Dave Martin, outstanding seaman, shares his experience with readers
Issue 37 : Jul/Aug 2004
Our newest contributing editor, Dave Martin, was a good old boater long before the term was invented. His affinity for sailboats began at age 7, when his father bought a Cal 25. It was strengthened in 1983 when Dave and his dad left Seattle to cruise north around Vancouver Island, south to the Panama Canal, east to the Caribbean, north to Rhode Island, and south to Florida.
By then his dad had lived his cruising dream. Dave began his own dream on that Cal, cruising the Bahamas and, when the cruising funds ran out, heading to New York for a job in Ralph Naranjo’s Sewanhaka Boat Yard.
The Cal had already done more cruising than ever was intended for a coastal cruiser, and it had developed structural problems. That’s when Dave became a good old boater. He decided to fix the boat he owned rather than work for decades to buy another. He gutted it, reinforced the hull, and decreased the size of the overlarge cockpit. Of this refit, Ralph Naranjo wrote, “I watched Dave transform a stock Cal 25 into a cutter-rigged cruising boat with the structural integrity of a Niagara Falls barrel.”
Two years later, Dave finished the project and set sail for the Caribbean. In St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, Dave met Jaja, who’d grown up sailing on the East Coast and was teaching sailing at a beachfront hotel. The tourist season ended, and Jaja left for a commitment in Japan. Dave sailed to England.
Jaja recalls: “Sailing was no fun alone, Dave wrote, and if I would come to England, he thought we could make a great team sailing together . . . I caught a plane to England. Dave met me at the airport, and I moved aboard. As we were sailing down the Solent in a gale, Dave proposed to me.”
They were married in Barbados and have indeed made a great team whose saga has been followed by the readers of Cruising World since 1995, when the couple was awarded the magazine’s Medal for Outstanding Seamanship. In explaining their selection of the Martins that year, Quentin Warren wrote, “ . . . the innate ability to transform a small coastal cruiser into a vessel capable of taking two toddlers and their intrepid parents bare-poled across the Indian Ocean without so much as minor gear failure . . . amounts to consummate preparation and impressive boat handling.”
Toddlers? Chris was born in Australia in 1990. Holly joined them in 1991 in New Zealand. Teiga was delivered aboard Direction in 1996 after they’d completed their circumnavigation and had settled briefly in North Carolina. “The only major gear failure we suffered during our years of bluewater sailing was in the birth-control department,” Dave quips.
That 25-footer was clearly too small, so the Martins found a 33-foot steel hull. In 18 months Dave gutted the interior and rebuilt it. As a five-some, they were off again, on a shake-down cruise to the Bahamas. They left there in the spring of 1998 bound for Bermuda and ultimately Iceland. This story is told in their wonderful book, Into the Light. They liked Iceland so much they wintered over, living aboard and sending their children to the local school. They headed for Norway the following spring. There again they wintered over not far from the Arctic Circle. For now, the Martins have settled in Maine, where the children have a bit more room to run.
We’re delighted to welcome Dave as a contributing editor. That title means you’ll be seeing his articles regularly. He joins an already high-powered group of sailing writers. We look forward to ongoing contributions by Dave Martin, who thinks outside the box and calls it as he sees it. He is likely to delight and occasionally dismay us.
Welcome aboard, Dave.
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