Writer Don Casey has helped and inspired countless sailors and their good old boats.
Issue 139: July/Aug 2021
Don Casey and his boat, Richard Cory, on the hard—briefly. He and his wife, Olga, typically sailed at least half the year.
When Don Casey quit his job as chief operations officer for the Federal Reserve in Miami in 1983 to go cruising, his mother and father were horrified.
“It was like telling your parents, ‘I’m going to be a poet,’ ” he says. Which, as it transpired, wasn’t too far from the truth. In addition to realizing his sailing dreams, he also became one of the most well recognized and respected marine authors, publishing classics like Sensible Cruising and This Old Boat, along with hundreds of articles in sailing magazines.
As he sits at his desk in a swivel chair with a laptop open in front of him, Don’s southern accent and warm demeanor radiate through the receiver. Though I’m thousands of miles away in a town near the Alaska border, I can feel the Florida sunshine pouring through the phone line.
The author lives in Miami Springs on the ground level of a 12-unit condomium. A canal runs besides the property, an extension of the Miami River, but it’s not navigable because there’s a flood gate between the building and the larger waterway.
Don and his wife, Olga, are landlocked. If it weren’t for the pandemic, they’d be traveling, perhaps in Spain, where Olga’s family lives, but Don doesn’t seemed perturbed at his confinement.
“It’s a very beautiful day in Florida right now,” he tells me. He looks out into his thriving garden. A breeze is blowing, and a newly planted Golden Dew Drop is erupting in purple blossoms. “We planted a couple of trees so that when we look out the back window, we’d see something new and interesting. We’ve been trying to occupy ourselves.”
As it turns out, Don grew up land-locked, too, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “I spent no time whatsoever on the water,” he says. “When I was 16, I went on a trip to California, and that was the first time I’d ever seen the ocean.”
In 1970, at 23 years old, his life trajectory would be radically altered when he picked up the October issue of National Geographic magazine. Don had recently returned to the University of Texas to complete his senior year. “I hated school,” he says. “At the end of my junior year I dropped out for two years to work for LTV Aerospace as a machine tool programmer.”
The National Geographic issue featured the final installment of a three-part series written by Robin Lee Graham, whose youthful, record-setting solo circumnavigation would inspire generations of sailors through his book recounting the trip, Dove. “I was completely blown away,” Don says. “Here was a kid, more or less my age, completing a five-year circumnavigation. The whole idea just fascinated me.”
Enthralled, Don hopped on his motorcycle, a 650 cc BSA Lightning, and raced to the university library to track down the previous two issues. “By the time I’d read those, my life was changed,” he says. “There was no way I could go and interview in a skinny tie for IBM.” Don finished the school year with a new plan.
“The day after my last final, I loaded a few items into my car, a BMW 2002, and drove to Miami,” he says. He arrived with no connections, no job, and no prospects, but in his heart and head he was already a sailor. “I came to Florida with the idea of buying a boat and heading off into the blue…and that led to a job in finance.”
Don wanted to buy a boat, and for that he needed money, which was in short supply for the recent college graduate. A job would have to come first. It took him a while to find work, but he ultimately landed a position with the Federal Reserve Bank.
“As soon as I had an income, I bought a sailboat, a five-year-old Bristol 27,” he says. He named the Carl Alberg design Tutor for all that he knew it would teach him. “I took this boat twice to the Bahamas for two-week cruises, all the vacation time I had.”
Don flourished at the Federal Reserve, eventually rising up the ranks to the No. 2 position, chief operating officer, but all the while he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. “I’m a good employee but I don’t have that, ‘I just live for this job’ attitude,” he says. “At 5 o’clock, I’d rather go home and mess with a boat or go sailing.”
Don and Olga sailed Richard Cory for 44 years, much of that time in the Bahamas and Eastern Caribbean.
Two years into his job, with long-term cruising still in mind, Don went on the hunt for a Luders 33, the boat on which Graham had finished his circumnavigation. “I figured I couldn’t go too far wrong following Graham’s lead,” he says. He never found one, and instead bought a four-year-old 30-foot Seawind, made by the same builder.
He named the boat after a poem written by Edwin Arlington Robinson that he’d read in a college literature class. It recounts the tale of a wealthy and successful man, admired by the town, who inexplicably takes his own life. “I named the boat Richard Cory as a reminder not to get too caught up in the pursuit of success at the cost of joy,” Don says.
Don feels that “settling” for the Seawind was ultimately a stroke of good luck; “It proved the perfect boat for Olga and me to cruise off and on for the next 44 years.”
Obviously, he was on something of a lucky streak, because less than a year after buying the boat, he met Olga. “She was my secretary, and that led to a romance that has lasted for 44 years,” Don says. In the early days of their relationship, Don penned a whole collection of poems. “Olga was the muse.”
He soon introduced her to Richard Cory. Though Olga had never sailed before meeting Don, she quickly took to it. “She made a heck of a cruiser,” he says. The pair married in 1976, and just two years later, they set sail for the Bahamas. Don had convinced the Federal Reserve to give him a six-month sabbatical.
“In 1978, we often had anchorages to ourselves,” says Don. “It wasn’t unusual to spear dinner right under the boat. Mature conch were plentiful.” Cruising the islands was a simple existence; they navigated by compass, were frequently out of communication for a month or more, and there was little or no crime to worry about. “Essentially the world was slow and pink and aqua,” says Don. “That was our first cruise of any length. It was informative. We enjoyed it.”
But was it the life he wanted?
“I went on sabbatical to decide,” he says. “Am I really going to outfit this boat and head off to the Pacific? When I came back, the answer to that was no…I realized that I just didn’t have it in me. For me sailing was more about anchors than it was about sails.”
Don tending to some sail work. Sensible self-sufficiency has been his sailing mantra since he began.
Shortly after returning from his six-month sabbatical, Don received a package in the mail from some people they had met cruising. “I opened it and it had a sailing magazine from the St. Petersburg area,” he says. Thumbing through it, he landed on the center¬fold. “Here’s this full-page, large-format picture of me, standing at the mast of our sailboat pulling into one of the anchorages in George Town.”
Don wrote to the editor of the Sailor’s Gazette asking for a copy of the photo. But before doing so he thought he’d better read the magazine. “There was a big article about making sure that you were armed when you went cruising,” he says. “I couldn’t have disagreed more, so when I wrote to the editor I said, ‘I read your magazine and I have to tell you that the logic about guns is just wrong.’ ”
The editor wrote back saying he’d be happy to send the photo if Don would put his thoughts into an article. “I wrote the article for him,” Don says. “He was thrilled with it and encouraged me to write more.” For the next couple of years, Don would dictate sailing articles to his secretary (no longer Olga) at the Federal Reserve.
When Don eventually left his job for good, he and Olga decided to build their lives around sailing half the year. One of their first priorities was to find a place to keep Richard Cory. They bought a piece of property and built a house on the Caloosahatchee, a 67-mile river that runs across Florida, draining the northern edge of the Everglades. “We could pull out of our canal and make a right turn and go out into Gulf Stream and then across to the Bahamas,” he says.
Don continued writing for boating magazines including Good Old Boat, SAIL, Cruising World, Yachting, and BoatU.S. In one article, he made the case for cruising in a modest-sized sailboat, at a time when 40-plus-footers were becoming more common. A cruiser named Lew Hackler read the article and was inspired to write a whole book on the topic. “He put a manuscript in my hand,” Don says. “I read it, and it was just awful.”
Fortunately, Hackler didn’t want to actually write the book, he just wanted to publish it. “I came back to him with the idea of using Thoreau’s quotes,” says Don, who felt that the poet and writer, Henry David Thoreau, had captured much of the essence and philosophy behind cruising.
Don spent six months writing Sensible Cruising: The Thoreau Approach. “Lew Hackler is listed on there as the co-author, but Lew’s real involvement was publisher,” he says. “The book was successful because Lew went to Annapolis and would drag people off the aisle saying, ‘Hey, I wrote a book, let me tell you all about it!’ ”
The book was published in 1986. It was picked up by Dolphin Book Club as a featured book, which gave it wide distribution. Its success changed how Don thought about his career as a writer.
“My words actually affected people’s lives. They would come up to me and say, ‘Thank you. It never occurred to me that I could just buy a $3,000 boat and go cruising,’ ” he says.
After writing Sensible Cruising, Don and Olga decided it was time to get more serious about cruising, and they extensively refitted Richard Cory. Don had kept every issue of every sailing magazine he’d received and spent hours digging through stacks of them to find a particular DIY article he was looking for. “One day, I thought, ‘There has to be a better way,’ and that was the genesis for This Old Boat.”
Don set out to ask all the relevant questions about cruising preparations, answer them, and then write them down in one volume. “At the time, This Old House was the top program on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), so This Old Boat seemed like a natural title,” says Don. McGraw Hill liked the idea and offered to publish the book.
Don built his life around extended cruising, but he knew early on that long Pacific passages weren’t for him.
“They didn’t have any money for an art program, so they had me do all the sketches,” he says. He would put a table lamp underneath a glass-top dining table so that he could trace a drawing onto a piece of paper. “I was just so in over my head. I thought they were going to give them to a real artist, but in the end, they just used the art that I submitted.”
This Old Boat hit the shelves in 1991 and was enthusiastically received by the boating community, going on to sell tens of thousands of copies. Still in print nearly 30 years on, it remains a revered staple in many a boat rehabber’s library. “It’s a manual for getting you away from the dock and spending the least amount of time and money to do that,” says Don. Of the book’s success, “Part of it was just good timing and good luck. This Old Boat was a book that the boating community needed, even if they didn’t know they needed it.”
Following the success of This Old Boat, McGraw Hill wanted Don to do a series of 10 how-to books on topics like canvas, electrical, painting, and boat repair. The books were originally intended to be sold as part of a subscription, but one day Don’s editor, Jon Eaton, had a different idea. He decided to combine six of the volumes into one book.
“So that’s how we got Don Casey’s Complete Illustrated Sailboat Maintenance Manual.” This time around, he didn’t have to do his own illustrations. “Thankfully all of the books have sold well enough that I merit an artist these days,” he says. The manual published in 2006.
Over four decades, Don has written 10 books and countless magazine articles. The three books mentioned above have together sold well over 100,000 copies, and Don takes great satisfaction in the number of sailors he’s been able to assist over the years through his writing.
He and Olga continued to cruise on and off as life allowed, at times living aboard full-time, part-time, or even taking extended breaks from cruising altogether. Aboard Richard Cory they explored the Atlantic Seaboard, Florida’s west coast, Florida Keys, Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean’s Leeward and Windward islands.
When not cruising, they took the opportunity to travel the world, hiking part of the Camino del Santiago and the Camino del Norte, spending time in London and Scotland, trekking to Machu Picchu, and visiting cruising friends in Canada. They were even among the crowd in Paris who watched in disbelief as fire swept through Notre Dame.
These days, Don is more or less retired, though he does contribute a column at SAIL and occasional articles for Good Old Boat. “I provide advice and expertise where I can, but we no longer live the life,” he says. “After almost half a century of messing about in boats, we’ve swallowed the anchor and are far enough beyond that decision to safely report no regrets.”
Don aboard Richard Cory, his learning lab for a lifework of writing addressing the practicalities of the sailing life.
Don and Olga sold Richard Cory in 2018.
“We had a fabulous run, but additional cruising was just no longer in our future. Selling the boat made sense and turned the page on that chapter. It also provided time and resources for other ways to experience the wider world.”
Like many of us, he currently finds himself in a holding pattern, waiting for the pandemic to end. He stays occupied with various pastimes and projects like riding his BMW G310R motorcycle or digitizing nearly 40 years of photographs. He’s also in the process of resurrecting a mystery novel that he wrote in 1987 but never published. “Today, the life we do lead is essentially on hold due to the pandemic. Fortunately, one of the enduring lessons of cruising is patience, so we wait.”
As a cruising couple, Olga and Don are perhaps better equipped than most to weather hunkering down in close quarters. “If you spend years together in 30 feet, you better like each other,” says Don. “Today I am 73 years old, and when we go out and walk at night, we hold hands.” His 44-year marriage is one of the things he’s most proud of.
Though no longer cruising, when Don sees an oceangoing sailboat, he still feels a twinge of excitement.
“It’s just something that absolutely caught my imagination. It still holds my imagination. The beauty of cruising is that it occupies every minute, 24 hours a day. That’s really nice. Most of life’s not like that.”
Good Old Boat Contributing Editor Fiona McGlynn cruised from Canada to Australia on a 35-foot boat with her husband, Robin. Fiona lives north of 59 degrees and runs WaterborneMag.com, a site dedicated to millennial sailing culture.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
