How We Got Here
My name is Dan and I've been an avid sailor since 1988. The personal journey which leads me here has been a long and somewhat convoluted one and is explained in detail in my personal manifesto, "Confessions of a Boatoholic".
In the early spring of 2007, I was finally released from a seven-ton albatross in the form of a 33-foot ketch-rigged catboat when, after two years on the market, a fellow finally agreed to buy my boat for only seven thousand dollars less than I had paid for it five years earlier. I had bought the boat shortly after losing my first wife and longtime sailing companion to cancer with the vague idea of sailing off alone to some exotic destination and leaving the world behind. As often happens, the world proved much harder to shake than I had previously supposed and, within a few years, my life was reassembling itself into a shape that didn't have room for a large boat in it anymore.
After many years of making do with a trailer boat, the novelty of owning a "proper cruising boat" had finally worn off and I had seen as much of western Lake Erie over the previous half-decade as I cared to. The final blow came when I realized that I had fallen hard for a woman who had little interest in sailing and (gasp!) didn't even know how to swim. Thus, it was a mercy to finally be rid of the 33-footer and I decided that it would be best for everyone if I put my sailing days behind me for good.
That resolve lasted less than two years before I caught myself casually browsing through the 'boats for sale' section of Craigslist (just wondering what the market was like nowadays, I told myself). A few weeks later, I found myself spending hours at a time leafing through photos of my old boats and reliving that indescribable experience of gliding soundlessly through the water on a breezy day. The big boat had been an expensive experiment and the monotony of sailing the same waters over and over again was still fresh in my mind, but I really missed being on the water. If I was going to return to sailing, I decided it would have to be in a trailerable boat that I could keep in the back yard and take out occasionally to places I had never sailed before.
My yearning was complicated by the fact that I was now married to that non-sailing, non-swimming gal and I didn't know how Barb would feel about me reconnecting with a passion that she probably wouldn't be interested in sharing. After all, Barb's passion was web design, which seemed about as far removed from tillers and jib sheets as you could get. Still, I thought, Barb was known to occupy herself for days at a time tweaking and polishing one of her many web sites and she spent more money buying web domains than I intended to spend buying an old used sailboat. Why shouldn't I have a hobby of my own?
After a few weeks of batting the pros and cons back and forth in my head, I broached the subject by mentioning offhandedly how much I missed sailing. Without missing a beat, she instantly confirmed that I had picked the right gal by replying, "Then you should get yourself a boat". True to form, she then tossed in, "Maybe we could make a web site about it".
I was thrilled that she was supportive of my desire to take up sailing again, but I was pretty dubious about the idea of doing any kind of internet project. I had posted a few how-to articles on an early version of an online forum many years before after I did a couple of modifications to one of my boats that I was particularly pleased with, but I had no expectation that the world at large would have the slightest interested in my boating life. Besides, my biggest non-boating concern at the time was what I was going to do with myself professionally, and posting blog entries on rehabbing an old sailboat wasn't high on my list of priorities.
I had previously been an office manager and partner in a regional futon furniture company for many years but had left the company a few years earlier. The futon business had been a profitable fad during the 1990s and had left me fairly well off financially, but the fad was over and, by 2005, the business was clearly headed towards extinction. Having recently lost my wife, the last thing I wanted to do was to participate in the slow death of a business I had helped bring into the world, so I sold out to partners interested in milking a few more years out of the venture and moved on. Since then I had been supporting myself, with a small measure of success, through stock investments, rehabbing an old house, and doing some occasional temp work on the side. As you can imagine, this lifestyle came to an abrupt end after the combined market and housing crash of early 2008.
To avoid depleting my savings while I weighed my options for the future, I picked up a long-term temp assignment working on an insurance company project, but the project was cancelled early and it was time to start looking for something more permanent. Unfortunately, by then the economy had gone completely sour and jobs in my old field were impossible to come by, especially for someone who had already been out of the mainstream workforce for several years. Barb had a good job that she had comfortably supported herself with long before I came along and I still had enough money to pay my own way for at least a few more years, so I decided to wait things out and indulge in some of the ambitious sailing expeditions I had always dreamed of until the economy turned around. I quickly found an inexpensive little sailboat that, with a small amount of effort and money, could be customized into a reasonably comfortable cruising boat for one or two people. I took Barb on a two-day trial cruise of my old Lake Erie stomping grounds and, much to my relief, she had a good time. She didn't show any interest in learning to handle the boat, but she was quite happy to be aboard. The "Admiral" was born.
Now it was time to start planning some sailing trips. I leafed through the stack of paperback cruising guides of various regions I had accumulated over the years, but they weren't much help. Aside from assuming that I was going to float in on a 40-foot deep-keel boat from somewhere offshore, the brief description they gave of any individual destination was generally limited to a list of marinas and a discussion of the water depth in the approach channels. I knew from my trailer sailing experiences as a younger man that these places must all be rich with quiet little shallow-water anchorages and swimming beaches, not to mention the all-important dockside restaurants. A handful of the guides threw a bone to the trailer boater in the form of a list of launch ramps, but even these didn't give any idea as to whether it was a good ramp or a poor ramp, a free ramp or one that charged a fee. Worst of all, what information they did contain was usually ten years or more out of date.
Surely, I thought, this is a job for the internet. Nope. I typed things like 'trailer boat cruising guide' for several popular destinations into Google and the best I got was a couple of generic chamber of commerce pay-to-play referral sites and a list of marinas. To add insult to injury, I also got referred to several online stores trying to sell me the same outdated guidebooks that I already owned. When I vented my frustration to the newly-minted Admiral Barb, she gave me one of those looks she reserves for small children who are being particularly slow to grasp an obvious concept and said, "Maybe someone should write vacation guides and put them on a web site."
So here we are, the Admiral and I collaborating in our own unique version of a couple's activity. I travel and write and Barb posts the results. Sometimes I travel alone (one of the downsides of Barb's good job is that they expect her to show up to work), but we often get to cruise together. Considering the vast number of lakes, rivers, harbors, and bays that America has to offer, I understand full well that my meager contribution of a handful of guides a year is merely a drop in the proverbial bucket that does more to illuminate the absence of small-boat waterway guides than to seriously provide a presence of them. But it's a start.