What’s the Difference Between a Boater and a Mercury Salesman?

It’s been a long nine months without my new Hake Seaward 26RK sailboat, but the helm seat track—despite being a revolutionary prototype design--was an accident waiting to happen. As a beat-up old quadriplegic (who just turned 60!), I’ve determined to return to sailing after a lifetime away from my favorite pastime. In fact, I set out to see if there was a sailboat designer out there who would be willing to help me create a moderately priced/sized sailboat that nearly anyone—be they old, weak, disabled, or whatever—could sail single-handed. After several prominent companies backpedaled, Nike Hake, at Hake Yachts in Stuart, Florida, stepped right up and said: “we can do this!”

Nick took my initial concepts and either improved them considerably, or came up with something better. In the case of my helm seat track, he did that twice! Among the many challenges for a wheelchair user on a 26’ sailboat was figuring out how to move around the cockpit. Despite the fact that today’s wheelchairs are both stronger and lighter, unless you’re talking about a multi-million dollar mega-boat, using one onboard is out of the question. So Nick Hake designed a curved traveler track that the back of my helm seat attached to via two ordinary cars, he put wheels sideways on the front of the seat, and, like magic, I could ride around the bench from port to starboard and back with relative ease. Simple and ingenious! Well, as it turns out, except when crossing a moderately sized trough.

The first time my open-stern Seaward slipped into a decent trough and shot up the other side, the helm seat’s front wheels rose up off the bench; and, had I not been locked in with the aft stay immediately behind my right shoulder blade, I’m pretty sure I’d have flipped back into the Atlantic, helm seat and all, and I would have found myself fumbling wildly with the Velcro release on my seat belt/shoulder straps….if, that is, if I hadn’t been knocked out on the way into the water! When Nick came down and checked it out, he agreed immediately that we needed a more stable approach.

Nine months later, after dancing furiously with several tubing fabricators, Nick sent the Eleanor P back to the Keys with a new track system worthy of a first rate rollercoaster. The twin tubular rails secure the seat rollers fore and aft, and the only way I’m going in the drink is if I capsize the old girl! So that leads me back to my initial question: “What’s the difference between a boater and a Mercury salesman?” Tim DeVries is the sales manager at Hake, and even years after a sale, he takes his customers more seriously than any salesman I’ve ever met. Instead of sending a couple guys down, he came himself, and as it turns out, he and his assistant, Rob, had to rig and launch the Eleanor P at the nearby Hawk’s Cay Resort, in gusty 25-30 mph winds.

The Mercury engine folks come to the famous Florida Keys resort every year for a company to-do, and they had a couple of in-service tents set up next to the boat ramp, so there were usually a half dozen or more sales types coming and going, sitting around drinking coffee, and gawking at Tim and Rob as they struggled to raise the rigging in the mini-gale. At one point, as Rob strained to lock in the mast foot and connect the wiring, Tim, on tip-toes, was pushing against the swaying mast crutch with all his might. (I should admit, at this point, that by adding a solar panel above the cockpit, and Gerry-rigging a new, higher mast crutch assembly, I had inadvertently made his job much more difficult.) If Tim slipped, and my mast crutch snapped or bent in the wind, my solar panel would be toast, so I rolled over behind the trailer where the aft stay hung down on the ground and scooped it up onto my lap. I backed my wheelchair awkwardly into the wind, locked the brakes, and wrapped the stay cable around both my gimpy arms in an effort to take some of the pressure off Tim. Twenty feet away, in the shade of their tents, team Mercury watched with great interest…but not one of them made the slightest move toward pitching in. By the time Rob began hoisting the mast, my gimpy hands were numb-er than usual, and I was very glad to release the stay.

A few minutes later, Tim was backing down the boat ramp, and I was giving Rob directions to my slip. One piloting mistake coming off the inaccessible loading dock, or one stall-out by the 15 hp Yanmar which hadn’t run in nine months, and the Eleanor P would be dashed on the rocks by the relentless wind and waves. I couldn’t do anything to help, so as Rob took the helm, Tim tried to design a combination of docking line maneuvers to at least help turn the little sloop into the wind before he had to let go of the lines. Once again, and now a mere ten feet away, the Mercury sales guys sipped their coffee and stared. I couldn’t help wondering if it was because I had a Yanmar, not a Mercury, engine. There seemed no good way to launch, until a 75-year-old guest at the resort, a man who’d stopped by on his way to the marina store to admire the boat earlier, returned. He took one look at the scene, hurried out onto the dock, and took one of the lines from Tim. Like the three of us, he was a boater, had been since he was a kid.

Well, I’ve finally got my boat back, Tim and Rob are safely back in Stuart, and that old man said he’d be anxiously waiting to hear whether his bid was enough to buy a forty-something foot Island Packard. I’m sending out good vibes for him…which is more than I can say for the folks at Mercury. We crazy old sailors have to stick together, and like it or not, everybody needs an extra hand now and then.

Easy Owner Modification

Those of us with daysailers and/or weekenders browse the sailing magazines and boat shows with no small amount of envy. To have a real chart table, or a "nav station," well, that's just a pleasant dream. But in the meantime, we do the best that we can with what we have.

Like those on most small sailboats, our Seaward 26RK's table is small and it stows away neatly, but I couldn't figure out where to put my laptop everytime we need the table for something else. So, with a few scraps of 1" x 2" cedar, some 1/4" plywood, a couple of hinges, some 1/2" insulating foam, a piece of fishing line and a little stain, I built a simple "table-topper." Non-skid shelf covering, double-face taped to the table, keeps the computer from sliding around, and when the table is stowed, the lid is held firmly closed by the cabin headliner.

Overall construction is waterproof wood glue, and I drilled holes and glued in dowelling instead of using screws to secure the plywood to the cedar framing. We used a jigsaw to round off the square corners after the glued-in support wedges dried in place. We seldom create a custom wood shop look in our little garage bay, but those of us with physical disabilities, steeped in art of adaptation, generally lean toward function over form. This little modification functions quite well.

Fits and Starts

This business of getting a 59-year-old quadriplegic back into sailing is far more complicated and time consuming an endeavor than any sane gimp might want to embark upon, but that’s what adaptation is all about: living and enjoying life . . . even if getting at the heart of it is usually more difficult. My new Seaward 26RK was delivered on the 18th of January, in the midst of the coldest, longest, stretch of real winter anybody in the Florida Keys can remember. Day after day, the highs have been in the 50’s/60’s, and the lows have been in the 40’s on far too many nights. Here in the tropics, where the average daily temp is 82, that’s a serious challenge to any local, let alone an arthritic old geezer like me, but that’s just one of many reasons I’ve had nothing to blog about ‘till now.

Fortunately, we got a lot accomplished in the past month or so, even if practicing our seapersonship wasn’t included in the list. The big deal was electrical independence. Since my dream has been to explore the Keys at my leisure, and since I suspected that I’d need to stop and rest more often than most, I wanted to be able to crank up the microwave and the laptop whenever I wished . . . without having to crank up the 14hp Yanmar diesel inboard to keep the batteries up. I planned on having a solar panel from the beginning, but it didn’t take much to talk me into adding a wind generator too. While they were at it, I had them double my battery banks, add a more detailed battery monitor and a DC “cigarette plug” outlet, and move a few electrical items to more accessible locations. “Up ‘till now,” said Mike the electrician from S.A.L.T. in Marathon, “this has been Hake’s boat. My job is to help you make it your boat.” And when he finished, Mike presented us with a complete electrical schematic of our boat!

The other issue keeping us on the shore has been dock height. Here on the ocean side, tides range two to three feet, and our neighbor’s seawall (they’ve been graciously letting us dock there!) is meant more for luxury yachts than for little daysailers like ours, so in order for my boom hoist to lift me out of my wheelchair, the tide needs to be up, along with the boat’s topping lift. We used a block and a couple of cable clamps to move Nick Hake’s adjustable topping lift device another 18 inches up the topping line (Nick offered us a shorter topping line, but that meant bringing the mast down or sending Ellie up in my bosun’s chair, so we respectfully declined!), so now we can crank the boom high enough to function on this (or almost any?) dock, but the more severe boom angle makes the swing onboard and off a bit more precarious. It’s nothing Ellie and I can’t handle, but I don’t think I could manage it alone. So we’ve located a marina on the gulfside, and secured a slip where the dock is almost two feet lower, and the tide range is halved . . . easier for everyone. Our next outing will be the 22-mile trip up through Channel #5, under the Long Key bridge, and back down on the other side.

Yesterday, even the tide and the cold winds couldn’t keep us off the Eleanor P, and so we loaded up and went to work on the most basic skill set necessary to turn us into sailors . . . motoring. It sounds strange, but learning how to handle your boat at or near the dock is where most newbies fail to do their homework. The result is a lot of damage to boats, docks, and people. We’ve watched some of the movie and YouTube boat crashing scenes and don’t want to add our clip to that particular wall of shame, so we spent two hours practicing on Lake Louise in forward, and in reverse, and doing dock approaches. I am so glad I spent a small fortune on bow thrusters, but I’m still going to need way more practice before I can bring the Eleanor P in alone. Thankfully, yesterday’s outing taught me that I will be able to do it eventually.

Before quitting for the day, and even though the cold wind was doing a number on my neck and shoulders, I just had to go out to sea. I’ve never skippered a boat in the ocean before. I have countless hours in the Intracoastal Waterway, thanks to my time in the crabbing business up in central Florida, but aside from being a passenger on cruise ships and party fishing boats, I’ve never taken the helm and gone to sea. As the Eleanor P slipped out of the causeway, though Hawk’s Channel, and out into open water, it was nearly impossible not to raise the sail, and had I not been cold to the bone, I probably would have done it. Next time, for sure!

WIND and PASSION

Being disabled means learning how to adapt, and for over 30 years, as a C6/C7 quadriplegic, I’ve always managed to find a way to do most of the things I wanted to do. I am 58 years old now, and four years ago I was run down in the street by little elderly woman in her white Toyota Corolla. My titanium wheelchair saved my life, but my pelvis is forever shattered, my balance will never be as good as it once was, and my stamina refuses to fully recover. In short, my ability to adapt isn’t as good as it once was, and my spirit’s been flailing accordingly, so what on earth makes me think that I can go back to my childhood passion: sailing?

When I was about eight years old, my mother’s favorite song was called “Red Sails in The Sunset.” She was so inspired by this song, she told my father that she wanted a sailboat with a red sail. Shortly thereafter, an 8 foot plywood pram appeared alongside our dock, complete with a gaff-rigged red sail. (My mother almost always got what she wanted.) As memory serves, she may have actually sailed it two or three times before the novelty wore off. My interest, however, was just winding up, and I asked my dad if I could learn to sail it. “When you can swim across the lake and back without stopping,” he said without missing a beat, “you can sail her whenever you want.”

“I can do that right now!” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. He stepped into the rowboat and said “Okay, let’s go.” It was a half mile to the other side of the lake, and as he rowed and I stroked, he began to enumerate the basic parts of a sailboat, explain what they were for, and instruct me in their proper usage. By the time we reached the far side of the lake I had abandoned the crawl and settled into a more comfortable side stroke. My breathing was heavy, but I was exhilarated because I never swam that far without stopping before, and I knew I could make it back to the dock.

What a far cry from today. I’m up at 5:00 a.m. or so, but by 11:00 a.m. I’m ready for a nap! At 8:30 p.m., I’m so bone weary, I can’t wait to hop out of my wheelchair and stretch out for the night. What makes me think I can sail a boat again? I used to be relentless, filled with passion. My determined spirit repeatedly urged my body on when it had nothing left of its severely limited resources to give. But it gave anyway. In the last four years, however, my passion has been slipping away like helium from an old balloon. Each time I call it up, there is less response. Life, the Universe, and Everything seems far less compelling with each passing day, and when calamities rain down upon my friends and loved ones, it weighs on my soul as never before. There has always been pain in the world, but it never felt so personal nor so heavy before. I guess I just got old and tired.

Every summer that little red catboat was my magic carpet, and if there was even the slightest breeze, I was out exploring every inch of that mountain lake. Sometimes I remembered to take a sandwich, but regardless, I seldom came home before darkness and calm had descended around me. I will never forget the night sounds, punctuated by my dipping paddle, as I ghosted back to our dock. I’ll never forget the way it felt.

Perhaps I’m trying to recapture those feelings. I don’t know, exactly. But after over a year of research and debate, fraught with self-doubt and stirred by moments of wild hope, I ordered a sailboat. I live in Florida’s middle Keys, where, to the north, the gulf side “back country” runs right up into the Everglades. There are thousands of islands and many more species of wildlife to observe and photograph above and below the crystal clear surface. But it’s shallow. . . sometimes as little as 18” deep in the eddy streams and channels. Just south and east of my little island paradise, the Atlantic stretches across the reef and then the gulfstream to carry a sailor anywhere in the world. And because I wanted a boat that could sail safely in both directions, I settled on a Hake Seaward 26RK.

Right now I can’t say whether my passion for the wind will rise up like the Phoenix of old, or whether I just ordered a very expensive toy for my grandchildren to inherit. All I can do is wait for the factory to call.