I've always been fascinated by boats and airplanes.  I built a sailing dinghy while in Junior High, took flying lessons while in high school.  Shortly after graduation from the University of Kansas in 1966, I was employed by Trans World Airlines as a pilot.  I was based in Los Angeles where I joined a yacht club in Redondo Beach and learned to sail.  In 1970 I purchased plans for a 36-foot sloop.  I had lots of free time in those far off days from my flying schedules and finished building the sloop within a year with the help of my young wife, Ingrid.  We lived on this boat in Redondo Beach, King Harbor for three years, sailing whenever possible up and down the southern California coast.  During this time I took a correspondence course in yacht design, one of the textbooks being Skene's Elements of Yacht Design.

 

I designed a 43-foot airex cored fiberglass cutter in 1976 and completed construction two years later.  We named the new boat "Beyond".  When the severe financial recession started in 1981 our airline offered leaves of absence to flying staff.  I requested a two-year absence and it was approved.  My wife, Ingrid, and I left for the South Pacific three weeks later.  We had a fabulous eighteen-month sojourn throughout the South Pacific including the Marquesas, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Tonga, and six months in New Zealand waiting for the South Pacific hurricane season to end.  Our return voyage to California was via the Southern Ocean, Tahiti, Hawaii, then back home to Redondo Beach.  

 

We had cruised some 18 months and 17,600 nautical miles.  A year later we sold Beyond and were back to airline flying.  "Little Beyond" as we now call her is still owned to this day by the same folks we sold her to, some 37 years later!  I was now flying Boeing 767s on international routes.  

 

But...about two years later I found myself at the marina in Tel Aviv, looking at cruising boats and talking with the cruisers.  The old wanderlust was still alive and within a few months, I was starting to sketch ideas for my ideal cruiser.  A much-used copy of Skenes's was dusted off and the sketches started to become organized.  I brought out all the notes I had made while sailing the South Pacific some years earlier and incorporated many of these ideas into the new design.

 

This new boat was going to be somewhat similar to William Garden's "Oceanus" which he had designed for himself.  Long, narrow, light displacement were the watchwords.  The new boat was designed to have a flush deck, center cockpit, sturdy pilothouse with an adjacent chartable, a watertight bulkhead, and spacious aft cabin.  Fiberglass construction, of course.

 

Construction began in 1987.  I was still flying a full schedule with TWA, flying from St. Louis to Paris or Frankfurt.  I hired a crew to help with the hull lamination.  Later, also with fabricating and casting the keel.  When the hull was completed we trucked the boat to Napa where we owned a home and dock on the Napa River.  There I completed the interior joinery (mostly in walnut) while completing a four-year contract flying 747s for KLM.  We named the new boat "Beyond', just like the 43-foot cutter we had sailed to New Zealand.

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When the KLM contract ended, Ingrid and I started doing shakedown cruises on San Francisco Bay, and later out to Drakes Bay.  We added a small diesel genset, watermaker, and several other upgrades.  With a new "Pactor" device we could use our ham radio to send and receive email.  We had an air compressor to refill scuba tanks and a heliarc welder that was useful later.

 

We started what eventually proved to be a circumnavigation around the world in October 1996, sailing under the Bay Bridge in a fog.  Four years later we returned, after logging 37,650 nautical miles of ocean sailing.  Transpacific via the Marquesas, Tuamotus, Society Islands, Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, Louisiades, to Australia.  Thru the Torres Straits to Darwin.  Then up through Indonesia to Bali, Borneo, Singapore.  Up the Malacca Straits to Phuket.  Thanksgiving was in Phi Phi Don, New Years' in Nai Harn Bay.

 

Thence across the Indian Ocean to the Maldive Islands.  Onwards to Oman.  Along the coast of Yemen, past Aden, to the straits of Bab el Mandab.  On northwards up the thousand-mile long Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Med.  Some of our very best times were while slowly cruising west along the turquoise coast of Turkey.  This was literally sailing through history.  We spent an extra year enjoying this coastline.

 

Our trip across the Med was most pleasant.  The Greek Islands, Malta, Syracuse, Sardinia, the Balaeric Islands, then along the Spanish coast to Gibraltar.

 

Sailing friends who had done the Atlantic crossing a year earlier had warned us to take plenty of diesel.  Our keel tank held over 120 gallons but to be safe we loaded another 80 gallons onboard in Cueta.  That proved to be unnecessary.  We had steady winds from Gibraltar all the way to the Canaries.  And leaving there all the way to Isla Sal in Cape Verde.   We spent a week there and left for the Caribbean the day after Thanksgiving.  The northeast tradewinds filled in leaving the harbor, and day after day the day's run increased.  We arrived in Tobago thirteen days out from Isla Sal, a 2550 nautical mile sleigh ride.  The best day's run was 256 nautical miles.

 

From Tobago, we provisioned in Trinidad, thence the ABC Islands (Aruba/Bonaire/Curacao) and on to the Panama Canal.  We anchored back in La Paz, Baja California on February 12, completing our circumnavigation.  None the worse for wear!