How did it all start for you? Please let us know.

[Zaphro]

My earliest experience was on little more than a pond in northern Michigan on one of my parents friend's Sun Fish. I got a ten minute lesson from the owner on the dock, several hours later they were begging me to come back to shore for dinner.

A few years later my dad bought a 34' Columbia but he worked 7 days a week in a metal stamping plant for General Motors so my brother and I as teenagers would steal it on weekends and sail in Lake Michigan. (Got caught everytime too, I guess the old man wasn't as dumb as we thought)

In 1986 I joined the Navy and somehow a 4 year tour turned into twenty. Met cuising sailors in nearly every port, that's when I discovered little boats cross oceans too.

I ended up divorcing just before I retired from the Navy, sold the house and without a clear idea of where my next career would take me I decided to down size. Rather than buying another house, renting an apartment, or moving into a trailer for the last couple of years of my Navy career I decided to live on a sailboat. In 2005 I bought a Catalina 34, lived on it down on the Intra-Coastal waterway for a couple of years. Fell over backwards into a second career (at the same desk I occupied on active duty doing the same thing) so moved the boat up the St. Johns river to the Naval Air Station marina, bought another house where my new love can put all her 'stuff', and sail on the St. Johns river south of Jacksonville. In another 20 years after my second retirment I'm hoping it will be the winter home down in the Bahamas for Admiral Kellie and I.

 

[AnthonyB]

When I was 12, my father (with no formal sailboat training) rented a 26' Grampian.
Before we set sail he caught the boat on fire (alcohol stove in the galley) nothing major. Sailed only one day from Picton Ontario to Kingston and long the way we ran aground. (What's a chart?) Docked in Kingston at the Holiday Inn and I lived the week on the boat while my parents kept cool in the hotel. All I remembered was the constant clanging of the loose halyards slapping against the mast while we slept at night. Not really the best "intro-to-sailing" story however 30 years later I was caught by the sailing bug in a big way and never looked back.

Cheers Dad!

 

[RAD]

Why Do We Mess About With Boats?

"If a man must be obsessed with something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful; it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. If it happens to be an auxiliary cruising boat, it is without question the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man- a home that is stable without being stationary, shaped less like a box than like a fish or a girl, and in which the homeowner can remove his daily affairs as far from shore as he has the nerve to take them, close hauled or running free- parlor, bedroom and bath, suspended and alive" E.B. White​

 

[wonkodsane]

Two years ago, one of my friends asked if I could help him move his newly purchased 42' Catalina from Annapolis to DC so he could live aboard there. I spent a long weekend in January motor sailing with him and another of our friends around Smith Point and up to Colonial Beach before the snow made visibility about 100' (and navigation in unfamiliar waters impossible.) We called it off and he motored her up the next weekend. I froze my butt off but was hooked. Within a couple of months I had bought a 1979 Sonic 23 from the Pentagon Sailing Club, my wife and I had taken classes, and spent a year sailing her, then lucked into our current boat. Her boss needed to sell their 1989 Catalina 30 (in amazing condition) and were willing to part with her for $9K, so we're Bay sailors now and hoping one day to cruise the coast and the ICW down to Florida and maybe beyond. We love sailing together and hope for many more years to do so.

 

[kpgraci]

Well, I'm no old salt, been sailing for only a few months now, but I've been interested in boats all my life. I was told stories about my grandfather and his brother being boat builders in the old country, but then I've heard a lot of stories. I've always liked power boats but never owned one for very long. Even as a younger man I had a fascination with lines and pulleys, cranes and the like, rigging lines to support and move things, and jokingly I wondered if a love of sailing was a genetically inherited trait.


A few years ago I was browsing some boat ads and I noticed how cheaply some sailboats could be purchased for, As a family man with a wife and kids I don't have a lot of expendable income, but I started to seriously consider getting a small sailboat. That dream could have stayed just that, but last year I had a medical scare when my gal bladder almost ruptured. I've always been very health all my life and that was a shock. Then a few months later I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and my thyroid was removed, leaving my voice a little messed up. Now I've always know I was mortal, but its quite another thing to realize just how short life really is.


I decided that I would get that sailboat, and the rest, as they say, is history. The real beauty of the story however is my son, Marcus. I borrowed a friend's power boat and my son, who is 21, and I went out and the kid was hooked. He was determined that he had to get a boat. Later I approached him with the idea of going in on a sailboat, and he jumped at the chance. So we did a lot of looking and finally bought our current boat.


We both know it won't end here. We plan on enjoying and learning, then in a few years move up to a bigger boat we can do some coastal cruising with. There's just something about sailing. It's about going slow enough to smell the roses, it's about practicing a craft that is as old as man. And its just plain fun.

 

[Georgio]

My Story

As a Theodor Roosevelt High School Jr Class of “50” in the Bronx NYC I was used to going to Orchard Beach by way of City Island during the Summer. Some how I visited the City Island Canoe Club during my trips thru City Island, long story short I became the proud owner of a canvas covered 20 ft. circa 1930’s Old Town canoe that needed some TLC. After some extensive retrofit I was the owner of a Black Canvas Bright Work varnished Ship of the Sea. It came with a Lateen rig with Lee Boards and Rudder. This was used to sail from City Island to Orchard Beach every time I was able to get away from working my two summer jobs one at a Fruit stand in Arthur Avenue City Market (Think Ernest Borgnine in the movie “Marty”) and the other at Fox Hardware on 187th Street as general gofer.

Some of the old Salts at the Canoe Club took this landlubber under there wing and taught me the rudiments of sailing which some how got into the blood as I have hankered to sail ever since. In fact I joined the Navy and served during the Korean Conflict (They never did declare it a War) and was stationed in Japan and Hawaii with the Third Fleet. My next boat in the late 80’s was a 19 ft. 1970’s Rhodes while living in La Porte, Indiana raising a family (3 Girls) that was sailed on Stone Lake. This had to be sold due to work travel responsibilities After retirement in 1997 while living in Lancaster, PA I became the proud owner of a 1987 Seaward 23 CB model that was sailed out of the North East River yacht Club in North East, MD. I was later responsible for the care and maintenance of a 28 ft. 1995 Alerion Express that belonged to a friend that I had introduced to Sailing.

Our living location since 2006 has been in Valparaiso, IN NWI (to be close to our 3 girls and there families) I owned a WWP 15 for one season and found that I was not a real small boat sailor. My latest and “Final” boat is a 1979 Pearson 23 CB model that is sailed out of Michigan City Harbor on Lake Michigan 3x this past weekJ. All of the above has been supplemented by sailing on my B-I-L and Sister’s boats these past 60 years on the East Coast out of various ports in Connecticut.

As Rat stated “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing---absolutely nothing---half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boat’s. Simply messing”
“Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Graham 1908

George
We can not control the Wind
But we can adjust our Sails

 

[adirondackbob]

I actually told my story in an article for Good Old Boat magazine (http://www.albany.edu/~rpy95/storm.pdf). A sailboat was the 25th wedding anniversary gift my wife and I bought for each other. We had no previous sailing experience, just a lifelong desire to sail. One season was all it took for us to become obsessed with sailing. We still have the O'Day 23 described in my article but this year we bought a Catalina 30.

Bob

 

[JonnyQuest]

How I got into sailing

I am newly returning to sailing after about 25 years awya from it. When young, my father wisely sent my sister and I to the yacht club for summer sailing lessons--hoping that perhaps we would develop a more healthy hobby than bar hopping as we got older. The class was a basic sailing class using Flying Scotts, but it was enough to catch me. After the class ended I asked my dad if we could get a sailboat too. Seeing that his idea had taken root in me, we looked for and found a great deal on a 21' Cal DaySailer--swingkeel trailorable. We put it in the water in the local harbor and I sailed so much that summer that we kept it in the slip year round--love being in the South! For the next 3 years I got out almost every weekend year round. Good start with a boat much bigger than I was expecting--thanks Dad!

25 years slipped by without sailing, and I have young kids of my own. We recently moved back to the Gulf Coast to be close to the parents, and although it wasn't the best time to buy a sailboat-- very young children, exploding oil wells, horrific unemployment, etc., everyone was getting tired of living on the Coast and not getting to benefit from it's proximity. All caution thrown to the wind, my wonderful wife decided to let me buy a sailboat--old boat, but in good shape. The boat is still in Slidell and won't make it to the MS Coast until October, so we are taking steps to be able to sail as often as we want--I felt it critical to be able to decide last minute to go for a sail after work and have dinner while under way. The boat will be about 3 minutes from the house at that point--yay!

I am now playing catchup learning to sail again and how to feed and care for larger boats. (Thanks to all of ya'll for the turoring here!) We hope that if the kids grow up sailing then they will also catch a bug for it and in the process enjoy growing up with a family sport on weekends that surely beats the heck out of a routine trip to the Mall.

Sailing, fishing, exploring the MS Coast islands, and simply wandering with the winds-- I hope they find it as much fun as I do.

 

[PotomacDaysailer]

These stories are great! It seems like the bug's bite is very infectious - I don't know of many people who, once having had a taste, weren't hooked. Here's my story:

Like many of the posters here, sailing is in my genes - my great-great-granduncle, Herman Schuenemann, commanded the schooner "Rouse Simmons", the Chicago Christmas Tree ship that went down in Lake Michigan in November, 1912.

We moved to Laguna Beach, CA when I was five and spent quite a bit of time down at the beach. On a summer camping trip up to Olympic Nat'l. Park we stopped to see the wreck of the "Peter Iredale" on the Oregon shore. The next year we visited the "Star of India", and the year after that watched from the cliffs as the "Queen Mary" sailed in to her home at Long Beach. So at an early age I started dreaming of the romance of the sea.

A friend of my father's had a few years before inherited a Dutch sloop, the "Atalanta", and sailed her from the Netherlands across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and up to Long Beach. Often we spent an evening at their house and I would go down to the dock and admire the boat and imagine sailing in her. One weekend we were invited for a cruise to Catalina Island. Before the big trip Dad and my brother and I went for a sail in "Atalanta"'s dinghy, a little Sabot. Dad had no notion how to sail, but his friend said not to worry, just keep the wind on the side, let the sail out on the other side and go back and forth. But there was no room in the canal and we got downwind and couldn't get back. Finally bumped up to another dock, tied up the dinghy, and walked back. At that point I decided that I would learn how to sail a boat against the wind.

Going out to Catalina the next day, there was no wind, so we motored the whole way. Between the waves and the diesel fumes I got seasick. On the way back, though, they raised the sails and the transformation in "Atalanta"'s motion was extraordinary - no longer wallowing along but it felt like we were flying like a bird through the air.

Shortly afterwards, Dad was recruited by the State Department and we were sent to our first posting, in Turkey. Dad arranged for sailing lessons for my brother and me on Lake Golbasi (that was what we called it; on the map it is Mogan Golu) near Ankara. So I racked up a lot of time in Optimist prams. At the same time I fueled my seafaring dreams by reading how-to books on sailing and classics such as The Bounty Trilogy and Captain Horatio Hornblower from the US Air Force base school library.

On home leave I saved up my allowance, and Dad bought two cartons of Kool cigarettes (which he gave away; he smoked Chesterfields) so I could buy a Kool Sea Snark. Sailed it on Ponca Lake in Oklahoma.

When we came back to the States I answered an ad on Tulsa Cable TV's ads channel for someone to crew on a Catalina 22 on Keystone Lake. We raced almost every weekend, routinely beat by the owner of Tulsa Sail Craft and the '75 and '76 Catalina 22 champion, Joe Becker, among others. I have vivid memories of flying our 'chute on the downwind leg, the skipper standing with the tiller between his knees, while the 470's, Lightnings, and Thistles in the centerboard fleet (which started fifteen minutes after we did) rounded the windward mark and planed past us like we were anchored.

I saved up my money from odd jobs and bought my second boat, Lofland Snipe #15166, which I had for five years. I had to sell her and it nearly broke my heart. A long, long dry patch followed, broken by occasional rentals and a memorable trip to Tortola, BVI in 2000, sailing aboard the catamaran Kuralu and chartering a bare boat for a day. Just this summer I finally was able to buy my third boat, and have been happily sailing every chance I get.

My dream is to retire to a live-aboard, one day.

 

[Bob Poff]

Somewhere 15-20 years ago, my then girlfriend, her kids, and I used to go a park along the Susquehanna River for cookouts. We'd watch the power boats and waterbugs running here and there. She started making "we ought to get one of those" noises. In my best PA Dutch frugality, I usually replied "Cost too much. And too much work to take care of".

Little by little she wore me down, and I found myself looking in the classifieds.

About the same time, I was talking to a casual friend about this. He had a sailboat and wondered if I'd trade some radio gear for it. Said it "needed some work". Once I saw it, walked away and never looked back. But the seed had been planted.

Saw an ad for a Cal 21 located at a nearby state park. Another tub. But while looking around the marina for it I ran across this MacGregor 22 with a "for sail" sign on it that I fell in love with. Two weeks later it was mine. There was no turning back. That was in 1995. Sailed that boat on that same state park lake for about ten years. That poor boat, who was never named, taught me plenty. Wonderful memories. Loving every minute of it.

That girlfriend is long gone (soon after I bought the boat). Since then my life has been blessed with a good wife. We're on our second boat. And changed our sailing grounds from that lake to the Chesapeake.

This spring we finally sold the MacGregor so that it can entice and tutor yet another new sailor.

 

[Douglast]

well for me i got started just 4 years ago at 48 years young..my new wife was interested and so was i and we really didn;t think we could afford it untill we found out how reasonably priced they were used.
The one amazing selling point to sail is that i have spent all my years building high horsepower snowmobiles,and once i discovered that there is NO horsepower that compares to a sail full of brisk wind...!!!...yahoo..!!!...i never looked back...

 

[jimmyb]

you folks are definitely giving me much to read here and I thank you. So many paths leading to the same love of wind in your face.....sailors ROCK !