I just found this site, and wish I had done so much earlier. I am a retired land
surveyor, previously living in the
PNW and
Alaska. Life threw us a curve ball and we ended up in SE
Ohio. My sailing has been on small
boats except for
crewing on a couple of larger (30' +)
boats.
After we moved here I saw a 12 sailboat in a neighbor's yard and asked him about it. He had always wanted to learn to sail and found it with a
for sale sign, bought it and then never went any further. I traded a canoe for it, have done a bunch of
work on it, but have not put it in the
water in the last 15 years.The main problem is that there are no
sails. It came with one jury rigged from a
Hobie Cat which was in poor condition. So at present the Dragonfly sits on her
trailer and gets moved every week so I can cut the
grass.
I started sailing in a friend's El Toro when I was 9 or 10. In 1962 I enlisted in the
Navy, got out November 1965. Moved to
Alaska a year later and called it home, despite several interludes in
Oregon. In Ketchikan I ordered a Folbot kit, with sail rig. It was replaced later with a Glen-L 17, which was eventually replaced by a Santana-21. Later, my wife and I bought a
Catalina 27 which we sailed back up to Ketchikan from
Seattle. However, we
sold it later to provide funds for adopting our youngest boy and I haven't done much sailing since. We moved here in 2006 and are probably going to spend the rest of our lives here. One of my great interests is still sailing which brought me to Cruisers Forum, even if I will probably not be able to scratch that particular itch anymore.