Our first salt water adventure with our boat.
Years before I ever thought of buying a big boat, I had chartered a 30 foot Catalina at Hilton Head, SC with some good friends. The thing that stuck with me was how great the winds are on the coast. They are more constant and steady than the winds on the lakes of East Tennessee. Nearly eight years after that great trip my family and I bought our Macgregor 26M Power Sailor in 2006. We keep her slipped year round on our local lake. Since we bought her we sailed the lakes and rivers of East Tennessee but I kept reading on two different websites: Macgregor Sailors and The Trailer Sailor about people with trailerable boats like mine who were towing them to Pensacola, Florida for an event called the Beer Cruise. The pictures, videos and trip logs that people were posting just looked like sailing paradise, especially when viewed during a particularly rainy and dreary winter. I spent way too much time at work reading and rereading trip logs and watching videos of people who had done the Beer Cruise before. I was a constant lurker on the official Beer Cruise website. BEER Cruise, Backwater Environment Escape Rendezvous I kept talking saying I should do that trip. Finally my coworkers sick of picking up my slack said “just sign up on the damn skippers list already and get back to work!” So I did.
As often happens in life events conspired to threaten our first saltwater sailing adventure in our own boat. The tow vehicle that I had bought used at a great price blew it’s engine only two weeks before the trip. I couldn’t complain as I only payed a few thousand for the big old suburban and it had given me 2 great years of service including the original 1800 mile trip to and from East Tennessee to Wisconsin to buy the boat. However at the time money was tight and I didn’t have the cash to rebuild or replace the engine. What I did have was a Laser 2 sailboat with racing spinnaker and trapeze that I had not used at all since we got the Macgregor. The Laser 2 is a thrilling fast sail boat meant for at most two people, so since I had the bigger boat that the whole family could go on, the smaller boat was neglected.
Laser sailboats have been built for over forty years and have a very active class world wide and therefore hold their value very well. I quickly placed an ad on the Laser forums with an I’ve got to sell this boat now price, which also happened to be the exact amount of money I needed for a new motor for the suburban. Within two days I had three serious offers. I sold the boat to the first one to send me a deposit. That gave me just enough time to get the new motor in the suburban and we were able to make the beer cruise.
On our boat for the 4 night, 5 day cruise were my wife our three kids and my Dad. Six people on a 26 foot boat for five days in the Florida heat!
The Beer Cruise was a special vacation for me. My mother had died in 2006 from a short nine month battle with brain cancer. After her first brain surgery but before a second surgery clinical trial at Duke she had been well enough to go sailing with me on the new boat. It was a wonderful special day, just me and mom. The last few months after that were brutal as the cancer stole her away. The next two years weren’t much better, as I had to settle her estate, clean and empty her house where I grew up and get it sold, which if you remember was almost impossible to sale a house during the 2007-2008 real estate crash. Anyway, even though mom and Dad had split up years before they remained close and she was heavy on our hearts and minds as we headed to Pensacola for the Beer Cruise because she loved sailing.
On the 2008 Beer Cruise, regulars who had been doing it since it started seven years earlier said that this was probably the best weather they had ever had for a cruise. My family and I kind of think that was Mom with one last blessing for us. The only rain we had was one welcome cooling shower that lasted just two or three minutes on the last day as we sailed back to the marina. Then as the rain lifted a double rainbow appeared. We just knew that was Mom smiling on us all. You can see it in the last picture of the video I made of our trip below.
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