The Expectation
Little did I know that reefing, wind blowing like stink, and 150 candles were the beginning of a new way of life.
In 1981, Betty and I and Monty and Sally Goldman, friends from Aspen, were all in San Francisco. The Goldmans called and asked if we’d like to go sailing with friends of theirs. It was a beautiful San Francisco day with the sun shining and a brisk wind on the bay. We gladly accepted.
The boat was a Peterson 44. I liked everything about it. It was comfortable, fast, and had good lines. When we returned to the dock, Betty and I decided that if we ever got another boat, this would be the one.
We had only been back in Aspen a few days when my friend, Dave Baxter, said he was partners in a boat called the Sea Nymph and one of his partners had dropped out and they were looking for a replacement. The Sea Nymph was a Peterson 44. The boat had a mortgage, five partners, and it only cost a couple of thousand to “join the club.”
The Sea Nymph summered in San Diego and each winter it sailed the Sea of Cortez. The group hired an attendant who stayed on the boat, maintained it, and sailed with some of the partners who were not sailors themselves. Back then, we called him a BN (Boat Nigger); now, we’d probably call him a sailboat maintenance technician. When a sailing partner would use the boat, the attendant could take a week or two off.
That winter, we decided to sail the Sea Nymph with Valerie and Steve Arelt as our guests. On this trip, Valerie discovered she was a landlubber—defined as anyone on board a boat who wishes she was not.
Our first attendant was Dave Muckinhern from Aspen. Because we didn’t feel we needed a crew, we gave Dave a couple of weeks off after he showed us how to operate the Sea Nymph’s systems. Shortly after the Arelts arrived in La Paz, we left for one of the islands about 25 miles north.
The wind was strong, but the Sea Nymph sailed beautifully. Because I hadn’t learned about reefing, I had too much sail up, and we heeled over farther than necessary with our rail in the water. I knew we were fine, but Valerie panicked, thinking we were going to tip over.
Disaster occurred when we were about an hour out of La Paz sailing hard on a starboard tack. I happened to look ahead and saw that the leeward side stay was just dangling loose. If we had come about at that time, we would have lost the mast. I didn’t want to further alarm Valerie, who might raise her fist to the grey sky and curse me and my children for ten generations. Fortunately, I was able to fix the side stay, and we proceeded to Isla San Francisco where Valerie recovered, and we anchored for the night.
The water was calm, and we broke out the drinks, ready to relax and enjoy the evening. Then, while we were cooking dinner, the stove went out. No one had thought to check the propane. It wasn’t going to be a fun trip if we couldn’t cook or make coffee. We decided to come back the next morning.
Lo and behold, the engine wouldn’t start the next morning. The wind was blowing like stink (very strong) and because we were only a hundred yards offshore, getting the anchor up with a slow manual windlass and sailing out of there without going aground was a bit tricky, but we made it. We turned back for La Paz.
For me, it was a glorious sail. For Valerie, it was a nightmare. We were off the wind, zipping along at hull speed, but when you sat in the cockpit and looked back, the waves were huge. It looked like they were 15 feet high and each one was going to crash over the stern. Of course, as a wave got closer, the stern rose, and we would surf down the face of the sea at great speed. Valerie curled into a ball, muttering, “I can’t die, I have two little babies at home.”
There is a long dogleg channel at the entrance to La Paz Harbor. It would have been impossible against the wind without a motor, but the wind was with us, and we managed it nicely. As I approached the fleet of some 50 boats anchored off the town, I radioed to get some instructions for the best place to anchor and to warn other boats that we had no engine hence our anchoring might be a little perilous. Everyone in the harbor monitors their radio and they were all on deck, panicked that this runaway boat in a 25-knot breeze was going to wipe them out. I tried not to let anyone know how nervous I was about this maneuver—but I was plenty scared.
As it turned out, we sailed behind a number of boats, rounded up into the wind, Steve dropped the anchor perfectly, and it was “no sweat.” We even heard cheers from the other sailors, and some came over to congratulate us on such a good job.
Steve and Val were supposed to spend the night on board, but they couldn’t get off fast enough. They checked into a hotel and Barbara and Carson Bell, who were there to meet us, moved on board. That night was Betty’s birthday and we decided to party at a local restaurant.
Considering Steve and Val were overjoyed to be alive and in one piece and Carson and Barbara were delighted to be on vacation, we over-celebrated like seldom before.
My memory is of Barbara, who rarely drinks to excess, staggering out of the bathroom where she’d thrown up, saying, “I need to get some air.” She disappeared for a while; then Steve and Carson went to find her. I will never forget walking outside and seeing Steve and Carson holding her up. They could barely walk as they dragged her across the ground like a survivor in a battlefield movie.
Carson had ordered a huge cake for Betty’s birthday—maybe 150 candles. As they brought it to our table it was obvious that the Bells and Arelts were finished for the night and had to go to a hotel even though all their gear was on the boat. I took them to the hotel, which left Betty sitting at an empty table with a huge birthday cake. A group of Mexicans nearby felt sorry for her and invited her to join them for a drink. Somehow, I managed to get back to the restaurant to pick up Betty and we made it back to the boat alive. Oh, what a night to remember.
A few years later, Dave Baxter called me to say that our partners in the Sea Nymph, none of whom I had met, were having a financial disaster in the oil business and had to drop out of the boat. Dave said he couldn’t afford to own half a boat and thought it best to put the Sea Nymph up for sale.
By this time, Betty and I were bitten with the cruising bug. Since things were going well with Coates, Reid & Waldron, we started looking for a boat for ourselves. Boat shopping from Aspen isn’t easy. We hired a broker and initiated the search. David Hooks, a broker from Marblehead, found a Bowman 57 in France. We knew the Bowman was a fine sailing boat, the price seemed right, so we flew to the Riviera with David to take a look. We were sure we were going to buy the boat.
Poor David. We hadn’t been on the boat five minutes when we looked at each other and said this wasn’t for us. We knew it was a good boat and plenty big enough, but we felt the accommodations below were not as good as the Peterson 44.
We decided we liked the Peterson 44 better than anything else and made a deal to buy David’s Sea Nymph interest and recondition the boat. She was in rough shape (partnership boats always are.) We hired Billy Cast, better known as “Captain Billy,” to do a complete renovation of the Sea Nymph. We bought new rigging, a power windlass, new instruments, a total refinishing—the works.
Expectation was the name of a boat we bought as part of a charter fleet in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. We had sold that boat, but we still liked the name Expectation and we had never run across another boat with the same name.
We changed the name of Sea Nymph to Expectation. We decided against Expectation II as we thought it was a little trite and would require too much explanation to other sailors.