My father's regret

When we were back home in Wisconsin last summer, my father said something to me that has stuck in my mind. He said he regretted not getting more involved with sailing.

Naturally, my father was instrumental in getting me involved with sailing as a boy during our summer vacations, even buying the family an AMF Alcort Minifish in 1969. But he didn't really pursue it much beyond that level, except for a single terrible experience with seasickness on Lake Michigan while crewing on a friend's racing sailboat many years ago. I don't think he has sailed at all since then, but time seems to have changed his feelings about sailing now to ones of regret.

In thinking about my father, I am trying to figure out a way to include him somehow in my sailing dreams. Most of the recent effort in my "boat quest" has focused on the southeast coast for this reason. My parents own a vacation home on Skidaway Island near Savannah, Georgia, which would make a perfect home base from which to undertake retrofits and launch shake-down cruises in anticipation of a circumnavigation. If I could find the right boat and sail it to Savannah, I can envision my father and me working together on repair projects, and taking Nan and my mother on sailing trips to Hilton Head and Charleston. It would be an opportunity for me to help my father overcome his regret and to give back something meaningful to the man who has given me so much.

Boat Quest, Part 4

The fascination with the MacGregor 26 trailerable sailboat continued for several years, but it diminished briefly in the summer of 1999 while Nan and I were in Manitowoc, Wisconsin for the wedding of her youngest sister Sarah to Ian Griffiths. At the reception, we sat at a table with Nan's brother Jim and his best buddy Jack Simono. Jack was a long-time sailor who owned a Coronado 25 that he sailed on Lake Michigan. But the boat had been sitting unused in his backyard for a couple of years and he was ready to sell it. He thought it was worth about $7000, which was less than half what a new MacGregor 26 would cost, so I was very interested. When we got home, I searched the Internet and found a PDF version of the original Coronado 25 brochure. It looked like a sturdy, capable cruiser, more of a true sailboat than the MacGregor 26X power cruiser. I would have contacted Jack to work out a deal but like the dreams that preceded it, there was no money to fulfill it and it slowly died.

Later that summer, I made a pilgrimage to Colorado's only MacGregor dealer, The Anchorage, located just north of Boulder and only a four-hour drive away. The owners, Eileen and John, let me climb around on a brand-new MacGregor 26X and gave me literature and a price sheet. I left convinced that the MacGregor was the right boat for me after all. And I rationalized that it would be easier to come up with financing for a new boat than for an older, used boat. We might have qualified for a home equity loan, but the mortgage on our Aspen home was oppressive enough without taking on additional debt, so I never got past checking interest rates and calculating monthly payments.

That fall, Nan and I attended the wedding of Erika and Mike in Moab, Utah. Erika and Nan worked together in the pharmacy at Aspen Valley Hospital. Their boss, the pharmacy director Dan Gold, was also a guest at the wedding. Nan had been eager for me to meet Dan because she thought we had many interests in common, including sailing. Dan was late getting to the sunset wedding after riding the challenging Monitor and Merrimac trail on his mountain bike, so we met only briefly before the ceremony, which took place beneath one of the arches in Arches National Park. The reception was a low-key affair at Eddie McStiff's brew pub, where Dan and I talked sailing and became friends over pitchers of microbrew. Like me, Dan was a believer in the MacGregor 26, in his case because he owned one, a 1992 MacGregor 26D.

Boat Quest, Part 2

In 1972, when I read Robin Graham's book, Dove, about his around-the-world adventure, I knew that what I wanted to do with sailing was not to race in regattas on Lake Michigan but to see the world from a sailboat like Robin had done. I was only fourteen at the time and living in mostly land-locked Wisconsin, so the possibility of buying a boat and sailing it around the world seemed pretty remote, a someday dream that I didn't actively work toward for many years.

One day in the mid-1990s, I was at the office of one of my computer business clients in downtown Aspen, and I noticed a framed photo of a sailboat on his desk. "Nice boat," I said. "Is it yours?" He said that it was and asked if I had an interest in sailing. "Yes," I said, "but a boat like that is awfully expensive, isn't it?" Not as much as you'd think, he replied, especially for an older, used boat. "Where was that picture taken? It looks like somewhere in the Caribbean." It is, he said. "So how does that work?" I asked. "You're here in Aspen and your boat is down there?" He said that every few months he would fly down to where the boat was stored, sail it to the next destination, put it back in storage, and fly home. In this way, he was slowly touring the Caribbean by sailboat, an island at a time.

The idea I had been holding for more than twenty years that owning a decent-sized boat and sailing it on the ocean was something I might never be able to afford either in terms of money or time was suddenly gone. If this person could do it, I thought, why couldn't I? How to get started though?

About this same time, Phil LeBoutillier walked into my office. He said he was developing a bed and breakfast in the Bahamas (tomatopastehopetown.com) and needed some assistance getting a computerized accounting system set up to track the project. He also said he had noticed my Minifish leaning against a wall out front and wondered if we couldn't maybe work out a trade for some fiberglass repair work. There was still a deep scratch on the bottom from a bad day sailing on Lake Mendota, while I was at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1970s, when I was blown into rocks near the shore. He invited me to come with him to check out his shop a few blocks away where he was building a plywood dinghy for a new trawler he had bought as a transport boat for the bed and breakfast.

The dinghy was a cleverly designed skiff, with the plywood sides and bottom curved around a sturdy frame. Phil was in the process of fiberglassing it so the shop smelled of chemicals. He said that since he was already at it, we should just go get my boat and fix the scratch. We shook on the trade and on our newfound friendship.

When I asked Phil later where he had gotten the plans for his skiff, he handed me a catalog of boat plans. I can't find it now but I know I still have it somewhere, and I think it might have been Fifty Wooden Boats, published by WoodenBoat. In addition to smaller boats like the skiff, there were plans available for cruising sailboats, which I studied carefully. One in particular looked like the right combination of sailplan and layout without being too large to build in a big garage and transport to the ocean by flatbed truck. But did I have the time and more importantly the skills to build a wooden sailboat from scratch?

Boat Quest, Part 1

This series picks up where "Introduction" left off as my very first post to this blog, way back in March, 2005.

After my family purchased an AMF Alcort Minifish in June of 1969, when I was eleven years old, my interest in sailing never diminished. We would put the boat on top of the station wagon every summer for our vacations to Waupaca or our trips to visit Grandma in Iowa. I kept Royce's Sailing Illustrated next to my bed and studied it nightly until I knew all the concepts and vocabulary, and could tie every knot. My friend Mark Wiars and I even played a sailing board game, Regatta, at his home after school. Mark always won because he saved his Puff cards for the finish.

At that time, we were mostly interested in small sailboats because that was our experience: my family's Minifish, the boats we sailed at Boy Scout camp, the boats we saw sailing on Wisconsin's lakes. Mark and I dreamed of sailing racing boats on Lake Michigan. He was a fan of the Star, while I favored the Lightning. Royce's contained excellent illustrations of both boats, so we would argue their relative merits like other kids argued over which professional athlete was better. Looking at my almost-forty-year-old copy of Royce's just now, I think Mark had the edge since the Star featured a lead keel while the Lightning used a wooden centerboard. On choppy Lake Michigan, the Star would be the safer and faster boat. I think this was the beginning of a long tendency on my part to overestimate a particular boat's seaworthiness.

There were many other boats illustrated in Royce's, including coastal cruisers and passage makers, but as kids we didn't pay much attention to those since they seemed so out of reach. The closest we came to thinking about that type of boat was Dove, the 24-foot sloop that young Robin Graham sailed around the world in the 1960s. As I said in my Introduction, reading a National Geographic article about Robin's circumnavigation was the beginning of my own dream to sail around the world.