The 85-year-old staysail schooner Niña, a fabled 50-foot (LWL) ocean racer that once was the flagship of the New York Yacht Club, disappeared without a trace on the stormy Tasman Sea with its American owner, his wife and 17-year-old son, and four crewmembers.
Back in the day I owned a salty gaff-rigged ketch named Autant. Traditional to a fault, she had no electricity, plumbing, winches, roller-furling or any other modern conveniences. Nor did she have an engine, though there were plenty of times when I wished it were otherwise. Like it or not, those years I spent cruising without an engine were emphatically educational.
Gazing upon Cayuga Lake on a calm August day, I am struck now three decades later by my vivid memories of what must be every sailing instructor’s worst nightmare. It was supposed to have been a picnic, a final exam for the summer sailing program at the local yacht club. Instead, in less than 20 minutes, it turned into a terrifying, life-threatening maelstrom of wind and water.
I was on a hunt. A hunt through 20 years of SAIL Magazine history for some of our best ads of yesteryear. The ultimate lesson I learned from this exercise is this: consumerism during the 70s and 80s relied heavily on nearly naked women, unflattering hairstyles and killer mustaches.
Eventually everyone wraps a line around a prop. I was told this on my first-ever job as a captain—leading teenagers on liveaboard dive-training trips in the Leeward Islands—and bragged about being the only skipper not to have done so.
It all started midway through a cruise on Mexico’s Sea of Cortez when we were having dinner aboard Born Free and Chris of Starship announced: “Anne-Marie [his wife] and I have been talking and she agrees, we should do a partner swap.” An uncomfortable silence followed as I failed to respond.
Though we’d dragged our 6,000-pound Balboa 26 over three mountain ranges and through seven passes, our pilgrimage from Colorado to Washington State had been relatively carefree. After that we’d spent three weeks in the Gulf Islands east of Vancouver, all without a serious mishap. Then, as we were moored in Oak Harbor preparing for the final leg back to Seattle, everything changed.
My 42-foot Pearson ketch, Silverheels, was originally built with a shallow anchor well on the foredeck that could not accommodate the long anchor rodes needed for serious cruising. While converting the shallow well to a deeper chain locker, I decided I wanted a fore-and-aft partition so I could carry two separate rodes.
As I write this, I am aboard First Light, our Pacific Seacraft 31, in an anchorage at Isla San Francisco, in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. As usual, ours is the smallest cruising boat in port.
In response to a letter in our July issue, SAIL editor Peter Nielsen asked our readers to spout out on their thoughts on multihulls. Check out reader responses to “Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea”.
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