CASTING OFF
Long Ago and Far Away
copyright 2013 Edwin P. Cutler
DREAMING OF FARAWAY PLACES
WE BOUGHT THE ROMARIN
The sailing magazines promised beautiful islands and wonderful weather from the Bahamas on down through the Caribbean.
So in 1981 with misty eyes looking south from Annapolis in Maryland, we bought an old wooden boat named Romarin, which means Rosemary in French and means Dew of the Sea. It turned out, the Romarin, built in 1938, knew much more about sailing than we did.
We had sailed a friend's Cal 27 for several years in these same waters. No problem, four foot draft; run aground, get out and push off. The Cal weighed 8000 pounds, the Romarin weighed 13000 and drew five foot six. I am 6 foot two, so all I had to do was get out and push off. Only problem was instead of the Romarin lifting off the bank, my boots sank in the mud. We learned to sail in questionable waters at low tide so if perchance fate cast us on yet another mud bank all we had to was wait for the tide to rise.
An inspection said the rig was good but old, you can sail it in the Chesapeake but don't take it out in the ocean. So to get our feet wet, so to speak, we proceeded to run it aground on every mudbank from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds above Baltimore to Newport News at the southern end of the bay.
One day, working on the Romarin in our slip in the South River, a man sauntered by and offered some sanguine advice, "No working man should have a wood boat."
We looked at him with wondering eyes until he added, "But every retired man should."
So we began the procedures necessary to retire. The first thing we did was to quit spending money. You can't believe the money we were eating at restaurants and stitching into clothes to look nice at work.
In one year, back there in 1982 we saved $40,000. Now that doesn't sound like much but adjusted for inflation to the time of this writing in 2011, 30 years later, it is equivalent to $140,000 saved in one year.
We had a good reliable boat, right? The only mishaps stemmed from a sojourn at a marina in Solomon's Maryland. We got some bad fuel and the Volvo engine absolutely refused to ingest it. So for six months we sailed up and down the bay without an engine; we learned to sail.
A mechanic friend got a jug of fresh diesel and stuck the intake line in the jug. Bingo! The Volvo loved it and after replacing the bad fuel with fresh we once again had a working reliable engine.
A good wooden hull, pitch pine planks on oak frames with copper rivets, gave us unwarranted confidence; we got a call from the Solomon's marina that our boat almost sank. A fisherman, leaving port saw that it was sitting low so the marina put a pump in and saved her. We rushed down and helped dry her out. Wendy told me later she forgot there was no stuffing box around the drive shaft, only grease, so she put soap on the drive shaft and it cleaned it so well the sea seeped in. Well the only one other time, years later, water appeared on the kitchen floor because of a loose hose. The hull was sound, and we never sank the Romarin, but "The Night We Sank" in our dinghy is another story.
One more winter with snow and Brady's wood stove and we became determined to go.
Resolved to find those tropical island the sailing magazines boasted about, we stocked the boat with six months of grub and invited everyone to a cast-off party.
Everyone in the photo is still alive, save one. Who is missing?
Everyone wanted to go along, but we said we could only sleep a dozen, and that only in good weather. So we started the engine and the party crew untied the dock lines and we backed out of the slip.
Nothing to it. We'd show them real sailing skills, so we raised our tanbark sails and turned to sail south.
The first mishap on our Caribbean Cruise was we ran aground within sight of the dock and the waving crew on shore.
On the fourth of November in 1984, all checked out and raring to go, we got underway and sailed south into a winter storm.
We sailed away for 25 years.