October is also the time I like to take my boys down to the park next to the canal to watch the cruisers go south for the winter. There are quite a lot of them. In fact the lion's share of the cruisers who come to the Great Lakes each year pass through my hometown. It's not the only way out but it's still the best way.
I used to be the guy they all visited on the way. I used to manage the coolest marine store between Detroit and Annapolis. Now I watch them run South for the winter with their masts on crude sawhorses on the deck, their folding bicycles lashed to stanchions, the dinghy crammed between the cabintop and the forward hatch. I watch them run South shivering because most of them don't even own warm clothes. The closest thing to a winter jacket they own are lined heavily built raincoats that salty people call foulies.
I once wanted to join them, but I couldn't ever get my wife to go for the kind of discipline that it would take to achieve that dream. Eating lentils and rice and peanut butter sandwhiches because all the rest of the money goes to build the boat just wasn't her thing. Nor was the idea of borrowing seventy or eighty grand for a used boat I'd have to refit really the deal either.
My wife has been growing frustrated lately at our life in this overly commercialized, keeping up with the joneses society. The sort of thing that frustrated me all along. (I'd be much less of a danger to society if I didn't have to deal with it very often). She's been shopping for boat plans.
We've settled on two or three designs from Jay Benford. I'd link right to the designs but he doesn't put the actual designs online. Just the price list. Right now I am torn between the 37.5 sailing dory with the raised flush deck and the steel 45 cat ketch. The dory I could definitely afford to build and it could easily hold enough stuff, but the interior space will be a little cramped as the boys grow possibly necessitating a bigger boat later. The steel cat ketch is over twice the size and has a really sweet looking fantail stern. We wouldn't grow out of it, but it would be considerably more expensive to build. The only reason I am considering it is I have access at a fair price to a plasma table big enough to cut the hull plates from a CNC file. That brings steel into a reasonable possibility. And which would you rather smack a rock with? Half an inch of wood wrapped in kevlar and fiberglass? Or five millimeters of Corten steel?
This is the boat I'd built if money and time wasn't a big deal. I'd make the kids drill holes in their toothbrushes and my wife could forget about bringing her shoes but we could leave Lockport and be in Rio 16 days later. there is even an excellent juniper currently for sale now for not too much more than what materials would cost me. all that stands in my way is a mere 280 thousand dollars.
But then what would be the point of taking her to Rio without a decent pair of shoes?
