Sailing more than 1,100 nautical miles in 25 days is a task for energetic, determined voyagers. That aptly describes Sam Ness and his partner, writer Rachel Jorgensen, who took their 1980 Cheoy Lee 48 from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, to Traverse City, Michigan, in one fell swoop last summer.
But this story doesn’t start there. It starts in Thailand in 2016, when they conjured a dream of sustainable travel and settled on sailing despite having minimal experience. The route from the white sand beaches of Southeast Asia to crossing under the Mackinaw Bridge in their own cruising sailboat was a multi-year, multi-step process. First, Sam learned commercial diving, a skill inspired by exploring coral reefs from Thai dive boats. After adopting this vocation, he lived in a converted ambulance on job sites all over the Midwest and East Coast, from Louisiana to Rhode Island, gathering the funds they’d need for the next step. Once he mastered jackhammering concrete 50 feet underwater, other challenges seemed less daunting.
Along the way, Sam, 32, a former hotshot firefighter turned carpenter, diver, and welder, researched sailboats. His sailing experience was limited to Hobie Cats and lake sailing a Tanzer 22 pocket cruiser. Then he found the neglected Cheoy Lee in May 2023, for sale at Safe Harbor Greenpoint, on New York’s Long Island. The boat had clearly experienced some hard years. Yet it fit the dream he and Rachel shared.
His research said it would be a good bluewater cruiser that he could refit for circumnavigation. Beyond that information and its name—C-Train—he was in the dark.
“The guy I bought it from had never sailed it,” he says. “The broker was not a sailor and couldn’t tell me anything about the boat.” The hull was solid, the engine had low hours, and the sails had been refurbished, so he took a chance.
He didn’t know what he didn’t know, but Sam got educated fast. Every day of his first four months of ownership involved 12 hours of hard work. The immediate list of projects included removing the teak decks, replacing the soggy deck core, then learning to work with fiberglass, epoxy, and Coosa board. In addition, he removed and rehabbed hatch covers, fixed leaky deck lights, and removed rotted interior wood. All 14 chainplates were removed for bead blasting and inspection, then reinstalled. Without him the boat might have found its way to a scrapyard.
His bond to the boat and determination to see his cruising dream through was cemented with every task he completed.
He never gave up or paid someone else to do the work. His willingness to learn and his proficiency with all sorts of materials from lumber to metals paid off. This back-door approach to becoming a cruising sailor, earning ownership by resurrecting a vessel, follows the primary theme of Sam’s life: setting a goal and working relentlessly toward it.
“It definitely sucked at times, but I sort of muscled through it and figured it out,” he says of the hot, frustrating weeks in the Greenport yard, particularly when he realized how much work even a preliminary refit would entail. “I didn’t anticipate having to recore the deck. It definitely pushed my skillset. I ran into a lot of work that I didn’t know existed, but doing it made me more confident in my skills.”
More than a year later, a conversation about the boat is still punctuated by his hearty laughter.
“One of the guys in the yard who was from Central America gave me tips on working with glass,” he says. He accepted advice and plowed ahead. Soon he’d rebuilt the decks, replaced standing rigging, glassed over cracks that let the rain in, and was ready to go. Even watching the progression of work in fast-motion videos he posted to Instagram (@theloch_ness) is exhausting.
They sailed the boat out of Greenport in August 2023, bound for Portsmouth, Rhode Island. It was an opportunity to try out their sea legs and sailing proficiency in a big boat. He says he felt the weight of responsibility and awe as their dream advanced another step.
The boat stayed in Rhode Island about eight months as Sam refilled his coffers with a commercial diving gig. He went home to Michigan for the coldest part of the winter to work on their house. In spring he completed a few more tasks and prepared for the long haul home through New York City and the Great Lakes. It would be the first real test of his sailing ability, boathandling, navigating, the workmanship he’d done, and even of the dream of seeing the world together.
When Rachel arrived with their blonde pup, Scuba, they set sail.
Going all the way to Michigan required running the gauntlet of big ferries and big currents in New York’s Hell’s Gate, the joy of being up close to the Statue of Liberty, then removing the mast for the Erie Canal, fighting biting flies on Lake Erie, and enduring choppy waves produced by summer storms. The whole time they lived primarily on deck because the interior had been dismantled to root out rotten wood. That’s a future project.
At dawn one morning he snapped a photo of Rachel curled up in a comforter in the cockpit and savored the moment. Their dream was close enough to touch.
The trip back to Michigan gave them time to reflect on this chapter.
“We thought about it a long time,” he says. “It was a cool realization, how many bodies of water we went through on that trip, and they were all different. We were just soaking it up at the end of the trip. If that’s not it, what is?”
They’re about three years (and a garage build) from leaving on an around-the-world voyage. Nobody doubts they’ll do it, but there’s still a hefty punch list standing in the way. The tasks include finishing the work on their current (terrestrial) home so they can rent it out, building a hard dodger on the boat, adding a tower and solar panels, and completely renovating the interior. And perhaps renaming the boat with an appropriate ceremony.
“We sure learned a lot. About the boat, each other, tides, locks, and Great Lakes waves—to mention a few,” Sam says. “And that nothing is what we expect.”
April 2025
