Stories of Boat Related Mishaps and Experiences | Soundings Online Column

Deadline is met with three days to spare

An advisory for bored retired folks: buy an older boat and refurbish it.

As participatory sports go, such a maritime project will keep you far more occupied than golf, for example, where activity among seniors ends at the 18th hole and the clubhouse but returns with seemingly endless tournaments on television.

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A hapless group on a maiden voyage

Forty years ago this summer, I recruited three newspaper buddies to help sail my older, newly purchased and painted sloop from Washington, D.C., to Annapolis, Md., on my introductory long-distance cruise of Chesapeake Bay.

Two of those proud fellows, John McKelway and Dave Braaten, were never to set foot aboard a sailboat again after what they said was a "hell trip."

A cold and windy Keys escape

Taking along a kayak aboard Amtrak's Auto Train in January for two weeks of paddling in the Florida Keys called for a rugged, small inflatable that would fold up and stow inside my car.

I thought it might also perform additional duty this summer on Chesapeake Bay as my tender and as a fairly stable boatwork platform, able to fit inside my boat fully inflated when cruising. I named it Gonzo because handling such offbeat functions may also aid in my kind of participatory boating journalism.

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Time for a tune-up before cruising season

When I began sailing in the mid-1960s, my watery world was limited to the Severn River, which opened to the great unknown (to me) Chesapeake Bay some three miles distant.

My first sailboat, a National One-Design, was moored in a cove near my home in Severna Park, Md.

Ed Cutts: designer, builder, Bay icon

I regularly cruise to Oxford, Md., on the middle Eastern Shore

— not primarily to eat, drink and make merry, but to poke around a remarkable time capsule of an old, traditional boatyard.

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Jack Sherwood, Writer-at-Large

Jack has been cruising Chesapeake Bay and writing about the region for more than 25 years. His critically acclaimed book, "Maryland's Vanishing Lives," was published by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University Press and is now in its second printing. Before joining Soundings, Jack was a feature writer at the Washington (D.C.) Star for nearly 20 years and a senior editor at Chesapeake Bay magazine from 1995 to 1998. His monthly Bay Tripper column focuses on the Chesapeake.

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