Merrymaid, Valkyrien, Lady Aida, Diossa del Mar and Ranger.

I have had a long time love affair with schooners since 1974. I was sailing back from the Isthmus when this schooner on a beam reach flying a gollywobbler shot by my meager 22 foot one masted, trailerable sloop. It was of such beauty and back lit that I took a picture of it. A picture? Is that some kind of big deal? Yes it is if you are a parsimonious SOB like me. Hell I went to Europe for the first time in 1975 and didn't even take a whole roll of pictures. But back to my story. After doing some detective work, I found out that she was Diosa del Mar. One of three schooners moored in Wilmington and owned by Eddie Weinberg and used in the charter business. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to go on board Diosa. 

I did however sail on her sister Lady Aida. It was 1979 and I had just bought my little schooner Merrymaid. I was selling apartment buildings in Long Beach and an escrow owner chartered her one weekend for her best customers. Of course, I fit that description so   I and my wife went schoonering, if there is such a word. These charter boats are notoriously underhand and the skipper causally asked if any of his passengers knew how to sail. I boldly said not only do I know how to sail I even own a schooner. Of course I only had possession of my boat for about a month and didn't know my butt from a hole in the ground. I do however have a talent for keeping my piehole shut and watch the other folks carefully. By the time the weekend was over, I was an old salt schooner sailor. 

When we used to race in the Ancient Mariner's Race here in Long Beach we had the same PHRF rating as Ranger. The AMR was an Austrailian pursuit race which meant it had a staggered start and boats with the same rating would start together. Theoretically if the handicaps were valid, all of the boats would cross the finish line together, LOL. We would swap positions during the race but eventually that big SOB would stay ahead of us near the finish and we always came in second to her in our class.Eddie Weinberg owned Ranger and we eventually became good friends.

I suppose that everyone has heard all of my Marymaid tales by now.

 

The 3 Ts.

In the summer of 1963, a few months before he was shot, JFK sat on the deck of USS Kitty Hawk which was then the largest aircraft carrier in the fleet. He was attending what we used to call a dog and pony show. A little display  of the Navy’s surface to air missile might. The stars of this show were the three Ts. A Talos a super range ramjet power monster designed to bring down half of most air forces in one shot. The big guy on the left in this picture. A Terrier, a two stage “intermediate range” missile, IE a missile with a booster and a Tartar. Tarter was essentially a single stage SAM with a DTRM, a Duel Thrust Rocket Motor. It had a ultra fast burning solid fuel rocket grain that served as the booster and then there was a sustainer portion of solid fuel that would provide the thrust to finish the job. It also had semiactive radar homing. Tarter was the close in, twenty miles or less, defense for the fleet. The terrier is the bird in the middle of this picture and the tarter is the right hand bird.

The purpose of this show was to fire all three birds at the same target with them all hitting the target at the same time. Of course things that complicated take on a life of their own.

Kennedy was sitting on deck with his binoculars watching the shot and the Talos and Terriers both blew the drone to bits. A few seconds later the Tarter gets to the intercept zone and then noses over into a spiraling steep dive. JFK remarks to some admiral that the Tarter is a piece of crap and off they retire to the wardroom for luncheon. A half an hour later a four striper comes into the wardroom and has a movie projector set up and starts showing a film taken from a gun camera that was filming the shot. On the film they could see that the Tarter was chasing the biggest piece of wreckage of the drone and ending up blowing the crap out of what was left.

I proudly was a Terrier Missile Technician on the Constellation, Kitty Hawks sister ship and then a Tarter MT on Waddell, my tin can.

BIANCO

In the late 1970s we had a 41 foot ketch which we bought brand new. Never again will I buy a new boat. The dealers advertise that the boats are “completely” outfitted and in “sail away” condition. There are no VHF radios, radars, Loran receivers or GPS. There is a crappy undersized anchor but no chain. An anchor without chain is as useful as an accordion in a lifeboat. There are no life jackets, flares or smoke signals. In short it will cost almost as much to complete the new boat as was the initial purchase. When people commented on the latest addition we were so tired of quoting dollar amounts we devised the unit of measurement of Unit. A Unit was $500. We’d casually say that was two or three and a half units. It seemed to take away some of the pain. As an example a stove with oven, in the likely event you wanted one of those, was about two units.

FYI, there is an upside to buying a new boat. The launching and naming of your newest toy. After much thought we named her Bianco. We wanted a name in some foreign language. Preferably a Romance language such as Spanish, French, Portuguese or Italian. Bianco is white in Italian and the boat was in fact white. There are  three types of vermouth. Italian sweet red, French white dry and a obscure third Italian sweet which was, at that time, our favorite aperitif, over ice. When some person who we didn't care for, we were a bit more elitist back then, we would simply say that it means white in Italian and let it drop.

We were moored in Long Beach Harbor near the Queen Mary. This was not only a pain in the butt being you needed to hail a intermittently water taxi there was no shore power and the drunken water skiers used your boat for beer bottle throwing practice. It was downright  dangerous. When the occasional rain water poured down the LA “river” it was Tsunami time.  We finally secured a slip at The Chowder Barge when it was still moored by the Procter and Gamble plant at West Seventh Street in Long Beach.

When we pulled into the slip for the first time it appeared to the helmsman, me, that the slip was maybe not wide enough. I was cold and tired and hungry and needed to discharge a few gallons of used beer so I just gunned the diesel and went in. Our bow sprit almost went through the large window by the booths and everyone in the booths made arrangements for abandoning ship. Long story short, we actually fit in the slip and we didn't add additional ventilation to the restaurant and I got a chance to relieve and feed myself and warm up. We moored at The Chowder Barge for about three years before moving to Wilmington. 
We ended up mooring the old girl  on Treasure Island abutting Naples Island in Long Beach at a friends house who had a nice boat dock. He also had a pool in his living room and a few Ferraris in his garage.  
By 1981 my life was becoming very much like a Kafka story so we sold her to friends who coveted her very much. 
She was a beauty.

After about six months without a sailboat I was miserable, so we bought Merrymaid the Downeast schooner which I owned  and lived aboard for thirty five years.