Boats and Ships
Boats
I have been fortunate to have boats of all kinds and sizes in my life. It all started on Lake Lotawana, a man-made lake thirty miles east of Kansas City. While I was growing up, my family spent a lot of time there during the summers.\
There are hundreds of types of boats, all of which can be classified as powerboats, sailboats or ships. I’ve enjoyed many experiences on all kinds of boats but if I had to pick a favorite it would be sailboats. I spent some of the finest, most exciting times of my life on them. But I’ve always been happy to spend time on the water, regardless of the vessel.
Powerboats
My first boat was an aluminum outboard that had a 5 hp motor. The Kansas City Star ran an article on me operating it when I was five years old, along with pictures of me riding a surfboard and swimming. As I got older, I graduated to a 9-1/2 hp motor on the same boat. This motor was just powerful enough that if you got the boat real flat in the water it would plane, which meant the speed would more than double.
Eventually my parents bought a Century twenty-foot inboard. It had a wood hull and a beautifully varnished mahogany deck. These boats were truly a work of art but the wood planked bottom would shrink if it was left out of the water for an extended period of time and would leak like a sieve when put back in, so to keep from sinking it had to be pumped until the bottom planks swelled shut again. It also had to be covered when not in use to protect it from rain and sun damage. I wish we had put that boat in storage; it would be a classic worth a lot of money today. My parents later bought a fiberglass version of the same boat which, while not nearly as striking, was pretty much maintenance-free.
Around that time my father brought Skippy to the lake. Skippy was the boat he had built as a young man for use on the Missouri River in Kansas City. She was fast with a 50 hp outboard motor but not a good ski boat and required constant maintenance. Dad soon determined that Skippy was no longer practical, so she was permanently retired.
The year my twin sisters were born my parents bought a 36-foot cruising boat they called The Carol Jean, named after my sisters, which they used to entertain business associates on the Lake of the Ozarks. It was not fast but a very comfortable boat with a galley, excellent berth for sleeping, and lots of deck space for sunning. In those days you could cruise for an hour and only see one or two other boats. Later, the lake became popular and small boats buzzed around like mosquitoes.
In the mid-1960s, a new fad developed on Lake Lotawana—the float boat. They were large floating platforms built on two pontoons, powered by an outboard motor that was remote controlled by a console in the middle of the platform. They were great for getting around the lake and could accommodate ten to twelve adults comfortably on easily stored folding chairs.
My father decided to buy one but, being Neligh Coates, he had to go one step further. The Coates’s float boat had a bright yellow and white canopy, nice indoor-outdoor carpeting, a barbecue, a bar, and geraniums in hanging baskets. The only problem was that Dad would sometimes get oblivious to his surroundings and interfere with some of the boats while watching the Sunday sailboat races.
The first powerboat I owned as an adult was a gift to Robbie and me from our good friend, Jim Briggs. Jim was Vice President of Outboard Marine, the manufacturer of both Evinrude and Johnson outboard motors. They decided to experiment with getting into the boat business. Jim sent us one of the experiment models of their first product, a fiberglass inboard/outboard boat, to evaluate. We used it at the lake and eventually tried to return it but Outboard Marine had decided against going into production so Jim told us to keep it—a very nice gift! When we moved to Aspen we towed that boat over unpaved Independence Pass, which had no guardrails at the time. It was a hair-raising adventure. We also towed that boat all the way from Aspen to Baja, California (see my essay titled “Baja Adventures” for that story).
I went in on a fourth interest in a powerboat called The Aspen Four. It was a 26-foot inboard/outboard based at Lake Powell. It was a perfect lake boat. It had a small galley, a forward sleeping birth, and a huge upholstered rear platform that made for a great outside sleeping area. It was fast enough to explore the lake and small enough to go down the canyons where the canyon walls were 75 to 100 feet straight up on both sides.
The final powerboat worth mentioning is the catamaran we purchased in California and towed to Puerto Vallarta. It was the perfect boat for whale watching because it was fast, with twin 60 hp outboard motors, and extremely stable because of its catamaran hull. Typically, the problem with whale watching is that when a whale is spotted everyone rushes to the side to get a close look at the beast, but a catamaran can handle that without any danger of swamping.
Sailboats
When I was about 10 years old, my parents bought me my first sailboat. It was a dinghy that taught me the art of sailing. It was a good boat to learn with except that if you let it tip too far in a good wind it would fill with water and would then have to be towed to a dock to be emptied out. On Lake Lotawana, this involved someone ashore calling my mother, who would come with the motorboat to the rescue. A real pain in the ass for her, but she was always a good sport.
Before too long I became fascinated with competitive sailboat racing. The boat of choice on our lake was the C class Inland Lake Scow, the smallest class of Lake Scow. This class had been developed in the late 1800s for use in the sheltered waters of the Midwest Lakes. Scows are flat bottom boats and instead of centerboards they have Lee boards on each side of the hull; essentially it is like having two hulls. This type of boat is sailed slightly heeled over so the lower bilge board acts like a centerboard. Being light, scows are extremely fast but they are not made for big waves. I had a several C boats throughout my life. The first was called Creeper, another was Fim de Mundo, named after a bar in Estoril, Portugal where Robbie and I had some wild nights and even met the future King of Spain.
The boat that meant as much to me as any was the Butterfly. I discovered the Butterfly when looking for the perfect training boat to teach my kids how to sail. In those days, Midwest youngsters were trained in what was called an X boat. The X boat was not a scow at all, but rather a sort of lumbering sloop. It was a terrible training boat, especially for future scow sailors. When I learned about the Butterfly, a fiberglass 12-foot C boat, I made a deal to be the Kansas City area dealer and started selling boats at just over cost to get a local fleet developed. It turned out to be the perfect choice and before long we had a fleet of twelve Butterflies on Lake Lotawana. I had a special trailer made that would carry three boats. With the trailer and two boats on top of my car I could bring back five at once from the factory.
My good friend, Lee Lyon, and I would gather all the kids on my lawn every Saturday morning for ground training and then put the kids in their boats to teach them the fundamentals of racing. My daughters each had one; Candie’s was called The Red Baron and Kim's was called Snoopy. The kids were good learners and some of them became top sailors in several classes.
Lee and I took the boats and kids to regattas all over the Midwest. Butterfly racing rules required a crew of two and a minimum of 150 pounds. Although at Lake Lotawana, the Butterfly was primarily a training boat for kids, at many of the other lakes Butterflies were mainly sailed by adults. So I started competing and won five national championships, usually in fleets of 50 to 75 boats. There was a tradition that the national champion could pick the site of the next regatta. I won the national championship at Lake Lotawana just before moving to Aspen, so I was able to designate Lake Ruedi, about 40 miles east of Aspen, for the following year. That year I sailed and won my final national championship.
When I moved to Aspen a group of men met to organize the Aspen Yacht Club. Everyone had their own opinion, but I strongly believed we should all sail the same boat, even if it was a bathtub, so that we could have real competition. Lefty Brinkman had a dealership for the Skipjack class so a bunch of us bought those. Bad choice! I hated that boat so much; it was eventually the reason I got out of sailboat racing altogether. A group of us went to one regatta on the James River in Virginia and I took Lee Lyon as crew. It was a great trip and we met some interesting people but screwed up on the racecourse and finished second.
Lee Lyon and I had some adventures in other classes. One year we decided to try for the Olympic team in the Finn class, a single-handed boat and a real brute in high winds. To get more weight out when the winds blew, we would wear as many as four sweatshirts which we dipped in the water to give us an extra 50 or 60 pounds of ballast. Fortunately, the class required everyone to wear a life vest.
Lee and I did well enough in the regionals in Illinois to qualify for the semifinals in Atlanta. That's where we met some real pros and experienced some thrilling sailing when thunderstorms came through. We both did okay but didn’t quite make it to the finals.
Another year I chartered two Laser class boats to sail in the national championship in San Diego. Lee and I sailed in a bay on Coronado Island, which was only separated from the ocean by 150 feet of sand. That was some of the finest sailing I have ever experienced. A fairly mild wind would come off the ocean in the morning, then as the sun heated the sand, the wind would increase yet remained constant so you didn’t have to play the wind shifts at all. We were competing against some of the top sailors in the country and I could hold my own against them on the windward leg but when we went off in a reach these guys could fly. I would go from second or third at the windward mark and eight boats would pass me on the reaching leg. It was great sailing, but we didn’t finish in the money.
Next was the Morgan Out Island 41. Betty and I purchased it with Barbara and Carson Bell. The Morgan was part of a charter fleet based in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Usually these charter boats were restricted to the Virgin Islands so, knowing we would get bored sailing only the Virgins, we made a special deal which allowed us to sail it anywhere in the Caribbean during our annual month of use (see essay XX).
My final boat was a Peterson 44 called The Sea Nymph. It was the perfect cruising boat for two people. Betty and I had originally purchased a small interest in it. Being a partnership boat with several partners who were not sailors, The Sea Nymph was not well maintained, so every time we used her, we had maintenance problems. However, she served as our introduction to the cruising life, and we loved it! It had a very comfortable center cockpit with benches on both sides that were long enough for an adult to sleep on, when necessary, a huge aft cabin with a comfortable king-size bed and head (bathroom), a nice galley with a huge refrigerator/freezer, a comfortable lounge area and a very comfortable forward cabin for guests. The Peterson 44 had originally been designed as a racing boat, so it was fast and a great boat to sail.
When two of the partners dropped out, we started looking to buy our own cruising boat. We hired a yacht broker, went to boat shows, and even went to Europe to look at the Bowman 57, which sounded like a good deal. After ten minutes on the boat, we knew it wasn’t for us. So, we decided to purchase the other half interest in The Sea Nymph, had it totally refitted and updated, and renamed it Expectation.
We started spending more and more time cruising and ended up having twelve great years of adventures on Expectation. We would pick it up each fall and cruise a different area of Mexico or the Caribbean for seven or eight months, then leave her at a different port for the summer. We were fortunate to be able to hire Deloris and Lynn Bolkan (see my essay on the Bolkans on page XX) to arrive at wherever Expectation had been left the previous spring to add any new electronics we had bought and get her in top shape so we could arrive and start comfortably on another season of cruising.
Over the years, people would always ask about the storms we encountered and the dangers from pirates and other hazards. To me, the hard part about cruising was not the sailing but the maintenance and repair of the engine, the refrigeration system, the windlass and all the other mechanical systems involved.
Ships
My first experience with a ship was when I boarded the Queen Mary in New York in the fall of 1947 to England to start my year at Haileybury College as an English Speaking Union exchange scholar (more on that in chapter XX). The return trip the following spring was on the Queen Elizabeth. I also enjoyed my time on many cruise ships including one voyage from San Francisco to Miami through the Panama Canal. Other delightful cruises were in the Caribbean. I always preferred the medium-size cruise ships—500 to 600 passengers—to the 4000 passenger mammoths.