Reality television shows tend to get a bad rap, but at the same time, they are among the most popular. There’s a reason for that: as manufactured as much of the drama is, real stories are among those that are easiest for us to relate to, the most engaging to our personal experiences, aspirations, and reactions.

To date, I’m not aware of any great sailing-oriented reality television. But media today is more than just what is on TV, and YouTube and other video-sharing websites have spawned a whole raft of episodes of the realest sort of reality… the kind direct from the participant.

I’ve been hooked on one of these dramas lately, a solo venture titled “Untie The Lines” starring a young German woman who bought a downtrodden boat in Panama and is in the process of repairing and rehabbing it with the goal of sailing away.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The boat is a German Reinke Super 10, twin-keel, aluminum hull sailboat that had been languishing tied up in Panama for 5 years with apparently very little care and feeding. You have to watch the second episode to gain a full appreciation for the epic variety of molds, spores, and fungi you can grow in closed-up boat in the tropics.

The woman is Nike Steiger, 32, from Hamburg. Her background is not completely clear, but her goals are: clean up Karl (as she has dubbed the Reinke) and untie the lines and conquer her “White Spots – Undiscovered areas on our maps of life!” as she says on her Facebook page.

The episodes are short, around four minutes, and generally have a theme of some sort. They’re some of the best amateur sailing shorts that I have seen, although admittedly I don’t watch an awful lot along these lines.

For my part, I’d like to see more sailing and fewer musical montages. And there are occasionally casual comments that make me wince… a bench in the cockpit described as a place so you can “…sleep at night while you’re at the watch,” for instance.

But this is no “All Is Lost.” Nike is eminently (to verge into stereotypes, one might even say “Germanically”) sensible. She may not be an expert mechanic or sailor just yet, but she approaches every problem she shows us with good humor and common sense. To paraphrase Monsarrat, you can do a lot at sea with common sense, and precious little without it.

What she finds are a lot of the things we all find: working in confined spaces with limited tools is difficult, you always need to make another trip to the store after you’ve started, the store is never easy to get to, there’s always something else wrong once you dig beneath the first thing you thought was wrong. And she copes with those things the way most of us do, by sucking it up, spending more money than planned, calling in friends to help, being adaptable. Oh, and making mistakes, and learning from them.

“Sometimes you have to try. And learn it the hard way,” she says, after enduring a day that would leave many older, wealthier sailors reeling.

Getting tired and discouraged is par for the course when you’re learning the hard way. Nike doesn’t hide it and it’s not Schadenfreude to say I enjoy seeing it… rather, it’s one of the common factors in our experiences that I can relate to. And there is comfort to be found in watching her cope with the down times, and satisfaction in knowing some of the things that await her on the other side of the difficulties. Watching her prep Karl and stumble through the same learning curves that we’ve already passed is a bit like watching a kid fumbling with the wrapping paper on Christmas morning. And it reinforces my confidence in confronting those learning curves that still rise steeply in front of me.

Most recently, Nike has unveiled her route plans. Her final destination (if any real sailor ever really has a final destination) is to return to Germany… by way of French Polynesia, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Inside Passage, truck and trailer through Canada to the Great Lakes, then across the Atlantic to Europe. So we may be seeing Karl here in the Salish Sea someday not too distant.

It’s an ambitious dream, but it’s a real story. We’re all in this for the dreams.

There comes a point in nearly every boater’s career when it’s just time to slow it down a bit.

Few of us, however, will decelerate from 200 MPH to 8 knots.

That’s exactly what local hydroplane racer Chip Hanauer plans to do, however. Hanauer, whose 12 Gold Cup Unlimited Hydroplane wins have made him a legend in the Pacific Northwest (not to mention one-time hoister of the 12th Man flag at CenturyLink Field), has been out of the racing business for 14 years. But he’s still stayed close to the boating business, starting a website where he blogs and posts videos, TheBoatGuy.com, and putting on local boating events.

Cruising, however, has not been part of his experience. His new partnership with Ranger Tugs aims to change all that.

For 2014, outfitted with a Ranger Tug 27, Hanauer aims to get himself from the South Sound to Desolation Sound and beyond, filming all the way.

“We live in boating paradise here in the Northwest and I want to go places via a boat and spend the night,” says Hanauer. “I want the satisfaction of getting myself there and back on my own and getting away from the hordes of people that now crowd our beautiful city. I want see and explore places you can only see in your own boat.”

It turns out that charging around in circles at 200 MPH is not the best possible preparation for navigating from Tacoma to Desolation, reading weather reports, picking secure anchorages and anchoring safely, or preparing a truly delectable bean dip for the inevitable cruiser’s potluck.

Hanauer plans to document his experiences as he learns all those subjects, and more, starting from zero.

There’s only one episode out so far, covering Hanauer taking delivery of his shiny new Ranger, a vessel selected for affordability, safety, comfort, and versatility. Although Desolation is the first destination on Hanauer’s list, it’s not the last; Alaska beckons, and Mexico (by trailer!) is not out of the question.

Hanauer plans to spend some time around the Ranger booth on both Friday nights of the show… look for him there!

Correction – 1/22/14: The original version of the story incorrectly stated that Hanauer had been retired from racing for 18 years. In fact, it has only been 14 years since his last race in 1999.

Sailors looking for something to do the night before the Seattle Boat Show kicks off need look no further for some good genre viewing than the Seattle International Film Festival, which is showing the new film “Maidentrip” on Thursday night as a part of its 2014 Women in Film festival. “Maidentrip” (not to be confused with “Maiden Voyage,” the book about another young woman’s circumnavigation) covers the controversial solo circumnavigation of Laura Dekker.

Only 14 years old when she set out, Dekker’s trip became instantly controversial when courts in the Netherlands stepped in to block her departure, citing the danger and irresponsibility of the trip, despite her having parental support. Eventually, Dekker prevailed in court and set off alone, completing her circumnavigation in January of 2012 at age 16.

Along the way, however, Dekker agreed to document her trip at the behest of New York filmmaker Jillian Schlesinger. This film is the result.

“Maidentrip” plays at the Uptown Theater in Lower Queen Anne at 6:30 PM on January 23. Tickets and additional information can be found here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Monday was Women’s Day at the Seattle Boat Show. Sponsored by KOMO TV, the day was free to attend for women, and was arranged around a variety of conferences by female presenters, designed for women boaters.

The show was well-attended that day, but there didn’t appear to be any particular bump in female attendees that I could detect either around the show floor or at the seminars. Recognizing that my sensors might not be particularly well-attuned to detect this sort of fluctuation, I decided to swing by the Northwest Women in Boating (NWWB) booth to see if they had noticed any difference.

First, you teach one person how to tie a bowline …

There was a single volunteer staffing the booth when I got there, and no one else around. The booth is not actually a booth, but the cut-off bow of a small powerboat with a new rail installed and ropes and instruction guides hanging it from named Knot a Boat (a name which is deliciously accurate on at least two levels; we owe a hat-tip to frequent Three Sheets Northwest contributor Mike Brough for cluing us in to the unique knot-tying station).

NWWB had originally obtained the entire boat from the Washington State Department of Natural Resources Derelict Vessel Program and then had CSR Marine chop off the back end of it and clean it up to use at shows. They then festooned the rail with practice ropes and laminated step-by-step instructions for tying seven basic sailing knots.

Then they teach everyone else how to tie a bowline!

The volunteer hadn’t noticed more women either, but noted that it was early in the day yet, and anyway, they were non-denominational knot instructors and men were as welcome as women. She proved it a moment later when a gentleman sheepishly approached and admitted he had not yet been able to learn how to tie a bowline. Five minutes later, she had not only taught him how to whip them out himself, but had him teaching other folks in turn as they wandered up (two of them female, I noted).

She had learned how to tie them behind her back, the volunteer explained. Now, the bowline was pretty much her preferred solution for everything. After her husband passed away a few years ago, she decided to hang on to their boat, and had joined NWWB to connect with other women boaters. Now about 300 members strong, the organization is open to women with any degree of boating experience or aspirations.

Within about five minutes, the rail of Knot a Boat was full of boaters, male and female alike, practicing knots and teaching one another tips and tricks for tying them.

I figured my best bet for finding the women of Women’s Day would be to head to the final panel of the evening, the Northwest Women in Boating panel, and I wasn’t disappointed. As a mixed group of men and women left the previous session, the Red Stage room slowly filled up with mostly women.

Vivian Strolis and Marilyn Michael of NWWB introduced the panelists. They were:

• Maren Van Nostrand
• Carolyn “Ace” Spragg
• Kim Carver
• Carol Hasse
• Nancy Erley

Most of those names will be recognizable to local boaters, male and female alike. All are accomplished mariners, and each had an inspirational story ready to tell (or, as Ace joked, at least one humorous enough be mistaken for inspirational by an amused audience).

The stories, though, weren’t uniquely gender-dependent. Switching out the pronouns could have turned almost any of them into the story of a curious and adventurous young man instead, and if you’ve read many sailing stories, I would wager you have already heard some variation on these tales before. It turns out that what is inspirational isn’t necessarily based on gender. The things that are cool and fun about sailing and cruising are cool and fun for everyone.

Sailing certainly has a reputation as a man’s world, and perhaps it is; such things are notoriously difficult for men to judge. But it struck me as I considered the panel, and the respected authorities I turn to again and again for solid sailing advice, how many of our luminaries are women, compared to other sports. We look to Beth Leonard for light-wind sail-handling and storm tactics and Lin Pardey on cruising boat selection and Carol Hasse for sail construction, and we crack open an Elsie Hulsizer book when we’re planning a trip to the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Carol Hasse said it best during her talk when she said, “I’m sixty-three, and I have seen a miracle happen. Women can do anything now.”

It may be that every day is Women’s Day at the Boat Show now.

Kimberly and Ky Huggins. Photos courtesy of the Huggins family

We were tied up to the customs dock at Friday Harbor one summer afternoon a few years ago, waiting to be cleared, when a friendly voice called a greeting from the other side of the dock.

We looked over and saw a couple on their powerboat. They’d noticed our cat in the cockpit and commented on her. Within minutes, we were chatting with them and they invited us over to their boat for drinks.

That’s how we met Ky and Kimberly Huggins, fellow boaters who quickly became friends.

Over the new few years, Ky and Kimberly invited us aboard their boat and to their Seattle home for parties, wine tastings and dinner get-togethers. They were gracious and generous hosts, terrific fun to be with. We spent more than one night at their dinner table, drinking wine, sharing stories and laughing.

At the end of one particularly memorable evening, the four of us, along with one of their daughters, ambled over to the nearby and now-defunct Viking Tavern and closed the place down.

Both of them were gregarious, but Kimberly radiated a particularly magnetic, upbeat energy. Statuesque and pretty, with an easy smile and an infectious, hearty laugh, she was someone who clearly enjoyed life.

Kimberly and Ky Huggins and their daughters, Gillian, left, and Sydney.

Ky and Kimberly’s house in Ballard was less than a mile from ours, but we likely would never have met if it wasn’t for boating. They both worked in the medical field — Ky ran a surgery center in Olympia and Kimberly was a researcher and instructor in the University of Washington’s Department of Oral Medicine.

Our paths probably would never have crossed professionally, and I was struck, as I’ve often been, of the ability of boating to bring people together across demographics, across distance.

We had Ky and Kimberly over to our boat on beautiful July evening last summer. We were long overdue for a visit and happy to see them. Kimberly came bounding down the companionway, a bottle of rosé in hand, effortlessly chic as usual in a black casual dress and cute sandals, her hair drawn back in an elegant ponytail. She looked tan, vibrant, healthy.

So it was a shock to get an email from Ky a little over a month later, letting us know that after 13 years of remission, Kimberly’s breast cancer had returned.

“In early July, Kimberly was feeling a bit fatigued,” Ky wrote. “Instead of an energy level at 150 percent of the rest of us, she was about 110 percent.”

The cancer had metastasized to Kimberly’s liver. She was receiving chemotherapy treatments, Ky said, and they were cautiously, guardedly optimistic about her prognosis.

At the time, I had just started a six-month contract in the communications department at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The work took on a personal weight, and I thought often of Kimberly in the weeks that followed as we waited for further news and hoped for the best.

But on Dec. 30, we received a email from Ky with the subject line “Kimberly’s last journey.” The treatment had been unsuccessful, Ky said, and Kimberly was being discharged from the hospital the following day to home hospice care. It was her wish, he said, to spend her last days at home with her family.

My heart ached to think what Ky, Kimberly and their daughters were going through. It seemed inconceivable that even cancer could take down someone as vital as Kimberly, even though rationally I knew otherwise — Marty had lost his 44-year-old brother Chris, a strapping police officer with a boundless energy to rival Kimberly’s, to cancer six years ago.

Kimberly, 58, died last week. It’s hard to believe such a bright light is gone. I would never have imagined that that July evening on our boat was the last time we’d see her.

There is something about boating that brings people together in ways that simply aren’t the same on land. There is an alchemy on the water that lends strength to bonds of friendship with people who were perfect strangers just moments before. And even as we enjoy each other’s company and share our stories, we recognize that there will be a time when our courses will diverge, leading us to different destinations.

That, too, is the nature of boating. Still, across time and distance, those bonds of friendship forged on the water remain fast.

We will remember Kimberly with great fondness, and miss her. The world is a little dimmer without her in it. And we are richer for having known her.

The photos tell the story.

Check out the latest edition of “Cruising World” in the magazine rack. A lone cruising boat (a big one!) sits at anchor on a rippled sheet of the most cerulean blue, framed in by majestic, green-clad mountains towering behind, wreathed in wafting mists. “There’s lots to love about New Zealand” it proclaims, and, we might imagine, lots of excellent places to be in love.

Same thing with “Sailing” or “Boating” (the latter of which throws in a smoldering dark-haired beauty in a red swimsuit, so you can see exactly what awaits you). Beautiful boats, beautiful places, beautiful people, quite clearly having the carefree time of their lives out on the water, in some distant paradise.

Contrast this with the actual scene in any Pacific Northwest anchorage on a sunny, crowded August afternoon: kids screaming, husbands yelling at wives as they try to set the hook, snide remarks carrying over the water about the perceived lack of skills or seamanship of the anchorers, and over-powered dinghies blasting through the fleet, setting boats a-rolling with over-sized wakes. And no one in sight comes to within a decade in age of that model in the red swimsuit.

It’s fun, sure; but that’s not the picture of romance.

Being underway can have similar deficiencies in the romance department. The steady thrum of the engine and smell of diesel has a certain something to it on those days when the waters are glassy and calm, but at the end of eight hours, all you’re likely to end up with is a headache and a strong desire to have a shower and a nap. And there’s probably not enough water for a decent shower.

Wind doesn’t necessarily improve on this condition. Watching the cabin slowly undergo a washing machine action that will require hours of cleanup later doesn’t engender particularly romantic thoughts. Yelling over the howling in the rigging as you work to tuck in a reef on a heaving deck isn’t sexy. Nor is holding on to your significant other’s lifejacket as she heaves her breakfast over the windward rail (no, windward isn’t a typo, unfortunately).

Of course, it’s not all terrible, or we wouldn’t be out doing it.

There does come a time when all that smudgy reality falls off astern, and cruising becomes just as romantic as it is made out to be.

But for me, it doesn’t come on sultry afternoons in glaring sunshine while my wife drapes herself languidly across the foredeck in a bikini (although, if she were ever actually to do that, I might change my vote).

It comes, instead, in those quiet moments when you find yourself alone on a windswept beach with the person who matters most to you, with no one else within a hundred miles.

All alone for a hundred miles in any direction on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

It’s being able to sleep on the off-watch because the person you trust most in the world has the helm in her capable hands.

Although, come to think of it, that grin looks a little diabolical

It’s going to do interesting and exciting things with someone special, building memories together that will last for a lifetime.

Sailing to Vancouver for the Winter Olympics isn’t an experience either of us will forget

It’s sharing the load of all the many, varied, necessary tasks that boating entails, making it all manageable and even fun.

Detail-oriented woodworking isn’t my thing; fortunately, I have a partner who can fiddle with it all day long

It’s not the size of the boat or the exotic port or the beautiful scenery: it’s sharing it all with the perfect person.

There isn’t anyone better to appreciate the beauty of Desolation Sound with

I was slaking my thirst for things nautical during the dark winter months here recently by perusing some of the larger online cruising forums when I came across a thread titled “Shy cruising; or, don’t invite me to the potluck” which begged to be read.

The original poster commented that she had been reading a different thread recently (such is the nature of cruising life in the winter; we don’t talk about different anchorages we’ve seen recently, we talk about various threads we have been to and explored) in which the social aspects of cruising were rated most highly in the experience of many of the posters.

This person found that moderately confusing, because, she said, her and her husband cruise to get away from people, not to hang out with more of them.

This apparently struck a chord and a chorus of “me too!” posts joined the thread, each echoing the same sense of relief that you might find at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where you have finally found a forum of like-minded folks to whom you can confess your embarrassing condition in safety and with acceptance.

I number myself among those folks who most enjoy cruising precisely because it gets me away from other people. It doesn’t take me more than a week in the city before I’m dreaming again of empty anchorages, with only trees, seals, and sky for company. Oh, and my wife. But she’s pretty tolerable these days.

As the forum experience shows, this isn’t actually a completely rare proposition. Nor should it be terribly surprising.

Some of our most celebrated cruising progenitors were folks who intentionally set off cruising in order to avoid the crowds: Joshua Slocum, Bernard Moitessier, and here locally, Capi Blanchet and her brood (one could argue she had all the society she needed in one familial bunch already).

You might think that a lot of people still go cruising for the same reason, and if that was your assumption, you’d be shocked to find out how social the whole scene actually is. It’s hard to imagine a more convivial bunch of adventurous non-conformists. As the original thread that sparked the anti-potluck thread demonstrated, many of the folks out there find their interactions with other cruisers to be among the high points of their voyages.

Of course, with sociability comes sociopathy; get a large enough group together of any sort of folks, anywhere, and you will start finding petty slights and disagreements adding up, social norms developing and corresponding shunning and shaming occurring when those norms are violated. Cruisers, for all their kindness and generosity, are no different.

So there are still some of us who would just as soon avoid the crowds, spend our time in the unspoiled anchorages where we can be apart, and hunker down and read a good book while we’re recharging and tanking up at the marina instead of kicking back in the yacht club bar with a crowd.

Still, we are all social creatures by evolution, and however much we think we want to isolate ourselves, we’re just not equipped to survive individually. Cruisers are a tribe, and the rituals of community are not without value, even if you don’t find them particularly enjoyable. Those rituals provide some of the binding that strengthens the altruism, increase communal knowledge transfer, and lay the groundwork for the rapid, strong interpersonal relationships that even us loners enjoy with other sailors on a one-to-one basis.

For my part, and I think this is true of most cruisers to greater or lesser degrees, I appreciate both aspects of the lifestyle. I actually even enjoy a potluck now and again. And the benefit to cruising is that you can have it both ways. Many people do; there are many empty, isolated anchorages in the Broughtons, for example, where solitary boats can be, well, solitary, for days at a time with no neighbors or visitors. Those anchorages are less than a day’s sail away from, say, Pierre’s at Echo Bay, where every night is a feast and there is always a crowd.

Hopping back and forth between the two states is one of the great advantages of the cruising lifestyle. So, don’t invite me to the potluck … but when I feel like it, I’ll probably just show up anyway.

A plate to pass

Canadian adventurer and filmmaker Colin Angus, the first person to circle the world exclusively under his own power, will give a presentation at the Northwest Maritime Center in Port Townsend on March 21.

Angus, who also gave a presentation at the 2013 Wooden Boat Festival at the Northwest Maritime Center, set off from Vancouver with fiancee Julie Wafaei and companion Tim Harvey on bicycles in June of 2004, heading north. Harvey and Angus had prepared a year for the journey, which originally was styled as a human-powered voyage from Vancouver to Moscow.

The team variously cycled, skied, canoed, and hiked up to Alaska, where Harvey and Angus jury-rigged a sailboat and rowed it across the Bering Sea. At one point, caught in a storm, the pair were forced to call for rescue by a nearby Russian research vessel. After reaching Siberia, the pair hiked across the treacherous tundra until Angus experienced a serious medical problem and had to be evacuated back to Canada for treatment.

He returned three months later and the pair, joined by a Russian companion, resumed cycling across Siberia. Somewhere along the way, Angus and Harvey parted ways over philosophical differences on the purpose of the expedition, and Angus continued alone, and then again joined by Wafaei until he reached Portugal. From there, Angus and Wafaei rowed across the Atlantic to Costa Rica, and then headed north again. Angus finally returned to his starting point in Vancouver in May of 2006, nearly two years after he began.

The presentation will be given at 7 p.m. on March 21. The suggested donation for attendees is $15. Angus will answer questions after his talk. You can find more information about the presentation on the NWMC site here.

Assistant Secretary of Transportation for WSF, David Moseley, at the shipyard touring the ferry Chetzemoka as it was being built – (Photo by WSF)

Assistant Secretary for Washington State Ferries David Moseley announced his resignation today, effective April 15, 2014.

Although one of his maintenance crews just drilled a hole through the bottom of one of his Jumbo-class ferries, that doesn’t appear to be the reason for his departure.

In fact, neither Moseley nor his boss, Secretary of Transportation Lynn Peterson, shed much light on the reason he is leaving. Moseley cites progress in funding and building several new ferries for the system, improving maintenance regimes, and reaching out to and communicating better with the passenger-base. Peterson, in her own statement, thanks the outgoing Assistant Secretary for those, and other, contributions during his six-year tenure.

As Moseley notes in his statement, he certainly faced some significant challenges coming into office in the wake of a serious loss of funding with the repeal of the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax, and the sudden and unexpected retirement of the failing Steel Electric class boats. The average ferry vessel age was 38 years, and the increasing costs of maintenance were suddenly shifted directly to passengers through large fare increases.

Although it wasn’t an enviable position, Moseley undertook efforts to connect more with customers, holding 450 community meetings and launching numerous online communications initiatives, including those which today provide travel time updates and real-time vessel position information on the WSF website.

At the same time, Moseley presided over some difficult and embarrassing accidents in the system. In addition to the usual rash of groundings and allisions, a separate maintenance accident on the Walla Walla (which is the vessel that had the hole drilled in the hull this past weekend) melted a drive motor and put the vessel out of service for four months, and a collision between the Hyak and the S/V Tasya resulted primarily from a lack of communication, situational awareness, and poor training of the ferry crew.

But Moseley may be a victim of his own success in improving ferry system communications, in that these accidents received a full and rapid disclosure under his tenure, whereas incidents further in the past may not have. Certainly Moseley’s weekly newsletter updates on the state of the ferry system were unusual, and unusually personal, coming from an Assistant Secretary for Transportation, and were, indeed, his chosen venue for announcing his resignation.

In those updates may be a clue as to the reasons for his departure, as well. In the February 28th edition, Moseley notes that March 1st would be his six year anniversary in the position, and expresses his thanks and reflects on many of the same notes that he was to later address in his resignation statement. Perhaps, then, as he says, it was simply “…a good time to hand the future to the next director.”

Some of the excellent cover art by Chelsea Stephen available as prints to Kickstarter campaign backers – (Illustration by Chelsea Stephen)

The FisherPoets Gathering, an annual conglomeration taking place in Astoria each year of fisher-folk who have a way with words, has always presented an unusual aspect of the commercial fishing industry: the latent artistic talent present in many of its participants. Now, the folks that brought you the Gathering are breaking through another cherished misconception about the commercial fishing crowd: that it thinks the “Internet” is what happens when your gillnets get all tangled up in the net shed.

But not only do the FisherPoets know what the Internet is, they are using one of the most cutting-edge, buzz-worthy websites on it today to fund the publication of a new seven-volume anthology of fisher poetry, songs, and stories: they’ve started their own Kickstarter campaign.

The anthology, called “Anchored in Deep Water” is being put together by long-time FisherPoet organizer and participant, Patrick Dixon, and Portland illustrator Chelsea Stephen. Dixon, now a professional photographer, is part of the organizing committee for the event and gillnetted salmon in Alaska for twenty years. He also maintains the FisherPoets online archive InTheTote. Stephen, whose work can be found at LeftPebble.com, began working with the FisherPoets last year to illustrate the anthology.

It is comprised of seven volumes of original poetry, songs, photographs, and stories from over 40 writers, from as far afield as Hawaii and Japan. Each volume covers an aspect of fishing life; from the Kickstarter description:

The books are thematically organized: Every Boat Has a Wave deals with risk and survival at sea; Illusions of Separateness deals with the politics and environment of the fishing world; Making Waves is filled with stories by and about women in the fishery; Gathering chronicles the community and camaraderie inherent in commercial fishing; Family Dynamic speaks to the family issues commercial fishing inspires; For the Love of Fish chronicles the reasons fishermen go to sea; and the final book, Mending Holes, which is still in the works, is about the history of commercial fishing.

Kickstarter calls itself the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It leverages a concept called crowdfunding — a catchy new term for the old concept of raising large sums by asking for a little bit of money from a lot of different people — by using the Internet to put creative projects in front of many more potential contributors than any of those projects could reach individually. The site has been used to fund development of everything from games to music albums to major motion pictures. Funds raised can run to millions of dollars.

The FisherPoets aren’t looking for nearly that much. Their significantly more modest goal is to come up with $10,000 in the next 41 days. As of this writing, they are slightly more than halfway there, with $6,025 pledged from 67 backers. At an average of not quite $90 each, it’s a pretty good showing; the average individual pledge rate for all Kickstarter projects is only $70. Only 43% of projects become fully funded (and the projects receive none of the pledged funds unless the baseline goal is met).

Dixon and Stephen are taking the smart route, however, one that has proven successful for many other Kickstarter campaigns. As you might have noted from the description, the first six volumes of the anthology are already done. Having that much of the project complete is solid assurance to potential backers (who, depending on their pledge amount, may receive some combination of volumes and artwork should the campaign prove successful) that the pair can deliver the goods, and are not simply indulging in pie-eyed fantasy (as poets and writers are sometimes wont to do).

In fact, Stephen was originally planning to print and bind the volumes herself. But it became apparent that the time-consuming and labor-intensive nature of the work would be a limiting factor in getting the anthology out in front of an audience. The $10,000 will provide enough to complete the final volume and produce an initial run of 300 sets of the anthology.

If successful, the sponsors anticipate distributing the works and rewards sometime in the fall of 2014.

Scott and Augusta Lowry – two generations of surfmen – (USCG Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class David Mosley)

It’s a little unusual these days for sons to follow in their father’s footsteps; even more so to follow both their father and grandfather in their chosen profession.

But to find three generations of one family who are all US Coast Guard surfmen is a rare — probably unprecedented — thing indeed.

That’s exactly what happened last month at Coast Guard Station Yaquina Bay, in Newport, Oregon. Petty Officer 2nd Class Augusta Lowry had his surfman qualification check pinned on by his father, Master Chief Petty Office Scott Lowry … also a surfman and currently executive petty officer at the National Motor Lifeboat School at Station Cape Disappointment, where most of that rare breed are minted. Scott’s father (and Augusta’s grandfather), Mark? Also a surfman, back in the 1960′s.

As most boaters know, breaking waves are the most dangerous sort. Surfmen (there are female surf”men” as well, but the title remains as it was historically) make their living among those waves, the chosen few who have trained hard enough and long enough to be relied upon to take a forty-seven foot motor lifeboat into heavy breakers without turning themselves or their crew into fresh victims. There have only been around 500 designated surfmen in the entire history of the Coast Guard and its predecessor, the United States Life-saving Service. Fewer than 5% of the service’s coxswains receive the designation, which can take years to earn.

If there’s a place in the United States where breaking waves can be served up almost on-demand, that place is the Columbia River bar. The volume of water coming out of the fifth largest river in North America smashes into prevailing westerly winds and swells with sublime fury. Massive freighters and tankers are tossed around like toy boats in a bathtub at the bar. Breaking surf conditions there occur more than 10% of the year.

That’s why the National Motor Lifeboat School, where the elder Lowry is currently stationed, is located at Cape Disappointment. The conditions are reliably awful enough there to enable the school to train up to 150 students a year in rough weather surf rescue. Students come not just from the US Coast Guard, but from the Canadian Coast Guard, Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institute, Norway, and elsewhere. It is the premier institution of its sort in the world, and the Heavy Weather Coxswain Course provides the hands-on experience that teaches the skills to save lives in heavy surf.

Despite this, it’s not a requirement to be stationed at Cape Disappointment to receive the surfman qualification. Instead, it’s a long slog of one to six years of demanding training and constant practice.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Lowry (left) shares a sea story aboard Coast Guard Cutter Northwind – Photo courtesy of Master Chief Petty Officer Scott Lowry

Augusta put that time in with the support of his family, including wife Melinda, son Hunter, and daughters Parker and Audrey. Time spent training for the qualification necessarily kept him away from home for long hours. But for Augusta, it was all worthwhile in terms of the larger scheme of things.

“I am very proud to be the third surfman in my family and I only hope that my son or either of my daughters might continue the legacy,” he said. “I’ve always felt that, being a 3rd generation Coast Guardsman, I have had a legacy to uphold.”

Unfortunately, Augusta’s grandfather, and Scott’s father, Mark Lowry was unable to be there as his grandson received the same surfman qualification as he had years before … the eldest Lowry passed away in 2007. He was buried at sea from a 47-foot Motor Lifeboat just across the Coquille River bar. According to Scott Lowry, “Both my son and I were aboard that day. It was blowing hard out of the northwest and the conditions were sloppy, so Dad’s final crossing of the bar was as he’d have liked it.”

A Hobie 14 in surf – (Photo by Brent Coetzee, CC licensed, some rights reserved)

Surfer, sailor, and commercial visionary Hobie Alter passed away last night at his home in California at the age of eighty after an extended battle with cancer.

Best known in sailing circles for the ubiquitous “Hobie-cat” sailing catamarans, Alter actually had a greater impact on the surfing industry, having developed and popularized the fiberglass-skin, foam core surfboard. Alter built the new technology into a successful business — Hobie surfboards remain one of the top-selling surfboard brands of all time.

A competitive surfer himself in his youth, Alter remained fascinated with wind, water, and speed and eventually produced not only the Hobie catamaran, but also a line of gliders.

The Hobie catamaran, a twin-hulled, fiberglass craft, was first introduced in 1965 and become an almost instant success. From 1967 onward, Hobie has been the largest manufacturer of small catamarans in the world. The original 14-foot model was followed by others ranging in size from 10 to 22 feet, and a lone mono-hull venture, the Hobie 33. Lightweight, maneuverable, and both affordable and easily stored, the small cats have been the vessels that have introduced generations of sailors to the art of sailing.

More details are available on the Hobie website.

Three Sheets’ Guest Dock is one of our better features, in our humble opinion; we follow and aggregate blog postings from local boaters, boating organizations, and historical societies of a nautical bent here, all in one place, and promote the best regularly to our front page so you can see the very best in Pacific Northwest nautical blogging easily all in one place.

As happens in the boating life, we’ve seen some boats cruise off into the sunset from our Guest Dock, but we’ve also seen a few new ones heave into view from over the horizon. Since we have added a few over this past couple of months, we thought it might be a good time for some brief introductions!

Stormy and Chloe aboard S/V Sookie, from Art of Hookie – (photo from the blog Art of Hookie)

Alan, who often goes by “Stormy,” is the free spirit behind Art of Hookie. His colorful background often comes into play in his posts, a whirlwind life of ups and downs that have led him (and his constant companion, his dog Chloe) to an absolutely gorgeous Falmouth 22 cutter, S/V Sookie, and to a unique perspective on sailing on the cheap and for the good times.

Maddie tells the tales of the Adventures of Wild Rose, including husband Matt, daughters Savannah and Lyla, and labrador Charlie Muppets, as they settle in to the liveaboard lifestyle in Friday Harbor aboard a 1954 50 Chris Craft Catalina. Maddie’s perspective as a new boater, a new liveaboard, and mother of two is a refreshing glimpse into the magic you first feel when you move onto the water.

Another new San Juans-based blogger is Chris of San Juan Sufficiency. Chris lives aboard the S/V Solace, a 27 foot US Yacht, where he focuses on “Simplicity, Happiness, and Doing It Yourself.” As Chris keeps his life simple, minimal, and focuses on leisure time he offers tips on streamlining your own lifestyle and making your vessel more efficient for the long-haul.

Sally the Sea Dog Strolls by the Sea Shore… try saying that three times fast. – (Photo from the blog of S/V Cambria)

Stephanie, David, and Sally the Sea Dog (do all our new Guest Dock contributors have cruising dogs?) are the crew of S/V Cambria, a Westerly Ocean 43 that they bought in New Zealand, performed the Pacific Puddle Jump in reverse with, and made the dread trek up the West Coast from San Diego. They’ve been wintering in Puget Sound and exploring the Inside Passage and west coast of Vancouver Island in the years since, chronicling fascinating destinations, do-it-yourself boat maintenance, and the challenges of cruising with an aging dog ever since.

Kirsten and Jason make up the adult contingent of the Free Range Family, which is comprised, as their tagline aptly says, “Two adults. Two kids. One chihuahua. Location varies.”

In the “slice of history” department, we have the Saltwater People Historical Society. Covering the San Juans and Northern Puget Sound, the Saltwater People unearth and post fascinating snippets of our maritime heritage that will give you a new way of looking at our local seas and harbors.

Patrick and Kirsten are the crew of S/V Silhouette, a 38-foot Cabo Rico cutter currently exploring the Hawaiian Islands, but slowly (at 6 knots, says their tagline… doesn’t sound that slow, to me!) making their way back in our general direction.

Ken is Naughty by Nature (a Three Sheets-hosted blog) and boy, does it show… his hilarious observations of sailing and racing aboard his Catalina 38 (a beautiful Sparkman and Stephens design) are interspersed from time to time by the thoughtful and touching.

Jon tells the tale of Solitude III in his blog, a fascinating story of building a 15’ CLC PocketShip from the ground up… and then, sailing her around Puget Sound now that she’s finished!

Finally, Mike gives us his Aft Deck Musings from Kingston, a journal of boating, the environment, and, well, whatever comes to Mike’s mind up there in Kingston as he reflects on a lifetime of cruising. That’s what musings are all about!

We hope you enjoy them as much as we do! And if you have any other blogs to recommend adding to this illustrious company, please feel free to suggest them to us (or, if it’s your blog, suggest yourself — don’t be shy!); we’re always ready for the next guest to round the point and head in for the dock here.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.
~Samuel Johnson

A hat tip to Port Townsend Sailing for the story.

Of course, few sailors agree with the esteemed Mr. Johnson; but fewer still have a direct basis for comparison.

That boating has redemptive and regenerative powers is a given for most sailors. There’s something magical about a nice day out on the water, and I think it is that mysterious power that keeps us coming back to boats, and the sea, again and again, despite the trouble and expense and to the befuddled amusement of lubbers who see the dollar signs and the seasickness and occasional danger and can only shake their heads at whatever strange affliction it is that keeps driving us back into those straits. They don’t feel the powerful surge of well-being as your boat moves in harmony with the water, or the glow that seems to transfuse from a well-hung sunset on the Western horizon directly into the soul of the sailor watching it from on deck.

But for some mariners, the healing powers of the sea go even deeper than that. Greg White is one of those sailors.

White had a rough upbringing in Washington DC, born to a teenage mother in the early 1960s. But there were flashes of happiness and glimmers of a way out. White and a few friends would take an old bathtub out and bob around in a suburban Maryland lake.

“It was like magic,” White says, “Because we were not sinking. We were defying nature!”

Although such experiences were few and far between for the city-dweller, something about it caught his imagination, and he began reading more about boats and the sea. He decided to join the Navy at 17.

He was out again by the time he was 21, administratively discharged with drug and disciplinary problems. He continued the downward trend after returning home, and got caught robbing a bank in 1981. He was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum security prison.

While serving his time, White ran across a book by University of New Hampshire history professor Dr. Jeff Bolster, “Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail.” White, who is African American, was inspired by the book, and wrote to Bolster about it. Bolster wrote back.

Bolster had none of White’s difficulties in starting his own nautical career. He had a family who knew the water, his own boat by the time he was 12, and a job as a skipper by the time he was 21. But hanging around with the old salts and hearing their yarns about sailing in the Caribbean, something about the history of the vocation struck a chord. He began doing more research, and it struck him that, through all that he had read on the subject, very little addressed the experience of African Americans on board, even though they frequently made up 1/3 or 1/2 the crew.

A grant in 1994 from the National Endowment for the Humanities finally enabled White to research and write the book on those men that they deserved. And, eventually, led to an ongoing correspondence with White, a modern version, perhaps, of the sort of down-at-the-heels man who that book was about.

When he got out, White was focused on getting a job on a boat. The odds were against it; in this day and age of enhanced security and increased credentialing requirements for professional mariners, a felony conviction is a big strike against potential merchant mariners. And the jobs he could find on land as an ex-con were never enough for him to accumulate the money required to even apply for his merchant mariner’s documentation.

Enter Bolster once again: his brother, fleet captain for Baltimore’s Living Classrooms Foundation, happened to need a hand on one of his educational vessels, taking students out into Baltimore Harbor and Chesapeake Bay. Pete Bolster was willing to take a chance on an unlicensed ex-con — a significant risk in this day and age on a vessel whose primary passengers were children between the ages of 6 and 17. It takes only a slight tilt of the head and a squint of the eye to imagine the uproar that might have been unleashed had the slightest hint of untoward conduct emerged.

But it was all the chance that White needed. He worked, and he persevered. He eventually became a credentialed merchant mariner and has since worked at sea around the world.

A mini-movie about the experiences of the two men has recently been released by the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can watch it here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Betsy Davis, executive director of The Center for Wooden Boats, at left, addresses the audience during a 2009 fundraiser.

Betsy Davis, executive director of The Center for Wooden Boats and one of the most familiar figures in Northwest boating, is moving on after 11 years at the helm.

Davis will step down at the end of the year after leading the Seattle-based nonprofit through more than a decade marked by a turbulent economy, the largest capital campaign in the center’s history and tremendous growth of a beloved institution that has become an integral part of the region’s maritime culture.

“It’s been such a fun ride the past 11 years,” Davis said. “It’s been such an honor to put my energy toward something I believe in so deeply and to build on the vision that [founders] Dick and Colleen Wagner started.”

Davis, the CWB’s third director in its 37-year history, said her resignation was a mutual decision made in consultation with the center’s board of trustees. CWB is preparing to break ground on its $6.6 million Wagner Education Center in Lake Union Park later this year, and Davis said the project marks a turning point for the organization that made a change in leadership desirable on both sides.

“It’s a perfect moment to hand the reins over to someone with fresh energy for the next phase,” she said.

Board President Lori O’Toole said Davis’s departure was not prompted by a rift with the board or any concerns about her leadership.

“We’re going to be starting this new wave with the education center, and she wanted to start a new adventure in her life,” she said. “We’re fortunate to have kept her for so long, and that someone didn’t steal her away from us sooner.”

O’Toole credited Davis for increasing CWB’s visibility locally and nationally and helping quadruple its number of visitors to almost 150,000 annually. Under her leadership, the organization has grown from about 1,500 to 2,300 members and increased its budget from $650,000 to $1.5 million.

Davis on her 1914 classic motoryacht, GloryBe, at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. Photo courtesy of CWB

Additionally, Davis led a $9.5 million capital campaign whose centerpiece is the future 9,000-square-foot education center. The campaign has so far raised $6.5 million and paid for improvements to CWB’s facility on South Lake Union and renovations to a workshop and warehouse on the north end of the lake. Davis also spearheaded the 2008 opening of CWB’s satellite facility at Cama Beach State Park on Camano Island and has helped expand the organization’s youth programs and exhibits.

But there have been tough times as well — in 2010, CWB canceled two regattas, cut three staff positions and scaled back weekday opening hours, citing a drop in donations and more competition for grant funding.

During Davis’s tenure, the South Lake Union neighborhood has transformed radically, from a former industrial area to a biotech hub and the headquarters of Amazon’s ever-expanding empire. The 12-acre South Lake Union Park, adjacent to CWB, opened in 2010 and the Museum of History & Industry moved to the former Naval Reserve Armory next to CWB two years later.

Amidst all the changes, CWB has continued to provide a low-key, friendly gathering space that harkens back to Lake Union’s days as a hub of boatbuilding. Students learn traditional skills such as varnishing and bronze casting, families come down for free Sunday sails, neophytes learn how to sail and people rent boats from CWB’s livery fleet. Teaching people about boating and helping them get out on the water is what Davis is most proud of.

“It’s been a real gift to create that access to the water and access to boats for anyone in the community,” she said.

The CWB was founded in 1977 by husband and wife Dick and Colleen Wagner, who wanted to create a hands-on museum where people could touch, learn about and work on classic wooden boats. Davis, a former Microsoft manager, started volunteering at the center in the 1990s, joined its board and eventually served as board president. In September 2003, three years after graduating from the marine carpentry program at Seattle Central Community College, Davis was hired as CWB’s executive director.

The center will conduct a national search for a new director, and Davis will remain involved with CWB as a founding member of its new advisory council. Davis said she’s looking forward to serving on the council and seeing CWB through its leadership transition and completion of the capital campaign. She has no plans to retire yet and will be looking for her next gig soon. But first, it’s time for a little retrospection.

“It’s been great to see The Center for Wooden Boats really grow in South Lake Union into this real community anchor. I think we’re a really important part of what’s becoming this really burgeoning neighborhood of Seattle,” Davis said.

“It will be really fun to reflect on the last decade and all that we’ve done.”

Gordon Myers’ unusual Coast Guard Auxiliary boat attracts attention when he’s out on Lake Union. Brian Haney photos

Gordon Myers is active in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary — very active.

An “auxiliarist” for the last 11 years, the 79-year-old cruises his Coast Guard Auxiliary patrol boat at least three times each week on Seattle’s Lake Union. But this one is not like most auxiliary patrol boats.

It’s a single-seat Surfbike, pedaled and steered like a bicycle, but on the water. Aside from the seat, handlebars and pedals, it resembles a surf kayak trimaran, or a kayak bike with training wheels. It has a maximum capacity of one person and a top speed of five knots, maybe.

Myers uses the Surfbike’s distinctive “USCG AUXILIARY” markings to promote boating safety. Since he is obviously representing the auxiliary whenever he’s out on the lake, he can’t slack off, he says — he has to wear his life jacket for all to see.

He’s noticed that more boaters seem to honor the Lake Union speed limit of seven knots when they see his Surfbike. But Myers sees the Surfbike mostly as a recruiting tool that has provoked conversations about the auxiliary and how it supports Coast Guard missions.

Myers discovered the Surfbike at a boat show 17 years ago and bought one on the spot. It combines his passions for biking and boating, helping him stay fit and get around his houseboat neighborhood on Lake Union.

“At first,” Myers said, “I could only ride for 45 minutes. I would get winded. But now I can ride all day.”

The Surfbike combines two of Myers’ passions: cycling and boating.

During his safety patrols around the lake, Myers might report oil spills or call Seattle Harbor Patrol to report flotsam large enough to damage a boat, such as waterlogged logs, but too large for him to carry on his Surfbike.

“They don’t like it when I call,” said Myers, “but I bug them until they come out to tow the flotsam away.”

On days when the wind kicks up a chop on the lake, Myers gets around in his yellow river kayak, using paddles with more decals that read, “SLOW DOWN” and “SPEED LIMIT 7 KTS.”

Until recently, Myers was a flight examiner for his local Coast Guard Auxiliary flotilla. He taught qualified private pilots how to assist with search and rescue missions and homeland security patrols, and ensured they knew the correct radio procedures to report their observations.

But the Coast Guard District 13 Auxiliary Aviation Program was cut back for budgetary reasons a couple of years ago, and Myers has since focused his efforts on the lake outside his doorstep. He seems particularly well-suited to the auxiliary, since boating and aircraft safety have played a key part of his career.

After Myers washed out of[1]  the U.S. Naval Academy for flunking calculus, he got his bachelor’s degree at the University of Washington, then joined the Coast Guard, graduating from Officer Candidate School. He served from 1958 to 1961, starting with command of an 83-foot patrol boat.

After returning to civilian life, Myers went to flight school and earned his commercial pilot license, eventually flying for Pan Am, then United Airlines. In that line of work, safety is just a part of everyday life.

Myers finally retired from United Airlines in 2000. But he didn’t stay idle. After getting his 100-ton master’s license, Myers skippered for Ride the Ducks, taking tourists around on the company’s amphibious craft for a few months, but it wasn’t a good fit for him. He has been active in the auxiliary since 2003, just before the Coast Guard was transferred from the Department of Transportation to Homeland Security.

I first met Myers on Lake Union while he was pedaling back from a trip to Starbucks for his morning coffee. His little dog, Skipper, was riding in the handlebar basket. Later, during a visit on his houseboat, Myers showed me his collection of certificates and letters of appreciation for his auxiliary participation.

It quickly became apparent to me that the auxiliary is not just a fan club of Coastie wannabes. The Coast Guard invests heavily in cultivating a working relationship with these volunteers, including providing operational training in such areas as:

• Incident Command System (ICS), which helps government agencies including the U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) work together after disasters like Hurricane Katrina
• Seamanship, navigation, communications and weather
• Inspection and reporting of failed aids to navigation
• Aviation operations instructor classes, which equip auxiliarists to train their peers to help airborne search and rescue and some homeland security missions
• Basic office functions, such as helping answer the phones at district headquarters on Seattle’s Pier 36
• But the auxiliary is probably best known in the boating community for its boating safety “examinations.” (They don’t call them “inspections.” That’s a law enforcement activity that requires a badge and gun.)

If your boat passes the examination, you get a decal to proudly display, indicating that the boat met Coast Guard safety requirements. Myers was quick to point out that the decal does not make your boat immune from being boarded later for a Coast Guard inspection. That’s just a myth, Myers said – but with a wink, added that a decal does make a boarding a bit less likely.

The auxiliary also offers classes on topics ranging from seamanship to boating safety, paddling and navigation. More information is available here.

Captain Charlie Long

If you happen to be tied up at the dock at any smallish marina up in the Broughtons and see a tall, tanned fellow with a perpetual gleaming-white grin on his face swinging a guitar and musical equipment off onto the dock, march right on up to the office and arrange to stay for another night: you’re witnessing the prelude to a serenade from the region’s own maritime musical celebrity, Captain Charlie Long.

That setup he’s hauling off the boat isn’t huge, but if you’ve had to pack a summer’s worth of provisions and belongings into a small boat, you’ll be impressed how Captain Charlie manages to cart around a kit that allows him to produce a show that includes a full band sound, complete with backing vocals. His solution is surprisingly straightforward: an iPad contains all the backing tracks and lyrics for his songs, and he can mix that, his guitar feed, and his microphone through a Fishman A220 public address system and amplifier, all controlled via Bluetooth footpedal. The setup only weighs 25 pounds, he says, and fits conveniently on his wife’s side of the bed.

He needs all this in order to play to the crowds he draws to his performances at the Broughton marinas, small, family-run places that nevertheless have some sort of gathering place on the docks or shore nearby, where a Captain Charlie gig can pack in the cruisers.

Captain Charlie is a modest fellow, despite his rock star status in the Broughton Islands.

He’s been singing the rounds up here for the past five or six years, indulging in a lifelong passion for music and at the same time doing his own part to chip in and help preserve the small, family-owned marina operations that he cherishes.

It started, he says, all by chance; his yacht club (Tacoma Yacht Club, of which Captain Charlie is a past commodore; he has a song about it, “Going Through The Chairs”) was looking for a “Jimmy Buffet tribute singer” to entertain for them at their Labor Day cruise, but the candidates all cost more than the budget would allow.

“Hell, I can sing Jimmy Buffett songs,” Charlie told them. “Want me to do it?”

They did, and Charlie realized he was going to need to spend some chunk of his summer practicing up before the yacht club cruise. One night, he happened to be tied up at the Port Harvey Marine Resort and George Cambridge, the owner, said “Why don’t you practice up at the Red Shoe [the marina cafe] so we can all listen?”

Charlie had more in him than just Jimmy Buffett covers, though; he had been noodling around a song of his own, “Cruise Away,” a sort of homage to the grande scope of Pacific Northwest cruising country, for a long time already. He decided to play that as well.

A star was born.

Captain Charlie’s adoring fans pack the house

Other original songs followed, and pretty soon, Captain Charlie had an album out, “Cruise Away,” packed with songs and lyrics tuned to resonate with the boater’s heart, followed by “B.O.A.T” and his latest, “Sucia Sunset.”

Charlie captures both the universal boating experience and the particularly local flavor of Northwest cruising; one song, “Captain George,” is a historical tribute to the first cruiser foolish enough to try sailing in the Salish Sea. “Cruise Away,” “Sucia Sunset” and many of Charlie’s other songs are love songs of a sort, ” … an anthem, an homage to all the areas we love in “Cruising Country,” as he puts it.

But (as you might guess from the album title of “B.O.A.T.,” an acronym every boater knows) it’s not all wine and sunshine in Captain Charlie’s cruising world. There are the boating blues to be sung as well, usually with a tint of that special sort of black humor that serves boaters in adversity so well: “The Fleet Captain’s Lament” talk about the thankless job of service familiar to many yacht club members, while “Sailor With a Power Boat” talks about the perils of transitioning to the “Dark Side.” “Onshore Flo” humorously anthropomorphizes that meteorological bane of the Northwest cruiser’s passage planning. Then there is the self-explanatory “The Cruise from Hell” and the sequel “Another Cruise from Hell” (Charlie says he could add another ten verses to either of them, just from personal experience).

And Captain Charlie is well-suited to sing the boating blues (and paeans) of Northwest cruising; he has been cruising these waters since 1962, when his parents first bought a little Islander 24 and taught themselves to sail, taking Charlie and his brother along the way. Charlie and his wife, Diane, bought their own series of sailboats over the years after college, and took their own sons out cruising of a summer in the San Juans, Gulf Islands, and Desolation Sound (both worked for the public schools, providing the degree of freedom required in the summer for extended cruises).

In 2007 they went over to the Dark Side and bought a 1978 Ocean Alexander trawler, Dreamtime.

He’s been a musician for even longer than he has been a boater; piano lessons started for Charlie at age six, and although tickling the ivories wasn’t quite his thing, growing up in the ’60s afforded him another avenue for the expression of a latent musicality: folk music and soft rock.

Unfortunately, by the time Charlie got his first band going, a duo with another teacher, it was the ’70s: folk was out, disco was in. So Charlie was restricted to directing a few what he calls “kid music groups” and toying around with the concept that he called “Sail Away” that later turned into “Cruise Away.”

Although it started out on a lark, Captain Charlie’s recent musical efforts have taken on a serious side of sorts. Charlie and Diane have always been supporters of the marinas all through what Charlie calls “Cruising Country” throughout the Salish Sea. But they were particularly fond of Greenway Sound Marine Resort, and when owners Tom and Anne Taylor were forced to stop operations and put it up for sale in 2010.

Captain Charlie rocks the house at Port Harvey Marine Resort during Canada Day celebrations

“We were so sad to lose it and that’s when I began using, “Never another Greenway” as a sort of rallying cry,” says Charlie. So today, he provides his CDs at cost (maybe a little less than cost, to tell the truth) to the marinas and performs for free, to drum up interest; the marinas mark up the CDs a bit and keep the profit. It’s his own modest way of contributing to the long-term survival of businesses that, even in the best of years, only have about three months to make their total annual profits.

“We’ve always made it a point to spend a few bucks everywhere we go because, as I’ve said many times, we want them to be there for us next year, too,” Charlie said. “The Broughtons marinas, being family-owned businesses just seem to appreciate our philosophy a bit more.”

If you can’t quite get up to the Broughtons to buy one of his CDs from the marinas up there, you can also order them directly off his website at capncharlie.com. But don’t expect overnight delivery during the cruising season: Captain Charlie is up in the islands gathering new material.

His latest CD, “Sucia Sunset,” just came out, but like all good songwriters, Captain Charlie always has an ear to the ground.

He’s already got a few ideas; some friends of his used to cruise with a dog, which unfortunately passed away one year north of the border, and though it’s not too much trouble to get a live dog into Canada, it’s apparently quite an ordeal to take a dead one back out, and they ended up smuggling it through US Customs frozen solid in an ice chest. Captain Charlie is thinking something with a country twang might suit the story.

If you happen to be able to be in Port Townsend a little early for the Wooden Boat Festival this year, coming up Sept. 5 through Sept. 7, you might want to take advantage of a golden opportunity to spend a little extra time and get a little extra education with three of the most famous speakers on the roster: for a select number of attendees, the Boating Skills Intensives seminars on Thursday, Sept. 4, will put them into a more intimate and extended session with famous survivor and author Steve Callahan, and world cruising’s first couple, Lin and Larry Pardey, at the Northwest Maritime Center.

One under-appreciated benefit to the annual Wooden Boat Festival is the big names that it brings to our corner of the sailing world. The lectures and educational aspects of the show have long been the virtuous underbelly of the show that serious sailors have taken advantage of while the day-tripping crowds admire the glare of varnish and the colorful flags of the fully-dressed boats out along the docks.

Every aspect of wooden boat construction and maintenance is bound to be addressed by some presenter or another; for boaters of every stripe, there are also enough presentations on destinations, general maintenance techniques and life-altering sailing experiences to make any boater salivate. It’s always a great opportunity to hear Brion Toss on the hidden causes of rigging failures or Carol Hasse on the essentials of sailmaking — a tremendous sampling of the depth of local expertise on tap in the Pacific Northwest.

Steve Callahan

But the show also draws in terrific speakers from around the world who are not as regionally accessible as Toss or Hasse. Attendees have had to make tough choices between different popular presenters, or between spending their whole weekend in seminars or taking time out to thoroughly investigate all the boats that are on display.

In recent years, according to festival co-director Barb Trailer, organizers realized that there was a great opportunity to provide even more access to speakers from outside the area, and last year, instituted the Boating Skills Intensives series to do just that.

“We started it as we felt that we bring in these incredible speakers, and they do the normal one-hour presentations all weekend [and] we felt that people would be interested in an opportunity to have more time with them,” said Trailer.

The concept kicked off last year with an extra all-day seminar offered ahead of the show by maintenance guru Nigel Calder. The idea was to offer attendees, and speakers, a smaller venue for a longer period, providing more interaction and more time for in-depth questions and individual attention.

It went so well that this year, the program is tripling up. “This year we thought it would be fun to combine Lin and Larry with Steve Callahan, and do something that you won’t get anywhere else,” said Trailer. The serendipity of putting experts together from across the boating world and having them interact with the audience has produced amazing results at other foundation symposiums over the years, says Trailer, and this event should be very much in that vein.

Lin and Larry Pardey

The day will start off with Callahan presenting his “Aquatic Caveman” seminar, discussing survival skills, strategies, and techniques drawn from his own life-altering experience spending 76 days adrift in a life raft alone after his sailboat sank from under him in the Atlantic.

Then, the Pardeys will present their “Storm Tactics” session to discuss the equipment and plans necessary to face storms at sea with confidence “… to help ensure rough weather becomes an interesting incident in your life, not the end of your cruising dream.” From a pair who have withstood rounding Cape Horn the “wrong way” around in a 30-foot boat, it’s a fair bet that they have some information worth listening to on the subject.

After lunch comes the juicy parts: all three will speak on the topic of the adventures that shaped their lives; for the Pardeys, surely a grab-bag of adventures from nearly 50 years of global cruising; in Callahan’s case, the adventure that surely no one wants to have. They’ll join in a roundtable discussion and question and answer session with Practical Sailor’s Darrell Nicholson.

You can choose to attend only the morning session from (9:30 a.m. to noon) with the presentations for $50, or the afternoon session on adventure and the subsequent Q&A for $60, or catch the whole day for $95.

If the price tag is outside your budget, you can always take your chances during the festival itself, which will include public presentations by both Callahan and the Pardeys; you’re not likely to get much time to chat, even if you manage to find a place to stand in the room!

For more information, both on the special Thursday event, and on the festival in general, or to register for the event, see the website here.

New executive director Michael Luis at the Center For Wooden Boats – (photo courtesy CWB)

Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats (CWB) has announced the result of their national search for a replacement for departing Executive Director Betsy Davis: Michael Luis, of Medina, a longtime public affairs consultant, historic preservationist, author and city council member will join the Center as Executive Director immediately.

Luis also has the requisite sailing chops to helm the working nautical programs at CWB — he learned to sail in an El Toro on Lake Washington when he was 8 years old, and was a Sea Scout.

“Mike brings decades of experience in non-profit management, leadership and public policy development to our organization,” said CWB Board President Lori O’Tool. “In addition to his work and non-profit experience, he is passionate about wooden boats and the art of building and preserving them.”

Luis has been involved with CWB previously, once donating a 32-foot mahogany sloop to the organization as a part of fundraising efforts, and fundraising is still in demand as the Center moves toward beginning construction on the new Wagner Education Center at South Lake Union.

“The Board believes Mike brings both the needed passion for historic preservation and hands on learning along with leadership skill and considerable business and political connections. All of these are needed to take CWB forward through construction of the new Wagner Education enter at South Lake Union and into a new era for the museum,” said O’Tool.

He’s also had a longstanding interest in wooden boats, having pored over his father’s old copies of “Rudder” and “Wooden Boat” magazines. He has also built and maintained his own boats.

Davis, meanwhile, leaves a legacy of 11 years at the helm of the Center behind, overseeing the organization through significant growth and the implementation of several new initiatives.

Outgoing Executive Director Betsy Davis aboard her classic wooden boat GloryBe. Photos courtesy of Betsy Davis

CWB supporters will have an opportunity to meet Luis, as well as to say goodbye to Davis (although it’s not so much goodbye as so long; Davis is assuming the executive directorship of the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building, just up Puget Sound a bit in Port Hadlock and is slated to remain a participant at CWB through the new CWB Advisory Council), at the upcoming Breakfast for Boats event on October 9th. More details can be found on the website here.