Sailing brings people together the way Christmas does. I have met and sailed with some extremely interesting people. Some have sailed around the world, others have cruised to many distant places. A common trait in all is a lack of boasting about it. Two I will mention here are Jay Walthers and Bert Coalson.

I met Jay as I was pulling into a newly rented slip on the ICW near Cocoa, Florida. His was the next boat over and he appeared on my finger pier to help me tie up--and then commenced to teach me all I didn’t know about tying up a boat. Jay was 89 at the time, a retired sea captain, living alone on his boat. He was slight in build, bald on top with long stringy grey hair on the sides and back almost to his shoulders. What he had forgotten about sailing over the years was more than most people ever learn and he didn’t forget much. He ran away to sea from his home port in Estonia at age 11 as a cabin boy on a square-rigged freighter. By 18 he was captain. Back then, to be promoted to mate you had to be able to sew 200 square feet of sail per day, every day. Over the course of his life he owned a fleet of square-rigged clippers—all of them confiscated by the Nazi government in the 1930’s; a fleet of oil-fired freighters after the war, and a summer home next to Albert Einstein. He was skipper of the famous 71-ft Herreshoff designed Ticonderoga when she was owned by John Hertz (of Yellow Cab and Hertz rental cars) and sailed her to winning the St Petersburg to Havana SORC regatta in 1947, shaving 3.5 hours off the previous best time. When you sailed a Herreshoff-designed boat, even the Bristol 29, with Jay Walthers you really sailed. I learned more in a year of sailing with him than I had in the previous 20.

I met Bert Coalson at the Harborage Marina in St Pete by drooling on the dock beside his beautiful Rhodes one-off ketch Natoma, until he finally climbed down and said Hi. Bert is a retired US Air senior pilot and lives aboard with his wife Lissie. He has a smooth North Carolina accent and salt and pepper gray hair under an inevitable ball cap. At the time he also owned a lovely wood Mason 36 in the slip next to the Bristol. Bert had crewed with Ted Turner on Tenacious, maintained Natoma to absolutely perfect condition and did everything himself, even the stainless. I hear Natoma is back at the Harborage after a year of sailing around Europe. I believe her next voyage might be heading out to the Galapagos islands.