THE CHARACTERS

Travis Blake
I’m thirty-nine years old and still reasonably attractive to women but slightly overweight, and yes, I’m retired! Suffice it to say, I do not need to work to support my lifestyle; therefore, I don’t. Being a sailor from the time I could hold a tiller, sailing was the only thing I loved. It was not work, so maybe designing boats would not be either. So I thought. Besides, the profession would require much time on the water so I wouldn’t become like many other young folks who waste their best years in offices. After graduating from Tam High in Mill Valley, California and attending UC Berkeley for as long as I could stand it and wishing for separation from my wife, Kay, I snuck off to the East Coast in 1973 to work for several of the hot yacht design offices of the time.

Carol Whitley
Besides being a close friend and confidante, Carol is one of the best sailors I’ve ever known, a natural-born master of wind and water. Beautiful, indeed, Carol appears in the companionway hatch and swings her lovely long and tanned legs adeptly down into the salon like the seasoned sailor she is. Her wavy blond hair rustles about her angel-like face much like Rita Hayworth’s did in Gilda, My favorite pin-up girl of all times.

Albert Kemp
Al hasn’t changed. He is fiftyish now, a rugged bear of a man with a large crop of graying blond curly hair and a deeply lined and tanned face—a big ol’ boo-boo bear himself … of the fast-living, hard-drinking Bavarian strain. Al is the very embodiment of the Nietzschian Superman, owing no allegiance to any flag or nation, or religion, only to his own concept of the warriors’ code: Make war at all costs against all peoples.

Kay Blake
Trav’s estranged wife. What a woman, Kay! She still doesn’t know how much she affects me; she is like a row of martinis sitting in front of me at the Trident Bar or the image of a golden keel. Everyone on that dock with eyes turns to look at her as she clacks her way up to the gate and out into the harbor parking lot, those long legs kicking that loose skirt around. She doesn’t really know what her beauty is. She has never known that about herself. She could start a revolution or become the Pentagon’s super weapon, able to stop whole armies.

THE PLACES

Angel Island, California
I delight in walking around Angel Island’s 775 acres of hilly, wooded terrain, which affords the grandest views of San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Golden Gate. Angel Island should have been a contiguous part of the real estate boom of the San Francisco Bay Area. But the army got to Angel first in the mid-nineteenth century and built some fort facilities, a hospital, an immigration station, and a few gun emplacements but did little else to spoil the natural landscape. The military finally turned it over, in its entirety, to the State of California in 1963. The state, with great wisdom, made the island into a state park.

San Francisco Bay
It is dusk, and the Bay Area’s many multitudes of lights are just starting to come on. A lovelier sight there is not, perhaps, in all of the world. Do we locals know it? How can anything so beautiful remain ours alone? Is this bay of ours just a glittering illusion like Oz or Shangri-la? The lights of Ondine’s and the rest of Sausalito’s waterfront are coming on now, and the amber flickerings of these little stars glow like amethysts in the twilight. San Francisco’s lights are farther away, and they are just starting to flicker in the greater light afforded by the sunset that is denied to Sausalito by the Marin Headlands. This setting would be enough to inspire a pig to write poetry.

St. Augustine, Florida
No Florida enclave is stranger than the little jewel called St. Augustine. St Augustine is not the usual eccentric Florida community, it is THE eccentric Florida community! This town is a life sized diorama at every turn and street corner of the historic struggle for New World domination between the classic European powers in the age of discovery. Even St. A’s modern day architectural face is another reason to mark it as one of a kind. This is because eccentric Henry Flagler, a northern robber baron, came here in the late nineteenth century and created a Xanadu of mock Moorish architecture that sets this town apart from all others in Florida let alone from the rest of the American landscape.

THE DRINKING ESTABLISHMENTS

Scarlett O’Hara’s
The 80 cent doubles every day at Scarlett O’Hara’s Happy Hour have made many a passing migrant from the north stay on in St. Augustine past happy hour. Nothing like getting drunk cheaply every night amongst your fellow illusionists to make life tolerable and the dream stay alcohol real in your weak little mind between happy hour sessions.

The Trident
the Trident Bar, with a commanding view of the west side of Angel Island, the central Bay and San Francisco. It was those damned 80 cent doubles at Scarlett’s that haunted me. Do you realize I can knock down six of those for one watered-down Vodka at the Trident Bar in Sausalito.

Sam’s
Downtown Tiburon has a string of waterfront watering holes, all lined up on its Main Street. Sam’s Place, in particular, has a customers’ dock. It’s not big and has a lousy and narrow little approach, so getting in by boat can be tricky. I’ve been coming to Sam’s all my life. I sat at the bar with my father when I was too young to have a drink, taken my high school prom queen dining here, sailed to Sam’s dock for a schnokker after many a tough race on the Bay and rendezvoused with a lover or two to dine in the romantic ambience of Sam’s wonderful soft evening view of the San Francisco skyline.

THE BOATS

Lolita
Lolita is a delight to sail and is also a quick little motor sailer under power, sporting a 120-horsepower diesel engine. I had long known of her designer Bill Calkins’ superb motor-sailers, and being that I was determined to live on my boat as well as sail it as often as possible, I knew Lolita was my best choice. She is one of the prettiest of Calkins’ designs and was built in 1961 when the movie Lolita with Sue Lyons and James Mason was shocking audiences. The former owner had her built at the Dennison Boatyard in San Diego. He was a cameraman for that very movie, and I guess Sue made a lasting impression on him as she did on most men at that time.

Carol’s Cal 3-30
A 30 foot fiberglass production sailboat, Carol’s Cal 3-30 is as quick under sail as she is good behind the helm, making her a formidable racer. Carol detests all the cutesy names people give their boats, so she maintains the 3-30 in no-name limbo.

Sophie
At around sixty feet long, she was a beautiful example of pre-World War II sailing yacht design with long, graceful overhangs and a delightfully curvy sheer, both of these features having long vanished from contemporary boat design. Of even more significance to me, I recognized her as a boat that has been docked, for as long as I could remember in Sausalito Yacht Harbor along the city-front row of berths paralleling Sausalito’s main street, Bridgeway Avenue.

Entrechat
A popular 30 foot fiberglass production sailboat called The J-30. Entrechat….what a name, maybe an attempt to describe the ballet of a sail boat’s motion in the Entropy of the natural elements or something like that. Leave it to the Doc to come up with a moniker like that. I don’t know anything about his youngsters or his pets, but I hope they weren’t named by him alone.

Street Racer- AKA Street Fighter
A 210 foot, 60 knot fast Trimaran yacht! The holy trio. Speed, triple engine redundancy, stability. Exotic, too! Street Racer will have more punch than a Rail Job dragster. “Ah, my sweet Street Racer, with that kind of power, nothing could touch you.” After all, if my Trimaran becomes such a breakthrough, maybe the U.S. Government will flash a juicy government contract in my face, one fine day.