Sailor webmasters are “Netizens” bringing far-flung sailors with mutual interests together
Issue 16 : Jan/Feb 2001
Webster’s dictionary offers “an interacting population” as one definition for the word “community,” a description that aptly describes a number of sailing associations as well as the readership of Good Old Boat magazine. And within the world of sailing, the dynamic, lively, free-flowing Internet has proved to be an excellent community-building tool.
Thanks to the Internet, you can log on to find out how others have replaced the centerboard cable on their Morgan 22, or where to find a part for that obscure, now orphaned, foreign-built auxiliary engine residing in your 1960s-vintage sloop.
Three days after I became affiliated with my first fiberglass sailboat in 1996, I was on the Web seeking information and other owners of our newly acquired plastic classic. And I quickly found someone with the same vessel, despite the fact that only 40 had ever been built. He had dealt with many of the same maintenance issues we had identified, and a highly fruitful exchange took place between us.
The Internet has become invaluable to some, useful to others, and a source of enjoyment for almost every northern sailor beached for the winter. And there is a special place in the sainthood of cyberspace for those selfless individuals who bring their fellow boaters together to exchange sea stories, practical tips, or encouragement via Web sites.
Internet repository
One such forum that has been helpful to hundreds is the Bristol boats Web site created and maintained by Doug Axtell. It has proven its worth to many a boatowner. Recently, a friend purchased a 1968 33-footer in need of an extensive overhaul. Within an hour of her delivery to his yard, he was logged onto Doug’s Internet repository of information, seeking data on his new boat.
Like most amateur webmasters, Doug, who lives in the Rochester, N.Y., area, became a boat-community builder by way of the back door. He simply posted a note on the SailNet owners’ exchange seeking information on his newly acquired Bristol 32 a few years ago. A couple of owners checked in, and comments and ideas began to flow. Before long, an informal forum for Bristol 32 owners evolved into a full-blown site with information on 18 models of Bristol-built boats ranging from the 19-foot Corinthian to the Bristol 51, designed by Dieter Empacher. Today, the site sees more than 15,000 hits a year and has a mailing list of more than 150 members.
One of the most visited areas of the Bristol boat site, used by owners of other types of production boats as well, is the extensive well-organized library of restoration project experiences and how-to’s. Many of the problems, such as repainting a hull, replacing the Cutless bearing, or seeking out the correctly pitched prop for your auxiliary, are generic to a wide range of 25- to 30-year-old fiberglass boats, so non-Bristol owners find a wealth of valuable and helpful information there, as well.
Doug, an engineer by training and vocation, is no slouch when it comes to getting his hands dirty doing a boat fix. He explains that whether he’s rebuilding a water tank or creating a Web site, “I grew up on a farm and on boats. If you don’t know how to do something there, you figure it out.” Doug sails Glad Tidings on Lake Ontario, usually with his wife, Wendy. He bought the 1969 yacht, hull #67, in 1995, recalling, “The price was right, and I made the owner an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Howard Chapelle’s boat
Sailing goes back to Doug’s earliest days, and the pastime runs several generations back in his family. “My grandfather was a maritime attorney. He was involved with the Titanic, the Morrow Castle, the 1912 Seaman’s Act, and other marine law affairs.” On the other side of the family was a Naval Reserve officer who owned a pinky schooner originally designed and built for noted naval architect and marine historian, Howard Chapelle. Doug’s grandfather purchased this yacht in the 1940s. When Doug was a boy, he watched the boat’s owner pack chunks of rock salt behind the hull ceiling, up under the deck, to keep her “pickled” and thus prevent dry rot.
Doug’s first real boat was a plywood Sunfish. “We bought it for $50. We could sail it for about 45 minutes before it filled up with water. Then we’d haul it out and set it up to drain for two hours, then we’d go sailing again.” A series of small racers used in dinghy competition gave way to a couple of keelboats on Lake Ontario, then to the Bristol 32 named after his grandfather’s pinky schooner. The Axtells enjoy cruising and club racing with their Bristol out of the small south-shore port of Pultneyville.
Like many an intrepid Internet pioneer, Doug was self-taught, saying of the cyberspace network and computers, “I love the way they work, and I hate to program them.” Nonetheless, he waded in, and his Web site is informative and straightforward to navigate. Like many a volunteer webmaster, he’s found that his “virtual boatyard,” where people gather to swap tips and fix-it stories, has taken on a life of its own. It also takes up many of Doug’s winter evenings and weekends. Luckily, in upstate New York he has a goodly supply of those to while away.
When asked what motivates him to keep the site going, he answers, “knowing you’re helping other people and answering other people’s questions about their boats is very satisfying. I’ve even seen a couple of boats change hands, and I’ve then helped the new owners with the same boats.” He has also found new homes for a couple of worthy Bristols. And matching a good boat with a good crew is always gratifying. A testimonial posted on Doug’s page aptly sums it up. “We looked at the boat (a Bristol 32). It looked right, but we wanted to research a bit further. Back to the Web, and I can’t tell you how blown away we were when we did a search and found a beautiful photograph of the exact boat we were looking at buying, along with all the other terrific information and comments.”
Self-taught techie
A considerably more diverse but no less enthusiastic crowd hangs out at another virtual boatyard: the trailer-sailor page. This site is maintained by another volunteer, Todd Johnson, also a self-taught “techie.” Todd inherited the trailer-sailor site from its creator, Brad Bachelor, who set it up in 1996 as an online newsletter for fellow trailer-sailors.
Brad, a lifelong sailor, ended up in the lower latitudes of Alabama cruising a Hunter 19 overland behind a Chevy Cavalier to a series of southern lakes and bays. He, too, wanted to exchange information with others on maintenance and sailing, and his online newsletter soon grew to become a popular forum, with an extensive message board for posting trailer-sailor gear requests, comments, rants, and tips. It became one of the most popular and lively sailing forums on the Web. But then, in 1998, Brad announced it was time to move on to other endeavors, so Todd volunteered to take over the extensive site and keep it going.
Todd explained that he was new to sailing and that he had “lurked” around the edges of the message board soaking up much useful advice and enjoying the free-flowing exchanges. A self-described thirty-something musician turned hardware engineer, turned programmer, turned entrepreneur, today he is CEO of a software company called American CyberNetics, which he founded in 1987. He is also an enthusiastic sailor aboard a Catalina 27 as well as a sport diver.
Arizona-based Todd has been drawn to the rich beauty of the Sea of Cortez, a place of abundant game fishes, reefs, whales, empty beaches, and wild rugged scenery. He explored it first as a diver, later as a sailor, and then developed an extensive on-line cruising guide to the region because, as he notes, much of what’s been published is oriented toward large bluewater cruisers rather than smallboat sailors and beach cruisers on one-week holidays.
The trailer-sailor site also has a vast number of links to other Web pages as well as a large library of articles on cruising in small boats. There is immense appeal in browsing through these online journals and ship’s logs, and many provide eloquent testimony to the pleasures of small simple cruisers. As Ernest Gann put it in his book, Song of the Sirens, “In large vessels there is travail and perplexity, in small vessels there is joy.”
I have a special place in my heart for dinghy cruisers, having put nearly 1,000 miles on my Lightning one summer traveling around the Chesapeake. I was somewhat younger (and more foolish) then, so it may well be that I enjoy reading about these excursions in open boats more than I would actually now like repeating them. But it is refreshing to read about people having fun and making honest and considerable voyages in a boat that cost them about half what most cruisers would pay for a new mainsail.
Gary Hansen, Todd’s partner on the Trailer Sailor page, was killed in a boating accident in July. This defining moment caused a major life change for Todd, who writes, “I have purchased an older 41-foot ketch, a 1978 CT 41, and have moved aboard with my daughter.”
Endless ingenuity
The trailer-sailor message board is also a tribute to the endless ingenuity of sailors. I was particularly intrigued by the description of a solo mast-stepping system for a 21-footer that involved using a jerry jug full of water and the trailer’s spare tire as a counter weight. Sailors are nothing, if not endlessly creative.
When I asked Todd what kept him motivated to feed his “monster,” as he describes the trailer-sailor Web site, he said, “I’m not quite sure what drives me to keep my site alive. It’s certainly not money. The income barely covers expenses. But I do love it, and I don’t see giving it up. I love the community and the constant flow of information that comes from these Web sites.”
International site
Freewheeling, lively, uncensored, and unfettered, this is human communication in the Internet age, perhaps between an American, a Czech, and a South African sailor, all of whom share a common interest in a particular boat, whether sailed on the China Sea, the Baltic, or Lake Michigan.
For a truly international sailing Web site devoted to older boats, it would be difficult to surpass James McGarvey’s Cheoy Lee Association site with visitors from more than 60 countries. James has even gone so far as to include a translator on his site that converts text to German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.
The Cheoy Lee site was launched after James and Cilla McGarvey purchased Jamcill, a 36-foot Cheoy Lee Clipper built in 1969, about three years ago. Jamcill is now beached in their backyard undergoing an extensive refit. Shortly after her purchase, James, who had never heard of Cheoy Lee yachts, logged onto the Internet in search of information. Like Doug Axtell, he then was drawn into the wild, wonderful, World Wide Web. “I’d spent a little time in the newsgroups trying to find out about these boats. I met a couple of owners in the newsgroups, and was playing around with a free personal Web program at the time. I decided to list the other Cheoy Lee owners I’d met there.”
At about the same time, James discovered Good Old Boat magazine. He learned of the effort by its editors to list all the boat associations they could find, which encouraged him to go public with his effort. By then he had learned that the Cheoy Lee company had produced more than 50 models of boats, so he decided to start an “official” Web site to “sort out the different models” and to list other Cheoy Lee owners. “It took off with a bang, and in just over a year, we had more than 400 members from more than 40 countries,” he notes. Soon he had to move and expand the site to accommodate the large volume of traffic it generated.
Like Doug, James was a self-taught webmaster, and he has found the task far more time-consuming than he ever anticipated. Today, he says, the Cheoy Lee Association gets more than 70,000 page views a month. “I am constantly amazed at the fact that we still get 20 or more new members finding us a month,” he says.
Large library
Visitors to the McGarveys’ site will find an extensive, well-laid-out library of information on the various Cheoy Lee models as well as information on maintenance issues. James says he has printed the site out and found its 1,100 files fill 350 pages of paper. This virtual boatyard and cruising club also carries accounts of voyages made with various Cheoy Lee Yachts. These husky bluewater boats experience adventures and get to places that are inspiring indeed, especially to winter-bound sailors in northern latitudes. It may be no coincidence that the Axtells and the McGarveys live in upstate New York, a climate highly conducive to Internet surfing by beached boaters between November and April.
James and Cilla have sailed smaller boats in the past, and James is a refugee from Southern California’s urban sprawl where, in high school, he spent as much time as possible surfing. He and Cilla, a former dairy farmer, ended up in a quiet country setting in upstate New York. They brought Jamcill to their home from Lake Champlain where she had sailed for some years. The boat originally came to the East Coast on the deck of an aircraft carrier around 1970 after a Naval officer stationed off Vietnam purchased her, but she has been in fresh water for much of her life since then. Her previous owner had done some chartering with her, and James was able to sail with him a couple of times before bringing the boat home.
Since then the McGarveys have begun stripping the boat down to do a complete refinish of topsides and of the varnished Sitka spruce spars. James is also doing an overhaul of the wiring system, redoing some plumbing, and replacing the fuel tank. Refinishing the cast-iron ballast has sparked an exchange on the Web site, as have some of James’s other undertakings. “Probably my biggest hassle will be pulling the prop shaft and tackling the rudder and Cutless bearing replacement,” he notes, adding that while he and Cilla have sailed for a number of years, they have never owned and maintained a yacht as large and complex as the clipper.
The big dream
When Jamcill is at last refitted, the McGarveys plan to shove off to do the inland waterway with her, heading to Florida. Then, if all goes well, they will sail to the Bahamas and perhaps continue on to the Caribbean. At that point, notes James, “If there is confidence in the boat and our abilities, then the big dream — the South Pacific.” Will Jamcill ever go back to visit her birthplace in the Orient? Keep an eye on the Web site to find out.
James says of his Web site, “I guess the most satisfying part of building a community on the Net has been the hundreds of great email messages we get, thanking us for putting the information on Cheoy Lees in one place, plus making a place where people can get to know other owners of their models . . . We have made so many friends through the project, we hope to meet them in person some day on the water. It’s been worth the effort, just to know that people from more than 60 countries use this site.”
We, who sail for pleasure, often travel alone and find ourselves drawn to places of solitude and beauty in a crowded world. But we thrive, too, on exchanges with our peers and value the opportunity to share a good sea story or fix-it tip. The wonderful, and still largely unfettered, world of the Internet has been a boon to that exchange between sailors, thanks in considerable part to the work of self-taught html authors like Doug Axtell, Todd Johnson, and James McGarvey.
Susan has written two books about boats she has known. Ariel’s World and Sweet Water both feature her good old 23-foot 1930s-vintage home-built sloop. She now sails Lake Ontario with her husband on Titania, a 32-foot Chris-Craft.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
