Nothing matures a teenager like owning a boat
Issue 42 : May/Jun 2005
In the great outdoors of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, deep in the backwoods, I sat in the sun, surrounded by rutted trails, a sparkling lake, and trees. Less than 10 feet away was a large sum of money.
“I must be crazy,” I thought as I looked toward the camper with the money inside. This would be the largest transaction I had ever made, the biggest pot of cash I had ever accumulated, and I was about to spend it all during the same summer I had acquired it.
I was 18 years old and had just graduated with the class of 2003. My first act as a high-school graduate was investing my life savings — along with all of my graduation money, plus a loan from the bank — in a ketch-rigged 1970 Privateer 26. It wasn’t exactly what my parents considered a shining example of my maturity. But my father, who was once upon a time a sailor himself, couldn’t deny that the boat would bring me the adventures I sought. Little did I know the boat would also bring the more responsible behavior on my part that he sought. A sly trick.
My first experience sailing had happened the summer I was six, when my father took me sailing a few times on a Sunfish. The next summer we upgraded to a Privateer 13. I remember sailing on this boat only once. My father piled our family of four into the boat and attempted to handle the two sails himself while steering the boat out of the narrow channel. My older sister and I, being young and excited, made things difficult. I noticed the boat had turned 180 degrees, and we were somehow sailing backward out of the channel. I looked at my father pulling lines, cursing under his breath, and waving the tiller back and forth wildly and thought how great a sailor he must be. He even had a crowd watching him!
Terrified crew
That day improved for my dad later on. He had a great time bashing the 13-foot boat through 3-foot waves while the rest of us sat there terrified. I was convinced it was a bathtub posing as a sailboat. We never sailed it again. Over time, the bathtub and the Sunfish, along with our canoe, ended up three hours away in the possession of my Uncle Jimmy who also has the 30-foot 1929 Chesapeake Trader that he and my father used to sail as teenagers. The ironic thing was that he lived hours from any lakes while we lived within minutes of the water.
Years later, I saw some tall ships that had come from all over for a show in my hometown. I was fascinated and attempted to get a crew position on one of these huge boats, but no one wanted a 17-year-old with my experience . . . or lack thereof. So the next summer I got the bathtub back from Uncle Jimmy and started sailing again. While searching the Internet in the weeks that followed, I found and fell in love with a Privateer 26 located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and selling for a good price.
So there I was sitting in the sun thinking, “I must be crazy.” Everyone had asked me how I would be able to afford it. But I had figured out the costs, and they weren’t that bad. I decided that maybe everyone just thought they couldn’t afford a sailboat, so they had never looked at the figures. But there were moments when I wondered whether they knew about something I had overlooked.
I was balanced somewhere between feeling terribly scared and terribly excited as my family and I got into our truck and drove from our camping spot to the boatyard in the little town of Escanaba where the owner of the boat waited. He was having second thoughts about selling the boat and asked me many times if I wanted to forget the whole thing.
Attaching shrouds
But in the end, the keys switched hands, and I was struggling to step a mast for my first time. One boatyard worker rushed to attach the most important shrouds while the other one yelled at me every time the mast lifted out of its place. The boatyard was closed that day — both had other places they wanted to be.
After the rigging was up, my mother jokingly said, “Too bad we don’t have a bottle of champagne.”
In response, one of the workers opened a can of beer, splashed some on the deck and said, “Here ya’ go, congratulations.”
My father and I motored my new boat to the Escanaba marina where I would spend the next seven days alone waiting for friends who would help me sail her home.
Kind sailors
It was wonderful. I spent the time getting her in the best shape I could. I washed the deck and polished the bronze dolphins that sit on the rails, along with the rest of the bronze hardware. The unique design of my boat attracted many people who wanted a closer look. One of the kind sailors taught me how to make sure the masts were straight and how to tighten the shrouds correctly. I’m positive one of the masts would have fallen off in the middle of Lake Michigan if he had not helped me. Escanaba was where I first experienced the kindness of boaters. There was always someone to drive me into town to get me whatever I needed from the hardware store or food from a restaurant. Those seven days were like a private slice of heaven.
Afterward, a friendly boater drove me to the airport to pick up my sailing companions. My girlfriend’s aunt and uncle, retired hippies who had spent the last 20 years sailing their ketch out of Newport, Rhode Island, had sold their boat and moved to Michigan just months before I asked them to help me sail my new boat 200 miles down Lake Michigan to our hometown.
John had long white hair and a beard. With his sleeves rolled up and shirt unbuttoned, he looked like a sailor who had just arrived from the Caribbean. His wife, Deb, matched him in a feminine way. Both were ready to go.
Too much wind
We spent the next four days waiting for the 25-knot wind to change direction. We were at the north end of the lake with the wind blowing from the south. The fetch was creating 8-foot waves. We made an attempt to head out when the waves were down to 5 feet but turned back in less than an hour. As we motored back through the channel I realized the wind would be blowing us off the dock so I planned to motor in fast in order to maintain control. Bad idea. We were about to crash into the pier at 3 knots or so.
Adrenaline pumping, I put the motor in full reverse, but I knew it wasn’t going to work fast enough. I watched in slow motion and imagined the impact as the space between the boat and the pier shrank from 5 feet, to 4, then 3. I grabbed the stern line and with all my might jumped for the dock that was nearly 10 feet away. I must have looked like a cross between Michael Jordan and a ballerina. Somehow I landed on the dock. I wrapped the line around the first cleat I saw and pulled it tight. The boat stopped within inches of the pier.
In the following days the weather improved. We crossed the lake and ran aground in a few different anchorages before arriving in Pentwater where Deb would get off and my girlfriend, Leeann, and her father, Dale, would join us for the night and a short trip to Ludington the next day.
Because Leeann was the person I spent more time with than anyone else, I wanted her to like sailing. I tried to think of ways to make the trip pleasant. The two squalls we ran into in the first four hours were not what I had in mind. Leeann made the observation that unlike most of the other sailboats around Michigan, mine has two big lightning rods instead of just one. The furling gear jammed when we tried to roll up the jib. Its thrashing around nearly pulled the mast down. I rushed to the mast, lowered the furling gear, and lashed it to the deck. When the storms passed, we anchored in a poorly sheltered area to fix the furling gear and to take a little nap.
We awoke to eight-foot waves crashing over the boat. We immediately tried to pull up the anchor and get out of there. There was no windlass. Whenever I came close to getting the anchor up, a wave would hit us, ripping the line out of my hands, stalling the motor, and putting us back where we started.
Square waves
The violent waves had Dale at the stern, paying homage to the sea gods, and I feared getting a finger or a hand tangled in the line and ripped off. I cut the anchor line and we motored off. We spent the next four hours pounding through the waves. Not ocean rollers, these were square Lake Michigan waves breaking over the bow. But we made it, and Leeann didn’t even get seasick. I left the boat in Ludington for a week. A friend and I later sailed it the remaining 10 hours home.
The rest of the summer held many great day sails with friends. Leeann, who enjoys sailing much more when the wind is less than 30 knots, came sailing many times. She doesn’t seem to mind sharing her time with the new love in my life. The mixed feeling of being scared and excited washed over me whenever reality hit me, and I realized this big boat was mine. But I was happy.
I no longer get that scared excited feeling, and I am glad I spent the money the way I did. It has changed my life forever. I’m looking forward to years of future sailing.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
