I’ve sailed all my life. My parents owned a sailboat since before I was born. When I was a kid we would take cruises to Monterey or Moss Landing (really the only one-day destinations from Santa Cruz) for a weekend, and occasional day-sails. I’ve always dreamed of sailing off into the sunset, but I don’t think I have the guts to do it…
Some friends of ours, Todd & Ellen Mandeville, have managed to live that dream. A few years ago my wife and I were living on our boat (a Cal 27 named Iguana) in the the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor, while our mast was being prepared for installation. A Cal 34 with no mast appeared one day at the dock across the way, and on board were a friendly couple which we quickly got to know well. We formed the “Mastless Cal Club”. They had to quit the club fairly soon, however, as their mast became ready for installation. Ours never did manage to get installed…
Todd & Ellen moved to Portland, Oregon for a while, preparing their boat for cruising while they worked to earn some money to pay for it all. In August 1997 they finally cast loose the docklines and headed out the Columbia River and north to Canada, and then down the coast to Mexico. Eventually they crossed the Pacific to New Zealand, where they are now living, and are the proud parents of a baby, Jessica Ruth Mandeville. See their web site for more about their adventures.
We sold the Cal 27, still without a mast, and bought a 16-foot Neptune sailboat (unofficially named Te after the Taoist virtue of smallness). We kept it for a while in the water at the Santa Cruz harbor, until a failure to (you guessed it) the mast made us take it out and store it on a trailer in my parents’ back yard. In 2003, we finally got rid of the Neptune and are now boatless.
Migrated from bill.wards.net/blosxom on 2026-04-12