Jon's own words:
"
My dad loved Friendship Sloops and Barnegat Bay catboats, in that order. One of his favorite musings was that one day we’d go to
Maine, acquire a Friendship, and spend the summer cruising Down East and sailing her back home to
New Jersey. To a boy of my
tender years, to whom
Maine was an impossibly distant and exotic place, such a vision seemed the dream of a lifetime. I’ve now outlived my father by several years, and I’ve come to appreciate that ambition of his to be a relatively modest one, yet one entirely in proportion to the wondrous nature of the man. How he could have survived the great war he so bravely fought in yet never managed a simple
cruise to a place he always dreamed of is about as cruel an irony as his brief
passage through life presents to me and about as good an argument as I’ve ever known in support of the oft-heard cruisers mantra, "Go now."
My dad would have loved The Basin. He’d have noted its striking likeness to a lake in the Adirondacks. Most of all, he’d have relished the fact that after dark, the only lights to be seen were above the tree line, thousands of light-years away. As I watched the sky darken and the
water grow still, I opened a special bottle of wine given to me by a friend at the outset of my
cruise. I drank a toast to my father, who’d nurtured the dream that had brought me to this special place, and felt for the first time that my life as a cruising sailor had officially commenced. Although I’d previously delivered other people’s
boats to these waters numerous times, I’d come to realize that sailing my own
boat there, and leaving a small token of him there in the waters he’d always hoped to explore, would be the most fitting way to honor both my parents."
Re: Jon Eisberg's passing
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