Capt Don

As kids we spent every day of every summer down at the Mattituck YC. I remember for years there was this Winslow Homer print on the wall. It was called The Gulf Stream and it depicted this shipwrecked sailor in the middle of a fierce storm. His mast had snapped off, the waves were swamping his boat, there was a waterspout spinning toward him like a tornado, and there were a bunch of hungry sharks circling his boat. I remember we used to look at that print and think, "Man, this guy is toast." We had our own small battles with the sea and those nasty So'westers on Peconic Bay and soon enough we knew that bay like the back of our hands - every sandbar, inlet, and landmark from Brush's Creek to Shinnecock to Nassau Point back to the MYC. I was reminded by Tom's story that a thick fog was part of the fun. We could test our sense of dead reckoning while running blind. Of course, boats never run true and we had no compasses so we'd often end up on some shore wondering where the heck we were and had to reorient our direction by the topography. Anyway, by the time we were teenagers we figured we pretty much had that bay tamed. As we got older Capt Don transferred that knowledge and confidence to the next level - to ocean-going yachts along the Atlantic coast, the Gulf Stream to the Florida Keys, across the Bermuda Triangle all the way to the Virgin Islands. You know, out there where Homer's sailor was hanging on to dear life. Once I joined him for a harrowing tale that we laughed about for years afterward. One day in October 1983, Don called me in California and asked if I wanted to do a delivery from NY to St. Thomas, where he was going to charter captain for the winter. It was a spanking new Mason 53' and the deal was airfare plus $35/day, so I was off on the next flight to meet him in Annapolis. Don hired the rest of the crew with ads in the NYTimes, but sailors are like a box of chocolates - you never know what you're gonna get. One guy seemed pretty normal, another didn't get out much and thought he was Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, and the last guy was on meds and turned into Jack Nicholson in the Shining when he didn't take them. Unfortunately we only discovered this halfway through the trip. The day before we left Annapolis this Israeli girl came by the boat and asked if she could hitch a ride to St. Thomas. She said she could cook and that night we gave her a trial run. We got boiled chicken, white rice and a salad soup of lettuce and tomato - turns out she didn't like spices, not even salt or pepper, so Don said, "Yeah, you got a ride but you don't have to cook." Turns out we didn't have to worry. Soon as we left the protection of the inland waterway we hit 20-25 knot winds almost dead on the nose for nine straight days. It was like living in a CrackerJack box. We hit some rain storms. The Israeli girl got seasick and didn't come out of her cabin to eat for four days (Don had graciously given her the large aft cabin with head). At one point Don had to fix the diesel and got seasick, then I turned green for a day. We survived on Snickers bars. Then "Here's Johnny!" started to lose it and the Old Man and the Sea wanted to hove-to for a day, but Capt Don (I was calling him Capt Ron by now) thought about floating around in the Bermuda triangle with this crew and said, "Nah, we're almost there." Luckily, the next day the winds died, the sun came out, and the dolphins swam with us. A couple of days later Don and I were up at dawn watching St. Thomas emerge from the mists in front of us and we couldn't stop laughing. It was a wild trip, but Don was cool, calm, and collected the whole time. Sometimes in life you get into tough predicaments like that guy in the Gulf Stream (I include the print below). That print became a metaphor of life for us. Like other friends confirm here, if there was one person in my life I wanted by my side when the bad storms hit and the sharks circled, it was my good buddy Don.