Sailing

"The pessimist complains about the wind;

the optimist expects it to change;

the realist adjusts the sails."

William Arthur Ward

The Golden Vanity

Over thirty years ago, my family and a few friends set out on the Golden Vanity, a home-built, forty-foot trimaran. I was only 10 at the time, but my memories of "the boat trip" are quite clear. From the central California coast we'd headed south over half the length of California, the entire length of Baja California, and then into mainland Mexico. After several months in the area north of Puerto Vallarta, we returned to Cabo San Lucas, at the southern tip of Baja, and the crossed "the long way" to Hawaii. We lived in Hawaii for over a year and I attended my last year of grade school there. Finally, we took the Vanity north through the islands and returned to California.

As true-life adventures go, it has always been a good story. Several years ago telling the story at a party lead to an opportunity to crew on my boss's boat when he brought it back from its summer cruise. That opportunity lead me to write "The Return of the Springtide." There is also The opening chapters of a version of Return of the Springtide written for middle readers.

My mother, who writes high fantasy novels as JoEllen Conger, has written her memoirs of the years on the boat trip and released them within the family under the title "The Maiden Voyage of the Golden Vanity." This has inspired me to think about my own version of the story. Rather than a simple telling of events, the story will represent my relationship with my father, as it unfolded during the family’s two-year journey on the Golden Vanity. It will be related as a loose chronology, focusing on those events that gave me particularly important views of manhood. The story would also be loosely woven around the song “Golden Vanity”, for which the boat was named.

From this beginning, I continue to be interested in sailing and in writing about sailing. My current sailing is captured in photos on the Sailing page among the Personal pages. In addition to the writing discussed here, there are also other bits of my sailing/writing mix in my Travel Journals.

49er Articles

Here is where sailing and nonfiction article writing met head on. I wrote articles on the new Olympic sailing class called 49ers and the US team that competed in the 2000 Olympics in this class.