A serendipitous spotting of a family’s first boat sparks a nostalgic mystery
Issue 154: Jan/Feb 2024
I’d like to think most people have experienced déjà vu, that odd feeling that you are reexperiencing a moment of time from your past. It could be triggered by a conversation, perhaps a chance encounter with a stranger you could swear you have met before. Sometimes it’s a location that sparks it — you’re somewhere new, but you’re thinking, I’ve been here before.
Photos by Nancy Knobbs
What causes déjà vu? I’ll leave that up to the French philosophers and scientists. Some think it’s just odd memory snippets that randomly pop into your mind; others blame it on watching too much TV. I’ll chalk it up to one of life’s cool little mysteries, and real or not, I did have an actual déjà vu experience several years ago with my sailing partner, Nancy.
Nancy comes from a sailing family that got its feet wet learning to sail in New Jersey’s Sandy Hook Bay on Déjà Vu, a Nicholson 32. In September 1974, her father, Richard, decided to move the year-old boat to the Chesapeake Bay for the winter sailing season. On the trip south, a navigational error during a nighttime squall off Island Beach State Park on the Jersey Shore caused the boat to get caught in the breakers and pushed onto the beach. Fortunately, Richard, his son James, and two sailing buddies made it safely ashore. The boat didn’t suffer any structural damage, but the interior was ruined from seawater washing in through the open companionway. Nancy still has the clipping of a newspaper story with a photo showing Déjà Vu being lifted off the beach by a crane.
The boat was trucked to an Annapolis boatyard, where a prominent local befriended Richard and offered to supervise the repairs and help expedite the work to get the boat into Bristol condition and underway again. Once the boat was back in home waters, the family spent summer days sailing and exploring much of the Jersey Shore off the coast of Sandy Hook. Déjà Vu was eventually sold, and like many boats, became a distant memory and a story to be told around the fire with a glass of rum on a stormy night.
It wasn’t a stormy night, more like a blustery day, that led Nancy and me to our déjà vu experience. I was on a two-month cruise from Florida to the Abaco region of the Bahamas in the spring of 2015, and Nancy joined me for a week of island adventure. Man-O-War Cay is a small island and one of my favorite places in the Abacos; it’s quiet and laid-back, and when the wind was blowing hard, we would tie up to a snug mooring in Eastern Harbour, near the south end of the island, till the wind backed down. Nancy and I were headed there from Green Turtle Cay to sit out an approaching weather front.
The wind was blowing hard when Nancy and I made our way into Eastern Harbour. The main pass into the harbor is a narrow, rock-lined cut that branches off to starboard for Eastern Harbour and to port for the island’s main settlement. With blind corners and shoals on both sides, it’s not the place you want to meet the water taxi on its way out. I focused on keeping us in the center of the channel as Nancy kept a watch for other boats. Once we made it into the harbor entrance, I relaxed my grip on the wheel but still had to contend with navigating the crowded mooring field.
Just as I spotted my usual mooring ball, Nancy turned to me and exclaimed, “Hey, there’s my dad’s old boat!” I throttled back, and sure enough, off to port, there was a Nicholson 32 named Déjà Vu! With a look of excitement in her eyes, Nancy said, “That’s got to be his boat. It’s too much of a coincidence. We need to check this out.”
We headed for the mooring ball and quickly secured my Pearson 31, Desire, to it. Grabbing our exploring gear and camera, we jumped into the dinghy and made our way back through the anchorage, excited to solve the mystery on how Déjà Vu ended up here in this island paradise, a thousand miles from the Jersey Shore.
As we closed in on the boat, we laughed — was it fate, coincidence, or just plain chance that we would find Déjà Vu in this particular harbor? We circled around the sailboat several times, snapping pictures, Nancy searching her memory for details about the boat from decades ago. She was positive this was the boat her family had sailed out of Sandy Hook. We circled for a few more minutes, admiring the graceful lines and sheer of the Nicholson design. Although the boat was showing her years, someone was clearly still caring for her, and with sails still bent, she looked ready for an afternoon sail.
Setting off to do some detective work, we tied up to the public dock and looked for the nearest marina. We figured someone would know who the owner was or could point us in the right direction. Nancy explained our story to the woman behind the counter; she knew of the boat but thought the owner lived off island and probably had a local looking after it. Nancy left her boat card with the woman, who said she would see what she could find out.
We spent the rest of the day exploring the island, and after dinner, sat in the cockpit sipping wine while Nancy recounted some of her past sailing adventures. As the wine flowed, so did our imaginations as we debated the wonders of the universe and our déjà vu experience that afternoon. We never did find out how Déjà Vu ended up in Eastern Harbour, but we’re fine with that. Nancy got to reminisce on what it was like spending her teen years living aboard, and I got to hear some interesting stories from back in the day, when the cruising community was a much smaller place. However Déjà Vu ended up in the islands, I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind it; perhaps another captain is sitting back on a stormy night with a glass of rum before a crackling fire, regaling his listeners with tales of sailing adventures on Déjà Vu.
Though Nancy’s father has since slipped the dock lines one last time and sailed off to Fiddler’s Green, I’d like to think he is still at the tiller of Déjà Vu, sailing down the bay, surrounded by his family, with a fair wind over his shoulder.
Joe Cloidt is a retired electrical engineer who lives and sails on Florida’s east-central coast. When he isn’t out cruising on his Pearson 31 or racing on a J/30 at the local yacht club, he can often be found in his shop tinkering on his latest project or simply messing about in boats.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
