I've been involved in sailing for most of my life. When I was young - and, perhaps more importantly, my parents were short of their 50's - we had a San Juan 24-foot sloop, kept it on Lake Ontario, did a lot of racing. Grand times. Among other things it brought me to my first public music performance. We'd take a couple of weeks every summer and do a circuit around the lake, up the coast to the mouth of the St Lawrence, camp out somewhere in the Thousand Islands, and hit Kingston before we headed back.
Time went on and culture changed, the yacht club we belonged to changed from a place serious sailors went to to a place where rich people hung around to just Be Yacht People. And dad got a new job that moved us an extra hundred miles away from there. So we ended up selling the boat. Bought a nice house, put my brother and I through Jesuit high school and on to college.
(There's an amusing story in there about my first time at scout camp, when I went for the "small boat sailing" merit badge....)
Eventually, Dad got bit by the sailing bug again, and we picked up a Lightning. This is a -tiny- little thing, about fifteen feet long and easily trailer-able, and we kept it on a trailer in our back yard when it wasn't in the water. It's meant for two or three crew and is a serious racing boat, but we really weren't much for serious racing at the time, so we just tooled around the bay and goofed off.
Sooner or later we decided that this was just Not Enough Boat, and Dad went all-in on a Beneteau 36, another nice sloop-rig a good bit bigger than the old San Juan. We had fun tooling around Lake Ontario some more with this one.
Of course, Dad and Mom are getting old by this point, and after Dad retired he bought a place in Florida and they started snowbirding. They joined a yacht club that had a sailboat you could sign out for a day or so at a time - I forget what type, it was old and small and kinda in pretty bad shape because they were mostly Rich Yacht People and didn't give a damn about it. So that was enough for a couple years, then Dad gets a wild hair up his you-know and buys another one - 32-footer, this time, I -think- another Beneteau but I'm not sure. I've only been out on it a few times.
This past summer, they decided that they were getting more good sailing time down there than up here, so they'd rather have the newer and more comfortable boat down there. Which entailed switching them around. My only part in this was digging up the title from the safe in their place here, and fed-exing it down to them. They apparently hired someone to truck it down as far as St Petersburg or so, and then another guy to actually sail it around to Venice, where their winter place is.
And so this Christmas break I got to go out on the new boat on the open ocean. Whee!
(Nostalgia moment: Anytime I go by a place with flagpoles, I get a flashback moment -- the sound of the halyards thrumming against the hollow metal poles just takes me right back and I'm out on the water again. Post office, McDonald's, anywhere with that right sound, and I just zen.)
Time went on and culture changed, the yacht club we belonged to changed from a place serious sailors went to to a place where rich people hung around to just Be Yacht People. And dad got a new job that moved us an extra hundred miles away from there. So we ended up selling the boat. Bought a nice house, put my brother and I through Jesuit high school and on to college.
(There's an amusing story in there about my first time at scout camp, when I went for the "small boat sailing" merit badge....)
Eventually, Dad got bit by the sailing bug again, and we picked up a Lightning. This is a -tiny- little thing, about fifteen feet long and easily trailer-able, and we kept it on a trailer in our back yard when it wasn't in the water. It's meant for two or three crew and is a serious racing boat, but we really weren't much for serious racing at the time, so we just tooled around the bay and goofed off.
Sooner or later we decided that this was just Not Enough Boat, and Dad went all-in on a Beneteau 36, another nice sloop-rig a good bit bigger than the old San Juan. We had fun tooling around Lake Ontario some more with this one.
Of course, Dad and Mom are getting old by this point, and after Dad retired he bought a place in Florida and they started snowbirding. They joined a yacht club that had a sailboat you could sign out for a day or so at a time - I forget what type, it was old and small and kinda in pretty bad shape because they were mostly Rich Yacht People and didn't give a damn about it. So that was enough for a couple years, then Dad gets a wild hair up his you-know and buys another one - 32-footer, this time, I -think- another Beneteau but I'm not sure. I've only been out on it a few times.
This past summer, they decided that they were getting more good sailing time down there than up here, so they'd rather have the newer and more comfortable boat down there. Which entailed switching them around. My only part in this was digging up the title from the safe in their place here, and fed-exing it down to them. They apparently hired someone to truck it down as far as St Petersburg or so, and then another guy to actually sail it around to Venice, where their winter place is.
And so this Christmas break I got to go out on the new boat on the open ocean. Whee!
(Nostalgia moment: Anytime I go by a place with flagpoles, I get a flashback moment -- the sound of the halyards thrumming against the hollow metal poles just takes me right back and I'm out on the water again. Post office, McDonald's, anywhere with that right sound, and I just zen.)