Shortly after I first met Mary Therese Kubek last October, aboard her 1968 Alberg 30, I handed her a copy of Bernard Moitessier’s first book, Sailing to the Reefs. I explained the connection—that the names of the two boats featured in Moitessier’s famous memoir, Marie Therese, were the same as hers. I mentioned also that Moitessier, unfortunately, had wrecked both these boats.
I’m not sure Ms. Kubek appreciated the coincidence. But like Mr. Moitessier in the earliest phase of his career, it did seem she was sailing very much on a wing and a prayer, with a large dose of grit and determination mixed in. The boat she was on, Dash, had been given to her by Jake Hanna, a boatbuilder in Maine, whom she met online. Jake had hoped someday to fix up the boat himself, and it was still mostly a wreck when Mary Therese drove up from Jacksonville, Florida, to take possession of it. Left outside in the back of a boatyard, hatch open, poor Dash hadn’t floated since the mid-1980s, and her keel had been split open by water freezing up in her bilge.
Mary Therese, when I met her, had little sailing experience. She’d spent just eight months back in 2021 cruising aboard an old Cape Dory 28 with a boyfriend, and when that relationship fell apart, she decided she had to keep going somehow. “I took matters into my own hands,” she told me. “I said, I guess it’s time for me to do it myself.”
For a young neophyte, Mary Therese is remarkably competent. Before sailing down from Mt. Desert Island to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I met her, she’d done a great deal of work on Dash, with a lot of support from her benefactor, Jake. She was attracted to the boat because, like the Cape Dory she first learned to sail on, it’s a full-keel Carl Alberg design and nearly the same size. In pulling Dash from the grave, Mary Therese re-glassed her keel, installed a new coachroof beam to support the deck-stepped mast, replumbed and rewired the boat, and also repowered her with an old Universal diesel, among several other not insignificant chores in just two months.
“I wanted to learn about the boat’s inner workings,” she told me. “Doing it from the absolute bottom up, I figured, was the best way to do that.”
The diesel engine, alas, didn’t last long and threw a connecting rod through its block when Mary Therese and Dash were 10 miles off Portsmouth. When I met her, she was busy repowering the boat once again, with a used outboard she bought on Facebook Marketplace mounted on a stern bracket, and she was determined to keep going south.
We stayed in touch, so I was able to follow along vicariously as Mary Therese made her way to Jacksonville. Predictably enough, she hit some rough patches along the way. Twice she had to get towed out of tight spots when her outboard gave her trouble. The second time, on the New Jersey shore, she’d tried to anchor in “some water that was full of breaking waves.”
“I needed two tow boats to come out and get me in this really nasty storm,” she explained. “I knew it was bad when Captain Bob [the towboat skipper], looked at me after he tied me up to the dock and said, ‘Can I give you a hug?’ He gave me the best hug ever. I cried so hard.”
Mary Therese needed a third tow after she ran hard aground in Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. Not long afterward, her mainsail blew out in South Carolina. But finally, 56 days after leaving Northeast Harbor in Maine, she made it to Jacksonville, where she promptly vacated her apartment and committed herself to living aboard full time.
The biggest adventure came in mid-December, as Mary Therese and Dash were making their way down the ICW in southeastern Florida. After hearing forecasts of super-cell thunderstorms coming their way, Mary Therese anchored south of the PGA Boulevard bridge in North Palm Beach to wait out the nasty weather. That evening what she described as a tornado hit the boat, parted her anchor rode, and drove her hard ashore in a gated community nearby.
“I took my stuff off, the valuables I knew I needed, and finagled my way in the middle of the night through this neighborhood of really fancy mansions with locks on every gate,” Mary Therese told me. “I climbed over some hedges and I would say like 8-foot tall fences, got to the side of the road, and prayed for the best.”
Poor Dash was badly damaged. Her starboard side was all scraped up, the hull-deck joint split, her rudder shoe gone, one bulkhead cracked, with lots of interior shelving broken loose. But last I spoke with her, Mary Therese was afloat on Dash again in the Florida Keys and, like Moitessier before her, was busy resurrecting her cruising dream.
“I’m not done!” she declared. “Nowhere close. I have a lot of work to do, physically and mentally, but I don’t know if I ever want to turn back around.”
June/July 2024
