The following are Joel’s own words as published in the book, Joel White, by Bill Mayher and Maynard Bray:

I became interested in boats at an early age- my father was boat crazy and passed that rogue gene on to me. My earliest boating memory is of standing on a dock in City Island, NY, looking down onto the deck of a pretty double-ended cutter named Astrid. Her hull was white. Her decks light green set off by darker green trim and guardrails. Her wooden spars were painted an orange buff color and her furled sails were of khaki canvas. Her massive tiller was varnished, of an unknown southern hardwood with a strong grain pattern. It was 1935 and my dad had just purchased Astrid for use around our home waters in Maine. She was a Larry Huntington design- 30 feet in length with a raised deck amidships to give headroom. (She actually provided headroom for my mother who was 5' tall, and for me, who was five. My dad, who was 5'10" had to stoop a little.) After the delivery trip to Maine, she was a summertime member of the family, hanging to her mooring in Allen Cove in Blue Hill Bay, and transporting us on many a day sail, short cruise, or perhaps most common of all, a mackerel fishing expedition. Mackereling was a big summer occupation in those days, and the schools were numerous and bountiful. They were caught by chumming, attracting the schools to the boat with chumbait made of ground-up clams, oatmeal, cornmeal, and vegetable or olive oil. The fish were caught on weighted jigs at the end of a light handline, baited with a clam. It was not uncommon to catch 200-300 in an afternoon, sharing the catch with friends and neighbors and putting up many of them in jars to eat next winter.
My most vivid recollection of Astrid is of her smells. She was built in Florida of southern cedar, and its strong aroma was always present aboard. In addition there was the slight presence of kerosene, from the running lights stored in the forepeak, tarred marlin in the brown ditty bag, and just a trace of mothballs, left over from last winter's storage of the bright red Hudson's Bay blankets on her main cabin bunks. Sometimes a whiff of gasoline from the Palmer auxiliary behind the companionway ladder, and traces of breakfast bacon.
I liked everything about the short cruises I took with my father- the preparations beforehand when we collected food, ice, clothing, and drinks on the shore which were rowed out to Astrid in her eight-foot dinghy. I liked casting off the home mooring and bearing away for new places, the ebb and flow of the strong Maine tides, the selection of the destination for the night, and the splash of the kedge going down in the late afternoon. I liked the warmth of the Shipmate stove fired with short pieces of wood or charcoal briquettes. I liked the boat meals cooked on the Shipmate, the washing up afterwards in the tiny sink. Most of all I liked the snug feeling of bedtime in the forward pipe berth, the gurgles and slap of water against the hull, the creak of the anchor rode on the bowsprit roller as a small puff swung her in some deserted, spruce-rimmed cove. Waking early in the low, strong morning light, I would creep on deck to examine the new day and imagine its pleasures yet to be.
This joy of cruising has never left me--it remains undiminished sixty years after those first early trips. The same simple pleasures still delight, just as they did when I was only eight or nine.