What I love most about old wooden boats are the eye-opening stories that invariably seem to come along with them. Until recently, my favorite tale was from a Fife yacht I crewed on that was haunted by the ghost of a captain murdered on board in the 1930s. My new favourite story is about the unique looking cutter I saw one day when sailing back to my slip in Marina del Rey.
I’m from New England where the coastline is littered with seemingly endless examples of the finest classic wooden yachts one will find beyond the French Riviera in September. Today, I live in southern California, and absolutely love it. The weather is perfect nearly all the time, and Hawaii is just an 11-hour flight away. Believe it or not, my biggest problem about living in Los Angeles is that there is a relatively small fleet of wooden boats, and that makes me homesick.
Like a fly fisherman wading through a river in search of his catch, I’m always looking around, searching for the sparkle of a varnished mast towering over a silver teak deck adorned with a series of mahogany deck houses. I’ve seen a handful of wooden boats here and there, but nothing worth writing home about. Then, one day, I caught sight of one of the most interesting classic boats I’d ever come upon. I was sailing down the channel to a sunset race finish line when one of my crew members pointed.
