Introduction

These are photos from building Rhapsody.

This is my story of our sailing adventures.  I am Laura, a retired librarian up until now only an occasional sailor.  My husband, Alan, and I are both in our late 60s. This is when one is supposed to retire from a life of adventure and settle down with grandkids and cats and long walks.  But we have always done things different.  

For as long as I have know Alan, he has dreamed of having his own boat and sailing it to the South Pacific.  Through all the years of our married life there were boats.  There was a sabot which he built with his dad when he was 12, which as far as I could tell always sailed backwards and spent most of its time under a tree in the front yard.  There was Prelude, the Hobie Cat that we bought when we lived on Mt Baldy.  We sailed it in Malibu, Lake Havasu, Puddingstone, Mexico and Long Beach but eventually it was parked in the garage with a broken trailer and there never seemed time to get it fixed.  There were several summers when we chartered a boat and sailed to Catalina for a week.  There was a season when Alan crewed on the tall ship Dirigo and carved it’s dolphin figurehead.  There was Lionheart, a catboat which came and went in a year.  The ill-fated Cotton Jenny that sank the first time we took her out.   Little by little life went on, the kids grew up, grandkids were born, we got older and the dream of the South Pacific seemed like a childhood fantasy.  But always in the background of our life was the undercurrent,  “This is not my real life, I should be sailing the South Pacific”.

And then life changed.  Alan’s parents died and there was some unexpected money.  It was “put up or shut up” time.  He put a broker to work and eventually, there was Rhapsody, the boat of his dreams. After several months of negotiations squeezed into a very busy work schedule which included a trip to Japan, she was ours.  We had a sailboat.

Rhapsody is a Neriea class ketch, designed as a project boat for Rudder Magazine by L. Frances Herreshoff in 1947.  I actually found copies of all of the articles at the central library in LA.  She was actually built in built in 1980 in Lemon Grove, CA , about 10 mi from San Diego by Nancy and Joe Schum.  They read our blog and sent us the pictures "We, and another boat builder, shared a space in an open field that is now on the side of Hwy 125.  Joe lofted the hull from blueprints that a friend had bought years before.  We we laid her up ourselves."  (Thank heavens they decided to add fiberglass to the original plans.)  She was launched in 1980 and sailed for the first time in Feb. 1981. 

I will now skip over 3 years of drama and trauma, of cleaning out the house, and sorting out our finances, of taking classes. learning to sail and getting seasick, of getting to know each other all over again and learning to live and work together in very close quarters. It’s done and we are on our way, ready or not.