I Smile Every Time…
This, ladies and gentlemen, is an Enterprise 14: marine plywood w/ mahogany half-deck/rails, and a centerboard housing for the swing keel. Mine looked like this one, with the traditional blue paint, only it had white sails and spruce spars.
A retired high school woodshop teacher had bought the plans, and built it himself, and it was beautiful. There are still active racing fleets in the UK, but over here the Lido 14 was king.
Beautiful, isn't she?
I had been crewing on my friends 34' coastal cruiser for a couple of years and had been reading Bob Bond's
The Handbook of Sailing and Eric Hiscock's
Voyager series. Then I bought my own place and finally had a garage.
A few body-ballast miscalculations and a capsizes, including one pretty hairy broach, in the local bay, and I was a sailor. I danced two summers with that first mistress.
Then the Catalina 22 that I coastal cruised for a 250-mile loop up the coast and around the California Channel Islands. Three years with her.
Then I saved like a dog until I self-delivered my current yacht, a Catalina 30, single-handed up the coast from San Diego to Long Beach (95% of that trip engineless & w/ no auto-pilot).
The disease progresses…