• ‘You gotta sail to places that make you scared.’ Roger Shane, sailing mentor.
November 4, 2018, with 2 Australians met in a bar, Grateful made her maiden voyage out of Turgutreis, Turkey. This moment was the culmination of months and years of hope, compromise, frustration and ultimately sheer joy. Since that day, grateful has crossed the Mediterranean Seas, reached the Canary Island, twice. But mostly, she has graciously given me the time and place to tell the story of Finding Grateful.
Our first stop, just 3 hours out of Turgutris is the Greek island of Kos. On our stop to check into the new country, stopping for Gyros I met 2 young men, Scottish and Welsh who just spent a year in Afghanistan teaching English and were biking their way back home. They shyly wondered if there might be room on our boat? I invited them for dinner, to see how we might all get along before committing. Within a few hours, their bikes were stowed below, and we were now 5 aboard. Many islands and 2 weeks of winter sailing in the Mediterranean, we reached Pireaus the port for Athens. The crew disbanded, and I was alone with Grateful. Tina, my then girlfriend, was flying from California to sail for the next few months. The Agean winters are famous for heavy storms and quickly shifting winds, but we were excited and ready. We set out from Pireaus on November 27. In the next 35 days we circled the Agean, sailed storms, tore sails, made 22 stops and re-entered Turkey...to the night we almost lost Grateful:
By the time we got to Marmaris, Turkey we had logged over 1000 miles, and had picked up my best friend, Brude McKee in Bodrum. We had a few snags along the way, like picking up rubber tubing on the prop, blowing out the clew of the mainsail during a massive rainstorm, 50 miles from land, and and a jammed headsail furling drum while approaching an extremely tight, uninhabited natural cove on North Karpathos. Maybe it was all that amazing sailing that got us comfortable and lulled into a new-years eve nightmare. We had been in Marmaris, Turkey for a few days, winding down from a week long journey from Bodrum, staying mostly anchored out in remote coves. The Aegean winter, while stormy, is uncrowded and beautiful. Tina and I were open-water swimmers in the SF Bay, so the winter Aegean waters were welcomely warm. And being a Bay Area surfer who chases bigger waves, the relatively flat Mediterranean is deceivingly safe. Over the past few months we had encountered 48 knots sustained winds just north of Crete, and some days rain so hard that we could barely open the companionway door without getting soaked! So we had seen a lot of real weather, and Grateful handled it all with aplomb. New Year’s Eve day was actually quite nice. And we had spent the previous 3 days with a local contractor bolting on additional supports for the custom hardtop that makes Grateful extra special. The night was longer than the day, but we wore flip flops and shorts when the sun was shining. Another storm was predicted, but NYE and promised parties kept us in the public docks instead of anchored out, in the safety of the lee of a mountain which would block the nasty southern winds...which was my big mistake.The storm started around 9 pm. By midnight the winds were 30, gusting to 50 knots. Huge cells of rain, lightening, thunder and micro bursts were charging through the bay every 10 to 20 minutes. We were tied to a 3-walled cove...and the waves were refracting and amplifying the impact on Grateful. From 1 am to 8 am I never left the deck, pulling and loosening the shore lines that were tied to each of our 8 cleats and drums. If we cut and ran, we surely would have been blown sideways into the concrete docks..some of them had large steel rods protruding here and there...The continuous surges were taking a toll on the cleats. I could actually see the starboard cleats twisting with each giant impact. The forward cleat finally had one of the bolts pull through the fiberglass! The loss of one cleat meant more stress on the others...I was literally watching my beautiful boat being torn apart. People were walking by looking in disbelief as all 35000 pounds of Grateful was tossed and bashed constantly
I love sailing. At 10, I knew I should be a sailor. I was landlocked in Hacienda Heights, a souther California Suburb but I knew.
Billy Ullrich, a good friend in 3rd grade, his family had a kettenberg 42 in San Diego. The feeling I got sailing under the Coronado Bridge, excitement and freedom. At 14, I bought an old Hobie 16 cat which I kept on the beach in front of my family’s trailer house in San Clemente. In 1985, After college, I traveled to Australia where I walked the docks till I found some people who needed crew. Turned out the owner of the pleasure yacht I had approached, Ian Douglas of Melbourne, also had just bought a 75’ Maxi-racer, Rumdoodle 4, and was looking for crew. I got the ‘lazy-grinder’ job and spent the summer racing up and down the Australian Coast, just one amongst a crew of 15. With the racing over, I switched to hostel life again. With some other travelers, we hitchhiked up the Australian coast, and at the Whitsunday islands, met a man by the name of Serge Sokolosky who accepted 2 of us as crew aboard his 36’ trimaran. I was 24, just finished 6 years of engineering and business school, cruising the edge of the great barrier reef, with Ingrid, one of the other hitchhikers, and this Russian defector, a self proclaimed ‘punter’,
For a month we explored, spear-fished and traded stories with other sailors...under the sun and stars. Magical. I decided on that trip that someday, this would be my life too, cruising the open waters of the worlds. After 3 years of touring Southeast Asia and Australia, I moved back to Cali, set up a construction business and was fully committed to making enough money to create a lifestyle that would allow me to cruise the world on a beautiful yacht ...however the housing crash of 1989 left me totally broke. The market was so bad you couldn’t ‘give’ jobs away. One bright spot of this: I finally had the time to finish my pilots license. Then in Sept 1991, the Oakland hills firestorm happened. 3500 homes torched in a single day. I had never been to Oakland, but on a tip from a friend, I jumped on a Southwest Airlines flight and a few hours later I was touring one of the most surreal disaster scenes I’ve ever witnessed. Entire neighborhoods decimated. Looked like a war zone, just smoldering ash and some fireplaces still standing. On the sidewalk, in spray paint in front of each now empty lot was a circle with a 2 numbers; one number represented how many people were on record as living there, and the other was how many remains found. The second number was almost always a zero, but still it was freaky and strange. I was 29, over leveraged on a home I just built, and needed a break. My friend who told me to go check the place out for potential development asked his sister in law, who had just graduated from the local architecture school to pick me up and show me around. What started that day as a tour of the burned out hills ended up a 22 year marriage, 3 kids, a real-estate development company, and even patent on a building system to fully automate net-zero buildings. Around 2004 we moved to the beautiful central coast town of San Luis Obispo, built out a 10 acre ranch and filled it with many wonderful things and people: 3 kids, 5 horses, a housekeeper, a barn keeper, 6 peacocks hatched in an aviary I built, 8 chickens, 2 dogs, 2 cats and lots of workers and engineers who would come daily to my on-site manufacturing facility in the 10,000 sf barn out back. In the middle of all that I planted 2 acres of Pinot Noir. Magical.
Despite all those achievements and events, nothing could have prepared me for the ‘ambush’ of 2012. Unbeknownst to me, my now x planned for several years to separate. She was well schooled in the art of hostile corporate takeovers, as well as the subtleties of tactical divorce strategies in the infamous California Family Law process. I was tarred, feathered and dragged thru that horrid institution for 2 years. On December 17, 2014 I walked out of the court, homeless, broke, with no jobs on the books or even on the horizon...complete disaster.
The rebirth of a mid-century man, I believe, is a story worth telling. But not today. Suffice it to say ‘Finding Grateful’ is the theme that carried me through the next 5 years, to remain focused and calm, and get on that plane, out and away from all that the noise and distraction that had up until that moment kept me from following the dream I had nearly 40 years before.
Back to Marmaris: Me, Brude and Tina were all hands on deck at times. Taking turns below to get some food and try to dry off a bit, but we were soaked to the bone. The blasting rain never relented. At one point, at about 7:30am the restaurant owner who’s place we were moored right in front of, came out, in the full wind and rain, with a full pot of hot tea...complete with those awesome little tea glasses shaped sorta like an hour glass...it was surreal actually...in the midst of impending disaster, comes a man with tea, graciously offering anything, something to keep our spirits up in this most difficult and uncertain moment. Normally, these types of dramas are out at sea, miles and hours from the nearest help, no one could ever hear you scream. And if you called for rescue, and that call was answered, they may scoop you up, but then require you to sink the boat if the storm was so bad that it could not be towed...they don’t want you to leave your ship as a hazard for others. The law of the sea can be harsh. Suddenly, about 8:30 am, New Years Day 2019, we looked up, and there was a lull. The bay at Marmaris is 3 miles across, and I could see the next squall out in the distance raking across the water, those White Sea horses charging our way. We only had a few minutes before the stampede would resume. The 3 of us devised a plan to cut and run, leaving some of the mooring lines behind on the dock...but this would get us out quickly. Tina, a world class distance swimmer, offered to stay on dock, release lines then SWIM out to us...now that’s enthusiasm and commitment...but this captain decided to keep everyone out of the water in such conditions. Tina took the foredeck, Brude, a machinist, is great with a knife and the bowline knots in the shore lines were so tight from all the pounding that there was NO WAY they could be undone in a short time...so as he jumped on the dock and cut 2 lines, I coordinated to swing the stern close enough for him to jump aboard, and it was full power to get out of that torture chamber. Thoughts of Midnight Express crossed my mind as I hit the throttle, working the bow thruster to keep the nose away from the hard concrete pier... In 15 minutes we crossed the bay and were behind a large hill in the lee of the weather in glassy calm water. We dropped anchor in 25 meters of water. Tina went for the tea and I headed strait for that big master suite bed with the custom Turkish made mattress, and as I passed the midship port suite, Brude was already passed out, didn’t even close the door.
As I write this, Grateful lay snug in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain. Double mooring lines, fore and aft, electronic security gate, water, power, land based showers and toilets, and even a busy ‘sailors-bar’ where we can trade ideas, solve mechanical boat mystery’s or just drink, un-alone and contemplate the sometimes droning sea and the compromises we might have made with ourselves and our crafts to arrive again. Certainly this luxury is the exception, not the norm for most of the sailors found in these ‘cruising-ports’.
When I started this journey 15,000 nautical miles and a 2 1/2 years ago, it was Brude who prodded me to write about it. Trained in engineer and brought up as a construction guy, it never before occurred to me to write. To cumulate ones thoughts and ideas in a journal of this type is especially revealing, because I have found that it is impossible to lie to oneself in the written word. To share with the world ones truth, in turn forces a reconciliation with oneself. Thus ‘Finding Grateful’ becomes the essence of the journey.
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Turgutreis, Kalymnos, Leros, Patmos, Patmos bay. Mykonos, Sounion, Pireaus, Sounion, Idra, Ermioni, Monemvasia, Chania, Rythimno, Iraklion, Eloundra, SITIA, Karpathos, Kos, Bodrum
