Once Bitten, Twice Fine

Sailing seemed over, till an old friend returned.

Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020

“Sailboat for sale. $400.”

The ad caught my attention: just what I was looking for, and the price was right.

“It just needs a little TLC. Price reflects the love it needs.”

I liked the sound of that. After all, two of my previous boats had required a lot of TLC.

I learned to sail in the 1970s, during my university years, on an Enterprise dinghy built by the father of my friend, Ken. Then another friend left Ken and me in charge of looking after his Nacra 5.2 racing catamaran while he was away. I grew hooked on sailing and speed.

Later, my wife, Kerry, and I bought a Prindle 16 catamaran and sailed her on just about every lake around western Canada. Then the kids came along, and life kind of got in the way of sailing. We sold the Prindle in 1990, and as my ex-boat rounded the corner and disappeared from view, my lovely bride assured me that someday I would get another boat. Really, I would.

The years passed. Then one day in 2003, while visiting friends at their lakefront property, the subject of sailing came up. When I mentioned that I would like to get another boat and get back into it, Don pointed to a couple of hulls lying on the lawn. “Which one would you like?”

I picked the Flying Junior, built by the Kildonan Canoe Company in Winnipeg in 1964. It was covered in mold and mildew. I could see where someone had stuck some large vinyl flowers on the hull, as the mold was less black where the flowers had been. A fallen tree had punched a couple of big holes in the deck, and much of the foredeck and hull were covered with osmotic blisters and small cracks. But because the hull was light enough that I could move it around a bit, and because all the sails and hardware were there, I gladly accepted the gift.

I spent most of the rest of that summer cleaning, sanding, patching, sanding, filling, and sanding. I removed all the hardware and used a small grinder to open up some of the blisters and cracks in preparation for doing repairs.

The grinder and I then moved to the holes on either side of the deck. I opened them up and beveled the edges to give new resin something to grab. I stuffed the gunwales behind the holes with newspaper and wax paper (to act as a backing) and started applying the first of several layers of fiberglass mat and resin over the top—with lots of grinding and sanding between layers. These projects comprised my first experience doing any fiberglass work, but my efforts eventually resulted in a surface that seemed relatively smooth and consistent.

After painting her with hardware store paint, buying and installing new hardware, and re-rigging her, she looked pretty good. I christened her Dad’s Derelict, a nod to the condition she was in when I first saw her.

I sailed the Derelict for a few years, getting back into the groove of reading the wind, playing with the rigging, and just enjoying life in the cockpit. And when the opportunity came to move up to a bigger boat, I bought a 1988 MacGregor 26D. Because I didn’t have room for two boats, Derelict went off to a new home.

For many years, I explored the lakes of Alberta and British Columbia aboard the MacGregor. She was easy to tow, easy to launch, and fun to sail. I even let her hull taste a bit of saltwater sailing off the West Coast.

Then a skiing accident resulted in major knee damage that left me feeling very insecure on a rolling deck in rougher water. With marina and storage costs rising, I reasoned that the time had come to find her a new home as well. I was pretty sure that my sailing days were over.

This past spring, when I learned that Ken and his wife had bought a lakefront place near my home, I wondered if maybe, just maybe, they would consider storing an extra boat on their property, a boat that could be used by anyone who wanted to sail. “Absolutely,” they said.

I started looking. Too big, too small, too fast, too new, too expensive—nothing seemed quite right. Then I saw the ad for the boat in Calgary: “Sailboat for sale. $400.” As I scrolled further down the ad, the first photo appeared. I recognized her immediately, a Kildonan Canoe sailboat, a sistership to my first boat. Next was a smaller photo that I couldn’t make out on my phone, until I opened it up.

There she was, Dad’s Derelict!

“You absolutely have to buy her,” Kerry said.

When I picked her up, I showed the seller photos of Derelict as she was when I first found her and told him the story. He couldn’t believe it.

So, again, my summer has been spent removing old paint and hardware, cleaning, grinding, patching, sanding, filling, and sanding some more. Someone added a furling jib and a tiller tamer; I’m keeping the former and ditching the latter. I’ve installed new stainless steel rigging and repainted her with actual boat paint this time—two coats of Interlux Brightside, red on the deck, and white for the hull, rolled and tipped. And now that she looks so great, I had to get her a new graphic for her bow.

I guess we’re meant to be together, this boat and me. It’s good to be sailing again.

Curt Wiebe is a retired sales engineer with too many hobbies and not enough time. Besides sailing on the oversized sloughs residents of Alberta call “lakes,” he also spends his time traveling, camping, rebuilding vintage fiberglass travel trailers, bicycling, slot car racing, trying to finish the items on his “Honey-do List” before it gets too long, and walking The Girls, his two pit bull cross rescues. He has previously been published in Pacific Yachting and Slot Car Mods magazines.

 

Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com