A chance encounter opens a window in time
Issue 75 : Nov/Dec 2010
A few years before I was born, my parents bought a 26-foot Sparkman & Stephens-designed New Horizon sailboat built by Ray Green. They spent a year completely rebuilding the little sailboat into their own small slice of paradise. Her name was Tardis-Planet Earth. This sturdy little boat was their dream and they cruised on her for years. In March of 1988, they welcomed a little blonde daughter, Kala Rae, and at just 7 days old, I joined them on board Tardis. A few months later, my parents sold their New Horizon in favor of a larger, more child-accommodating boat. Neither of them could ever have imagined that their daughter’s future lay in the hands of the little boat they had just sold.
Fast-forward 20 years. Their little girl is now grown and at a crossroads in her life. As with most 21-year-old college girls, I was facing graduation and all the decisions that go with it. Do I further my education? Do I get a job and start saving? Do I buy a house and settle down? These were difficult questions but, for me, they were only a pale shadow of something far more serious: a longing for the sea. This longing is not one that is developed by watching movies about cruising or by reading about sailing adventures. This is a longing born from the sun and the salt and the waves. It’s compounded by a childhood of living aboard, of exploring reefs and wrecks and deserted islands, of learning, not from books but rather from seeing and hearing and doing and feeling. These are the experiences that mold a child.
Most children learn about the world from the Discovery Channel, but I was out there in it — able to see it and touch it and pull it out of the sand with my own little hands. These memories stayed with me. I never could shake the feeling that a normal, dirt-dwelling life wasn’t for me. But what can any broke, college-age girl do about it? I’ll tell you: swallow her pride and ask Daddy. So that’s what I did. Dad’s advice was simple but powerful: be patient; if it is meant to be, then it will be. If it’s not meant to be and you force it, you are just setting yourself up for failure.
Heeding his advice, I began trying to scrounge some money together and casually looking on the Internet for boats. Days turned into months, and I was beginning to question this whole patience thing. Then suddenly, during a spontaneous family vacation, my life changed. While visiting Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs, my stepmom and I decided to do a little shopping while my dad and my boyfriend, Charles, explored the town. When we were all reunited, Charles was ecstatic about a place he and Dad had discovered that day. He told me, “There’s no better place than this on Planet Earth.” I couldn’t imagine the magnitude of those words.
Soon afterward, Dad was hurrying everyone into the truck and driving out a winding swamp road until we came to a small group of marinas. Dad pulled the truck to the side of the road in front of an old chain-link fence and simply pointed. Confused but curious, I followed his gaze and felt my heart stop. On the other side of the old fence, amid towering masts, was a ghost. “No,” I thought, “It’s not possible, it can’t be . . . her . . .”
I peered through the chain-link at this phantom, numb to the pain in my fingers as I clutched the fence — half terrified, half exhilarated — I drew my eyes down her sleek side to the faded-blue paint that spelled out the name. I didn’t have to read it. The hand-made block lettering was an unmistakable signature. Tears blurred my vision as reality struck. Then Charles was there, his strong arms around me, whispering the life-changing truth: it was Tardis. After 20 years of separation, I was standing face-to-face with the first place I had ever called home. The boat that had started the dream and the family was before me now. Filthy and pitifully derelict, she was still strong, noble and magnificently beautiful. Fate had miraculously reunited two old companions, both desperately in need of each other: the young woman named Kala Rae, and the sailboat called Tardis.
We purchased Tardis the next day from the marina owner who seemed genuinely touched by her story. We managed to piece together what happened to her after my parents sold her. The story goes that the people who bought her from my parents soon sold her again to an elderly couple. The old man loved the boat and brought her to a marina in Hudson, Florida. When he died, his wife tried to keep Tardis but was unable to make the marina payments and the marina got the boat. The marina owner said they kept Tardis in the water for a couple of years then put her up for sale out by the fence, where she sat for 15 years until that fateful day when we happened to drive by.
If that wasn’t enough, the marina had scheduled Tardis to be destroyed three times but each time something came up causing the demolition to be rescheduled. When we found her, the marina had scheduled, once again, for her to be destroyed in a couple of months. Thankfully, we found her in time and have now brought her home.
Dad, Charles, and I are working feverishly to restore Tardis to her original glory. I will graduate in December. Charles and I plan to move aboard and finish the story that she and my parents began 25 years ago.
Kala Cobb was a week old when she first moved aboard Tardis. Her family cruised until she was seven, when her parents separated and moved ashore. Kala hopes to add a chapter to the Tardis story now the boat has made its surprise re-entry into her life.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
