Sailing "Thanks Dad"

My brother and I did a lot of investigating.  There are several places from, Hammond, IN to Racine, WI where we could keep the boat.  We visited them all and decided on Waukegan, IL.  The Waukegan Harbor Marina is nice, the travel time from home to the Marina is exactly an hour, the slip price is good and the Larsen Marine boat yard is right next door.

We still needed to find a way to haul the boat from Maryland to Waukegan and I placed an ad on UShip.com initially in October 2011.  Didn’t get any bids.  I relisted in early February 2012 and received 2 bids and accepted one of them from Sea Wise Inc.  The husband and wife team, Ed and Jan, at Sea Wise made the entire process of getting the boat from Maryland to Waukegan a painless experience.  Jan communicated constantly on the current status of the process and when Ed and the boat were in transit, she kept me up to date on their location over the 2 days it took to get to Waukegan.  I asked her to let me know when they were about an hour from arriving at the Larsen Marine boat yard.  She did and I was able to be there when Ed and the boat arrived.

Dad calls and says he is done sailing.  Done, done.  He has not been able to go out sailing for a couple of seasons and if my brother and I want his Contest 29 sailboat, we can have it…well of course we want it! Thanks Dad!

Growing up in Maryland, my family (dad, uncle, grandfather, siblings) were sailors on the Chesapeake Bay, a beautiful body of water with over 5,000 miles of shoreline and many fun places to visit when sailing.  My Uncle and grandfather had a 35 foot sailboat that they owned for personal use and also chartered.  My dad had a 25 foot that we was solely for personal use.  Our summers were spent sailing almost every weekend and then we took longer trips when Dad would take his vacation days.  I enjoyed that a lot.

As occurs to all of us, as we grow up and get older, “life happens”.  Parents’ divorce, remarriages, step-familys etc.  I moved from Maryland to Illinois in 1975 during my freshman year in high school with my mom, brother and step-dad.  Then high school, college, my own marriage and children.

The first few years after moving to Illinois, my brother and I would spend a good part of our summers visiting our dad in Maryland and still sailed a lot.  After about 1978 though, with the start of my adult life, trips back to Maryland became fewer and sailing during those trips rarely happened.

Dad of course continued to sail and even got a bigger boat in 1992, a Contest 29 built by Conyplex B.V., a Dutch company.  S.V. Dutch Treat