Back Story - Chapter One or How Did Dave and Pam Come Up With This Hairbrained Idea?

Although many of you have heard parts of the story and some of you have heard all of it, and still others have heard eveything multiple times, I thought it should go down on the record how we came to be out bobbing around on a boat.

Dave has wanted to sail since he was a kid.  And when he found himself single in his mid-thirties he started investigating the idea of getting a sailboat to live on in Salt Lake.  He was "between wives" and what better time to pursue a lifelong dream.  At the time he was driving truck for Weyerhauser out of the Salt Lake yard, delivering building materials all over the inter-mountain west.  Coincidentally, I was working at that time for one of their customers, Anderson Lumber, in Provo as the yard bookkeeper.  He took a year of smiling and saying hello before he asked me out.  On that first date, June 22, 1984, he told me "I'm planning to move aboard a sailboat."  I said "That's nice.  I'm going to buy a horse within the next year."  A year later we had been married for about five months when he reminded me we were coming up on the one year mark for my horse purchase.  And so it went - horses, golf, ballroom dancing, camping, etc.  But we never got around to Dave's sailing.

That is until we became friends with Heidi and Laura.  They had a sailboat!  And when they heard that it was a dream of Dave's of course they invited us to go out with them.  They had a beautiful 26' San Juan.  They took us out and Dave took to it like a fish to water.  I thought it was lovely, but didn't really "fall" for it.  It turns out they had a little 11' Snark sailboat they told us we could use as long as we'd like.  It's  a very basic boat with a single sail and a styrofoam hull covered with a plastic skin.  The mast, boom and tiller are essentially made from metal conduit.  And the sail usually is advertising one product or another.  This one was selling batteries - Rayovac.

Dave was beside himself.  He took to refurbishing it immediately.  He painted what could be painted.  He rebuilt the rudder and the daggerboard.  He refinished the base for the mast.  It was stylin'.  We were headed up to camp at Diamond Lake one weekend and we loaded up the little boat.  The next day we launched her off the shore of Thielsen View campground.  It was a bit of a challenge to get her away from the heavy grass at the shore, but Dave was determined and had packed a paddle for auxillary power.  Soon he had the little sail up and was gliding all around the lake.  It looked fun!

Still it took a bit of coaxing to get me to give it a try.  Eventually I relented and Dave gave me a quick lesson on the basics and shoved me off from the grass.  A couple of times.  Finally I got oriented in a way where I could fill the sail with a bit of wind and I was off.  I can still remember the sensation of catching the wind in that little red sail and gliding across the surface of the lake.  It was sheer pleasure.  Those first experiments with turning the boat and feeling how she reacted differently to the wind coming from different directions was magic.  

I got it!  I was hooked.  I wanted more.  A LOT MORE.  We bummed sails with Heidi and Laura every chance we got.  They were very gracious and are to this day the ultimate sailing mentors.  Even taking us out on Christmas Eve that year.  We absorbed everything they would teach us as well studying everything we could get our hands on.  And of course we were in search of our first boat.  

That was 2004, twenty years after Dave informed me he wanted to live on a boat.  So I'm a little slow!  

But ultimately we gave ourselves  a twentieth anniversary gift of a used Catalina 25, My Prozac.  That will be at least another chapter of the back story.

The moral of this chapter is - Long-held dreams are worth pursuing. There's a reason why you held on to it.