On days when life seems unnecessarily ridiculous, complicated and frustrating, it occurs to me that I really just want to sail away. The pressures and complications that form the landscape of my life are so frequently oppressive and omnipresent, that for the most part, I simply yield to them without protest and do what I am told without even realizing I am submitting to the collective will of a culture that really may not have my best interests in mind.

Yet simply sailing away, while it has occurred to me daily in the past 15 years or so, seems impossibly out of reach. I believe this is exactly so for most of us, even the most adventurous. A bit of summer cruising is all I usually get, and mostly, it’s all I have the courage to expect. However powerful the allure of the horizon, duty calls, after all. My reality, you could say. While my choice has been to be somewhat passive in respect to accepting the daily grind one shouldn’t make the mistake of believing everyone chooses to live a life of quiet desperation.

There are people who plan great things and accomplish them, and it’s their stories that are at the heart of all that is extraordinary. Here you learn another of my little secrets. By day, I am essentially a salesperson. I know you see me only as a writer, but that is simply a matter of your perspective. From my point of view, there is an office to serve. Understand, I have never believed that the intricacies and art of the deal make for best selling material.

I don’t own any “Seven Secrets of Sales Success” books that I would ever admit to having read. What a bore. That’s not the kind of “sail” I am interested in. I will admit that these days, the implausible stories of business failures and the tracking of “sales” and stocks” has become a terrifying chain of acquisition, divestment, disillusionment and implosion, and is anything but boring. All the more reason to simply want to sail away.

I believe we were born to expect something better than to live our lives by the rule of the dollar. More eternal than the pursuit of wealth are the great sagas of the past, and in these, all of us can fi nd something inspiring. Epic voyages are at the heart of our fantasies, from Ulysses to Shackleton, Columbus to Vancouver. Such great explorations and adventures are universally enthralling. In a day when it seems all on earth that can be done has been done, where do we turn for another such adventure involving wooden ships and sturdy people willing to take a risk to learn something?

Well I have first hand knowledge of such doings, and I’m going to share it with you. Actually, I only saw a movie about these things. It was made here in Seattle, complied painstakingly by John Sabella and his team. John writes a column in this very magazine, but that’s really not his day job. He has had a few careers in his life, but his abiding interest has been in documenting maritime subjects, including commercial fishing, on the North Pacific from Seattle to the Bearing Sea.

Although not a fisherman, John knows something of the hard, dangerous life occasioned by fishing in northern waters. And it is this interest and his study of first the boats and men, and finally the facts of survival in this bitter environment that has brought us to his attention, and he to ours. John’s real focus in fact is media production and compiling the records of our marine heritage in an easily accessible form before those records are entirely lost.

This interest has led him to produce a number of videos on classic boats which you can explore on his website, the address I’ll provide further down the page. I think you should know about the subject of John’s latest documentary, the yacht Westward and her families of owners. All of them have in their way broken with the traditions of land bound responsibility and the rules of the game that we drones follow dutifully. The Westward makes everyone who possesses her sail away.

It’s simple, really. To sail away one needs a ship capable of so doing. Westward, which is the inspiration for my musings and our escape, was designed by Ted Geary, one of the golden era’s greatest marine architects. She cut the mold for the Geary fantails that were to follow. Built for Campbell Church Sr. by the John A. Martinolich Shipbuilding Company in Dockton, Washington, she was launched in 1924. But she is no ordinary yacht.

She is built in the style of a north Pacific cannery boat, but with rather more graceful lines at the stern where she fl aunts Geary’s trademark fantail. As a yacht built to cosset people and not hold fi sh, she has some extra house that makes life aboard gracious and spacious. At 86 feet, she’s a large boat but not so large that a small crew can’t handle her. Church’s planned use for her was Alaska voyaging, and he supplemented his family boating experiences by putting her in service, catering to the most wealthy, successful and powerful people of the day.

Later, his son Campbell Jr. would make a thriving business out of the vessel with a supporting cast of boats and camps in the wilderness. But Church Sr. showed the way. Westward’s passengers experienced nothing less than the wilds of Alaska in the days when it was untouched by civilization. There they might on any day shoot a brown bear or moose, or row up to a glacier from which it was possible to dive in and take a swim. The first paying guest aboard Westward, and arguably the most important, was George Eastman.

That’s Kodak’s George Eastman from Rochester, NY. Mr. Eastman taught Church Senior to take 16mm films. This was a most fortunate thing, yielding to posterity a legacy of 300 reels of remarkably competent film footage. These reels innocently display the wealthy of the time engaging in sports of a kind that are now entirely out of fashion. For instance, Sabella’s documentary has a section devoted to whale hunting from the deck of Westward, and to accomplish this she was equipped with a cannon
to do the work in a thoroughly efficient manner.

My dream has no place for whale hunting, and it was as disturbing to view this event as a sport as it was to see photos of skinned bears shot for fun. But you have to admit this is really different than what you do for a living. And to run this show, to be at the helm of this boat and give the Roger Maris salute to income taxes and parking tickets really does have universal appeal, doesn’t it? It was appealing enough to Don Gumpertz and his wife Anna Louise to cause them to buy Westward in 1967 after the Church’s had owned her for forty years.

Having refitted and engaged her in a few years of shake down cruises, they took her cruising. They left port one day, turned right and sailed her all the way around the world. I met Don at a Seattle showing of the film and was impressed by this soft spoken, unassuming man that did exactly what I fantasize about every day. He just done did it. The Gumpertzs sailed their forty year old power boat everywhere you could take her, returning five years later.

You really do need to see this part for yourself, and this central piece of Westward history matches my personal take on the ultimate escape from the world’s stupid stuff about as well as I could possibly imagine. My hat is off to Don and his wife, Anna Louise, whom he has survived. Their adventure is the stuff of dreams and it surely must comfort him that they lived this improbable experience together. Extraordinary. As Westward served Don and Anna Louise, so in turn did she fi nd new ownership in Teresa and Hugh Reilly, who purchased her in 1993.

The expected refitting may have exceeded the usual run of work demanded by a seventy year old boat simply because of the use that was intended of her. That is a story for another telling, but here I can do no better than to quote Hugh himself. We are leaving Port Townsend on Sunday, headed for San Francisco, the beginnings of a voyage that will take us down to Mexico. We will spend March and April in Mexico and early May we are leaving Cabo San Lucas for the Marquesas in French Polynesia.

It will be a two-week crossing and we will spend the summer, our summer, in French Polynesia, the Marquesas, Tuamotu Islands and the Society Islands, Tahiti, Bora Bora, the Îles Sous-le-Vent, the Islands under the Wind, French Polynesia. I am hard pressed to explain my rationale for doing this, it probably requires a pretty deep therapy to dig into my psyche and find out why this is going on. If I am crazy, I
am having fun doing it.

Although Hugh may have a hard time putting his rationale into words, I do not have so much trouble with what I imagine would be my justifications for such “madness.” You see, I believe I can perfectly explain such behavior as the desire to sail an eighty-year old boat around the world. If you have the boat, and you have the guts and the resources, what would you do? Do you prefer to read self-help books or collect parking tickets? Perhaps you find joy in dealing with insurance companies, or pondering how to get out of your latest jury duty summons?

Maybe you like jury duty; how would I know? But for me, Westward’s capabilities are the basis of the dream. There’s lots to explore. Poke around until you fi nd the section on Westward. As a decent navigator, I’m sure you’ll find the way. Look under “Classic Yachts.” That’s always a good place to start! Speaking just for myself, I have to admit that I’ll be going to work tomorrow, because I have responsibilities. But one of us needs to break away and taste freedom. The Reilly’s are looking for a partner to keep Westward on the move. I don’t know what a share costs. You’ll need to check with Hugh and see what he’s thinking. I’m afraid even to ask.