Boat Quest, Part 5

Dan Gold may have been a believer in the MacGregor 26 trailerable sailboat, but that didn't mean he wasn't interested in selling me the one he owned, a 1992 MacGregor 26D. Whenever I ran into him, he would play up the advantages of his boat over the MacGregor 26X that I was dreaming of at that time, back in 1999. He said the 26X was nothing but a powerboat with a set of sails tacked onto it and that it had way too much freeboard, which would make it sail poorly. Dan was equally forthcoming about his own boat, saying it had a significant weather helm problem and that the cabin was cramped and uncomfortable, but he would sell it to me anyway for just $10,000--$5000 less than a new 26X--and that made it an unbeatable deal in his opinion.

Dan kept his sailboat at the Aspen Yacht Club on Ruedi Reservoir, above the town of Basalt and just down the highway from Aspen. It took me until the summer of 2001 to finally make it up there to take a look at it, at Dan's request but without his presence. As coincidence would have it, Steve Parrott was visiting us at that time, so he and his girlfriend went with me. Steve was one of my shipmates from the American Sailing Association class in Bareboat Chartering that I took in October, 2000. (See my "Education" post for details.) And he also owned a MacGregor 26, a late-model 26X. The three of us located the boat on its trailer in the yacht club's yard above the lake and spent about an hour crawling around on it. Steve thought it looked pretty good but that I should offer $9000 to see if Dan would go for it. It turned out that he would, but we continued to negotiate good-naturedly for many more years anyway.

When I started working at Aspen Valley Hospital in 2003, where Dan was the director of the pharmacy and my wife Nan's boss, we would talk frequently about sailing. Dan was the person who told me about Larry and Lin Pardey's cruising seminar in Denver. (See my "Lin and Larry Pardey" post for details.) In return, I asked them to sign his copy of their book, The Self-Sufficient Sailor, for him.

It wasn't until the following April, when Dan and I were both laid off from the hospital during a financial crisis, that we finally got together to sail his boat and commiserate about our shared misfortune. Dan was right, the boat did have a significant weather helm problem, causing it to round up quickly into the wind at every gust. No amount of effort at the tiller would keep it on course. Dan said the problem could be solved with a larger rudder and that there were plans online for how to modify the existing one, but he hadn't gotten around to it.

Dan never did get around to fixing his rudder. He died of a heart attack while skiing with his wife Kathy at Snowmass on February 16, 2006. He was 61. Nan and I attended his funeral the same day that I was rehired at the hospital. As I write this, I am looking at the large toy schooner that sits on my desk behind my flat-screen monitor. It was a recent gift from Kathy, who thought Dan would want me to have it. We never did complete a deal on his MacGregor, but in a smaller way I feel that I finally have Dan's boat. We miss you, Dan.

Introduction

Hello, my name is John and this is the first post to my new Web log, Whispering Jesse. This blog will be an account of my dream to sail around the world. There is much more to life than the pursuit of a dream, but this blog will focus only on those aspects of life that contribute to the fulfillment of my dream. Here we go...

I grew up sailing in Wisconsin. My family would vacation in the Chain of Lakes area near Waupaca every summer with the same families. One of the families owned a Butterfly sailboat they named "Blenny". The father, Mr. Durant, would take the kids out on Round Lake one at a time to introduce them to sailing. I was ten years old in 1968 when I went sailing for the first time. I was excited by the speed and the spray, and I was impressed by the command Mr. Durant seemed to have over the wind through the control of his boat. I wanted to learn how to sail just like him. He was a good teacher and introduced me to all the basics: different reaches, coming about, maintaining a heading, reading the wind by watching the water, and the other skills necessary to sail safely and confidently.

I was so into sailing by the end of the vacation, as was my dad from his own experiences with Mr. Durant, that we convinced the family to get a small sailboat of our own the following summer. We bought a newly introduced AMF Alcort model, the Minifish, in June of 1969. It was a scaled-down version of a Sunfish, with an 11-foot, 9-inch hull that weighed 75 pounds. It had a weight limit of 300 pounds, which was perfect for Dad and two of the kids. Despite the small hull, the sail area was pretty close to Sunfish size, so our Minifish, which my mom christened "Chelsea Morning" after the Joni Mitchell song, was a quick little boat. She featured a hiking stick on the tiller and a nylon hiking strap across the small cockpit, standard equipment on a racing boat, so I came to think of her as a one-man racing Sunfish.

We sailed Chelsea Morning frequently over the next several summers and well into my adult years. I still have her. She is leaning against a protected wall outside our house in Aspen, Colorado. During our short summers, my wife Nan and I sometimes take her up to Ruedi Reservoir, about an hour away, to launch her from Freeman Mesa. The reservoir is small and narrow, and the winds tend to swirl wildly around the surrounding mountains, but it's always fun to get reacquainted with the childhood thrill of sailing this small boat, the thrill that has sustained my lifelong interest in sailing.