mast and said, 'I did that!' Everyone wants to be part of the story."

I grabbed a spoke, steering her back on course with the kind of confidence that had eluded me in Marquette. As Patton might put it, with good old American guts.

The When and If is sailing south for the winter. See sailwhen­andif.com for details.

Claire Shefchik is a freelance travel writer living in Stillwater. She has a memoir forthcoming about her experiences sailing on tall ships. She blogs at PrincessofPirates.com.