Inside, four yards of worn, gray-blue carpet direct the occasional visitor, such as myself, to a modest bookcase fixed to the wall dead ahead. Above it hangs a large and beauteous painting of a sailboat. It’s the first thing I notice whenever I visit.

“Your grandmother painted that,” he tells me. I know, but he doesn’t want me to forget.

The painting depicts a forty-foot traditional schooner, four of her six sails hoisted and trimmed. Only the fisherman and main topsail have not been raised. The two masts, starboard shrouds, and ratlines are silhouetted against billowing white clouds rising into the Pacific blue. The schooner seems to be beating to windward on a lively sea. The sails are tight and she’s heeled over at a good pitch, maybe twenty-five degrees, with my intrepid dad at the helm. Her round, raked transom is fully out of the water. Across the stern is the name Destiner. Surrounding the painting is a thick, carved, wooden picture frame, made as if to capture a scene from a storybook.

Dad designed the boat himself. She was his second schooner and the pride of the Wilcox fleet. After three years building Destiner on the cattle ranch near Cayucos, he and Clarice did, in fact, sail to magical places and live the dream. They sailed on a shoestring budget, often to Mexico, and a few times beyond. They loved to share their stories and seemed to light up whenever I came knocking, which lately hadn’t been often enough. On this visit, he offered a couple of vignettes I hadn't heard before.

“We were in Tahiti in ‘65,” he said, “tied up at the dock next to our friends. We were just sitting on our boats talking when Art Linkletter—Art Linkletter—you know who Art Linkletter is?" he asked with a tentative grin. I nodded. "Art Linkletter and his wife came walking by and stopped to check out our boats. He looked at our boat and at our friends’ boat, then he sat down on ours! He said, ‘This one’s prettier.’” In 1965, Art Linkletter was one of the most popular celebrities on American television. Planting his dapper derrière on Destiner’s deck would have been quite a tribute.

Another story followed, also in Tahiti.

“When we motored into the dock at Papeetē and were tying up the boat, the French customs officer came down and asked if we had anything to declare. I said ‘Well, I have a rifle. Should I declare it?’” The man nodded and motioned for Don to bring it along.

“So I followed him up the ramp with the rifle crosswise in my hands. I guess the local people saw me walking behind the officer armed with the rifle. They thought I was taking him in!” He later brought out a box full of documents, one of them scribbled on by the customs officer. The notation read 1 fusil Springfield.

This, of course, led to another story.

“There was a couple anchored in the cove who would row their dinghy to shore. They’d bring their cat along, and when they got close to the beach, that darned cat would jump out of the boat and swim to shore. They’d be twenty feet from the beach and the cat would jump out and swim! Every time! It was the darnedest thing.”

We chuckled in front of my grandmother’s painting, while Clarice and Kris chatted in the kitchen. My dad pointed to the carved Tiki figures, wooden knives, and other Polynesian trinkets that lined the shelf below the painting, briefly recalling where each item was from. The simplest of mementos, a tidy collage gathered by a pair of young seafarers more interested in collecting memories than things.

Next to the trinkets was a half-finished, scale model of Destiner. She was just under two feet long, excluding the bowsprit. He’d barely completed the hull.

“I'm building the model just like the original,” he said.

“Looks like work!” I replied. The model was new since my last visit, very impressive work for an old guy.

“I hope I can finish it. My hands aren’t too good anymore,” he said, rubbing his fingers through his palms. “It’s the same wood as the original. Seven varieties.”

He’d saved scraps of wood from Destiner’s construction nearly a half century before, so that someday he could build the model. In 2008, “someday” had finally arrived. 

He had cast the model's keel from a slug of lead—the original was cast iron, but that wouldn’t be practical for the model. He screwed the lead to the deadwood that formed the backbone of the hull. It was made of Douglas-fir and a scrap of apitong, the same durable Malaysian hardwood he’d used in 1961.

He’d built the transom and a dozen miniature molds and strung them together with ribbands, just as he’d done with the original at Cayucos.

“See the planking?” He pointed to the model’s hull. “Port Orford cedar from Oregon, same as Destiner. Same number of planks too.”

“Seriously?”

“Twenty-three on each side. And white oak frames. I boiled and bent each one.”

The model was scaled at a half-inch to the foot. Destiner was forty feet long at the deck. The model was twenty inches. He’d kept the original plans for Destiner and painstakingly redrew them to scale so he could accurately loft and fabricate each piece of the model.

“How’d you attach the planking?”

“Glue,” he said. “I cheated.”

The original had been built with galvanized fasteners—not as good as bronze, but more affordable. It took thousands of them just to assemble the hull. The planking was installed one long board at a time, from the bottom up and from the top down. The last one to be fitted, the whiskey plank (aka shutter plank), would be meticulously hewn to fit the remaining space. When the whiskey planks were glued and screwed into place, Don shared a cold lager with Sammy the cat, since Clarice didn’t drink. Second mate Mai Tai, of course, was now long gone, though not forgotten, as a small framed photo on the shelf affirmed.

With some leftover lead, he molded a little three-cylinder engine and set the gray blob into place above the tiny floor timbers. He drilled through the stern to insert a long, bronze drive shaft, but was still puzzling over how to fabricate a miniature propeller. He’d look for one in a hobby shop, he said, though it had to be just like the original. He was also beginning to install some of the cabinetry and furnishings inside the two cabins, woodwork that was largely composed of fir, cedar, and mahogany. The teak deck, cabin tops, and Sitka spruce masts and spars would come later.

Until he started on the model, Don hadn’t actually applied his expert boat-building skills for over three decades, yet the entire assembly process was still just as clear in his mind as it was in Cayucos, when pigs oinked their suspicions at the hull of Destiner taking shape in the barnyard.

He’d learned his craft in the 1950s at the W.F. Stone and Son boatyard in Alameda after leaving the Navy. He built his first schooner, Destardi, a 30-footer, at the Alameda airport. She was built in a shed next to an airplane hangar. Working evenings and weekends, Don took four years to build her. The boat was completed and launched in 1959, not long before Don got up the nerve to ask a petite Alameda bank teller named Clarice if she might want to go for a sail.

I asked him about the names of his boats, none of which I’d ever seen. Destardi, he said, was for an Apache woman, an alluring character in a Louis L’Amour story about the fearless gunslinger Hondo. L’Amour called her Destarte. Don liked the way John Wayne spoke her name in the movie version, which contrary to the norm, preceded the novel. He changed the spelling a little to capture the Wayne-esque intonation. Many years later and perhaps by coincidence, the Wilcoxes chose to retire in Apache country, the realm of the Gila River and Chief Geronimo.

And Destiner?

“She was going to determine my destiny,” he said with a grin.

One could still sense a sprig of regret in his voice that he’d let the best one get away. It was certainly too bad about Destardi, and he would share the details of her story with me later, but of all the sailboats Don built way back when, Destiner was the one that mattered most. And she still mattered forty-four years after her christening, even out here in the Arizona desert, five hundred miles from the deep blue sea.

Commonly used in marine navigation, the term is straightforward. Think of a simple sailboat, anchored near a tropical island under the stars, with a light atop the mast. If you are strumming your guitar on another boat offshore, you might see that light from as far as five or ten miles away, depending on mast height, deck height, eyeball height, obstructions and what kind of rum you’re putting in your Mai Tai. You and everyone else who can see the masthead light is viewing from within that boat’s arc of visibility. And they, of course, are somewhere within yours. We hope. It’s especially important for big boats that are underway to see little boats, parked or otherwise. And vice versa.

Applied to the arc of one’s life, the notion can quickly become a heady metaphor for all the things we’ve seen and not seen, experienced or blissfully missed, horizons crossed and not crossed, or perhaps the paths taken and not taken over a course of time. Little did I know when I began to inquire about Destiner that her story, her arc, would become so important to my own.

I originally learned about Destiner in September 1971 when I first met Don and Clarice aside the orange groves of Fillmore, California. For me, the schooner was just another boat, some random thing they happened to build, sail and live on for a time. Whatever. I didn’t even go look at it. I didn’t sail. I didn’t boat. I was more interested in his 1960 Harley hog. Rumble, rumble.

Decades would pass before I realized the true significance of Destiner. While she began her own journey into the wide Pacific in the spring of 1964, she would not become a key protagonist for my own story until forty-four years later, in the fall of 2008. Thanksgiving Day, to be precise. My wife, Kris, and I had gone to visit Don and Clarice at their spartan brick home in Safford, Arizona, far from the rolling swell of any ocean.

Safford is a dusty, sunburnt town two hours east of Tucson, thirty miles from the nearest interstate, and hours from any rail or bus stop. Yet it’s the economic hub for much of southeastern Arizona, and home to around ten thousand affable Saffordians, and at least as many tumbleweeds. Lonely highways, dry river beds, white cotton fields, and a couple of state prisons are painted across the surrounding desert in a kind of post-Geronimo landscape mural. The scrub desert fills much of the broad basin of the Gila River and might qualify as nondescript, if it wasn’t so pleasingly embraced by ranges of dazzling mountains. The dramatic hulk of the Pinaleño Mountains, Mount Graham in particular, rises nearly eight thousand feet above Safford’s southwestern cuff. Don drove me up there once during a prior visit on a blistering summer day. He brought sandwiches for the only father-son picnic we’d ever shared. From a paved turnout way the hell up there, we marveled at the cool mountain air and infinite views.

I’d visited Don the Clarice in Safford many times since in the early 1990s, after discovering they were living there and running a small business at the local airport. He was servicing and restoring old airplanes and was on the verge of retirement. We’d been out of touch for seventeen years. I’d last seen them in California in 1974. I was barely twenty-one back then, living near Seattle and driving delivery trucks loaded with eggs. On a whim, I took a few days off work and drove a thousand miles to visit them in Grover City (later Grover Beach). They were building a fifty-foot sailboat for a friend, a two-masted, two-cabin ketch.

The construction was well along when I arrived. I remember the great size of the hull—monumental inside the massive shop building. She was built for the Taylors and would be the last of six boats my dad would build over a twenty-five year career crafting traditional wooden sailboats, not counting the dozens of other boats he worked on at W.F. Stone in Alameda. The Taylors named her Tiare o te Moana, Tahitian for “Flower of the Sea.” When I arrived, Clarice had just finished carving the name into the transom. Her work was meticulous and beautiful.

Don gave me the nickel tour of their twenty-two ton boat project. Sad to say, as a young adult with little direction in my own life, I wasn’t much interested in the obvious tedium and hard labor of boat building. Nevertheless, we climbed the ladder for a quick look around. At that point, I don’t think I’d even been on a sailboat before. He explained the process of building the keel, then the molds and ribbands and how they were replaced with oak frames and planking. He showed me the motor that was about to be installed, while Clarice emphasized the finer points of interior design and the parts she’d fashioned on her own.

Though I hardly knew the man, it was a good visit and I was glad I’d made the trip. For as strange as it seemed, he was, in fact, my dad. I remember Clarice feeding us juicy cheeseburgers before I abruptly excused myself and headed back up the interstate to Seattle, groovin’ not to the glory of sailing, but to the rockin’ rhythm of Benny and the Jets, Band on the Run, Midnight at the Oasis, and all the other fine hymns of the day.

I didn’t make it back to Grover City for another two years. My dad and I hadn’t bothered to exchange addresses or phone numbers so we had no contact in the interim. He was still just an odd stranger in my life. Although I would have liked to know him better, there was never much of a connection between us. By 1976, I’d grown up a little and purchased a few acres of forest land out in the sticks an hour north of Seattle. I pitched a tent under the moon and the trees and made it my temporary home while constructing my own wooden wonder, a cozy log cabin. Not bad for a 23-year-old kid, I thought.

I figured my dad had me pegged as an aimless slacker, and correctly so, but now I was doing something useful with my life and I was eager to tell him about it. I dashed down the interstate in my beat-up Chevy pickup with visions of cheeseburgers and a vague interest in getting better acquainted with “Dad.” Maybe we could even go for a sail. This time, I wanted to ask him about his life. Simple things, like How did you learn to build boats? What did you do in the Navy? How did you meet Clarice? I liked her. She was nice. I wondered how their boat was doing. Tiare was surely in the water by then, though I really had no idea.

When I arrived at their boat-building shop at the edge of downtown Grover City, things weren’t the same. I knocked. A stranger answered the door. Boat? What boat? The ketch and the Wilcoxes had moved away long ago. There was no forwarding address. They were just gone.

I remember the feeling, like a puff of cool breeze that rustles the leaves and chills your bones. I’d driven my truck a thousand miles to see them, for naught. Climbing back in, I turned the key, turned around and headed home, feeling like the butt end of a joke, perhaps one of my own making. Needless to say, the overnight drive north was a long and lonely one. Praise the gods of rock-and-roll for AM radio.

After that nickel tour in 1974, seventeen years would pass before I found Don and Clarice way down south in Safford, Arizona. An odd train of events had led to the reunion.

On New Year’s Day 1989, my eighty-one-year-old maternal grandmother crashed her VW Beetle into a tree in Santa Barbara, rupturing her aorta. The surgery to repair it was a fifty-fifty proposition. She didn’t make it. My mother, my siblings, and I had grown up with her grandmotherly cheerfulness in our lives, so hers was a great loss to all.

My mother, Beth, contacted an old friend, my long lost Aunt Marion, Don’s older sister, to share the dreadful news. They hadn’t talked in years. Mom was living in Phoenix then with my stepdad, Bud. They hadn’t been there long when the accident happened. As Mom and Marion were catching up on things, Marion mentioned that Mom’s Ex, wouldn’t you know it, was also living in Arizona. He worked at the airport in Safford. For Heaven’s sake!, Mom would have replied, or something to that effect. Beth and Don hadn’t talked for thirty-five years. It seemed mildly serendipitous that he was in Safford. At is happened, Mom and Bud had parked their home-built motorhome at an RV park in Safford and settled there for a time before moving on to Phoenix. Somehow she and Don never crossed paths. I can only imagine the awkwardness among the two remarried couples had their shopping carts collided at the local Walmart.

Much later, during one of my own visits with Mom, she passed that tidbit of information on to me as a kind of Oh, by the way... I called the Safford Airport and, sure enough, he was there. I drove over to Safford the next day and found Don and Clarice at home in a little subdivision close to the airport. It was a happy reunion, and they recapped the years for me. After twenty-five years of boat-building, Don had had enough of sailboats and was now fixing and flying airplanes. The proceeds from the Taylor’s ketch at Grover City had enabled the purchase of a 1942 Boeing Stearman biplane, which he began to restore as soon as Tiare had cut her first wake.

I learned that airplanes, in fact, were his first love. He’d come to know a great deal about them while serving as an aviation mechanic in the U.S. Navy in the 1940s and early 1950s. In the Navy, he loved to fly, though he often dreamed of sailing, the career path he would ultimately choose. But after two-plus decades of sailing and boat-building, his creaking knees and the lure of the skies drew him back to airplanes.

As the old Stearman attained a resurrection, Don also completed work on an open-cockpit, aerobatic biplane, a replica of a 1929 Great Lakes Trainer, built from scratch. He’d started the Great Lakes before he’d even laid the keel for the Taylors’ boat, so he was especially anxious to get her done. The Great Lakes would provide many years of joyous flying above the Arizona desert and beyond. When he finished with the Stearman, he flew it for just twelve hours, he said, testing and tuning the critical components, before selling it at a nice profit for eighteen thousand dollars. It was the sale of the Stearman, he said, that provided their ticket to the desert skies of Safford.

He and Clarice bought a little house near the airport and built a hangar, a corrugated-metal quonset hut, next to the tarmac. Don established an airplane business there that would carry him into retirement. He called it Don’s Flying Machines. To save some bucks, he proposed a deal to the city: lease him a site for his hangar for fifteen years at a dollar a year, and the city could keep the building when he was done with it. The city agreed and the hangar was built. The hardest part of the construction, he said, was installing the outdoor light fixture above the giant sliding doors while balanced atop a shaky ladder.

Over those next fifteen years, Don serviced airplanes for local enthusiasts and restored more old classics, among them two World War II Fairchild PT-19 Navy trainers, one of which had been partially eaten by rats, and a 1947 Fairchild 24 bush plane that now had the plush interior of a Cadillac. He’d restored Clarice’s old Cadillac too, which occurred sometime between a redo of a 1964 Chevy El Camino and the 1960 Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide police bike. In his spare time, he assembled dozens of model airplanes, flew a few of them radio-controlled, and tinkered with his train set. A quarter-century of boat building had been hard on his knees, he said, so he followed it up with a quarter-century of planes, trains, and automobiles.

Having grown up a little by the 1990s, I had a better appreciation for his love of boats and airplanes. At that first Safford reunion, I enjoyed hearing their stories and shared a few of my own. I’d recently returned from several months of travel in Chile and they seemed genuinely interested in my adventures. We were still strangers, more or less, but he and Clarice were now well within my arc of visibility. From that point on, we stayed in touch.

I stopped in to see them on occasion, in Safford, then Bowie, forty-some miles to the south, after he retired. They’d scored a place next to an unused airstrip that was handy as hell once they cleared out the tumbleweeds. When Don decided he was getting too old to fly, they sold their last two airplanes and the house, and moved back to Safford. Scaling down and simplifying their lives was an enormous change for such an ambitious couple, but they adjusted to it well.

When Kris and I came to visit on Thanksgiving Day, 2008, something else also changed. We began to hear a lot of boat stories. Schooner stories. Stories of Mexico and the Pacific islands. With a sneaky, unexpected grace, the schooner Destiner eased herself into the arc.

“We heard about the earthquake on the radio,” Don told me. “I don’t think anyone was too worried about a tsunami.”

The magnitude 9.2 earthquake was centered just east of Anchorage, more than two thousand miles from Morro Bay. Given the great distance, people weren’t especially concerned about anything serious hitting the California coast. A local fireman happened to catch a late night news bulletin on television and learned that a tsunami had slammed the Oregon coast and would likely reach Morro Bay within two hours. He sounded the alarm with the sheriff and local fire departments, then contacted the Coast Guard station to see what they knew. But even the local Coast Guard detachment hadn’t heard anything. They called their partners at the Monterrey station who confirmed the news.

A small army of volunteers scattered along the waterfront and up and down the beaches to warn everyone to get to higher ground. Don and Clarice were sleeping onboard when the sirens started going off around midnight. They didn’t know what to expect, and felt helpless to do much of anything to keep Destiner safe. They quickly secured what they could, and like everyone else, rushed up the hill.

By 1:00 am, Crescent City was getting hammered. As many as five waves had flooded into the low-lying community, devastating twenty-nine city blocks. In Cayucos, almost seven hours after the quake, the sea subsided in the eerie darkness, then rushed back in, as a series of low waves washed over the downtown waterfront. When it was over, fish were left flopping on the pavement. Witnesses said you could have scooped up dinner in the parking lot.

Minutes later, the tsunami reached Morro Bay. The water surged into the harbor, violently shook the docks, pitched boats into piers, piling, bulkheads, and each other. Anything that wasn’t tied down was carried away.

“Things got pretty wild,” Don said.

The waves took out the fuel dock, destroyed a houseboat that had served as the local yacht club office and meeting place, damaged a number of boats in the marina, flooded businesses along the waterfront, and mucked up the bay’s oyster beds. Nevertheless, the impact did not wreak nearly the destruction that Crescent City had gone through less than an hour before. It wasn’t until daybreak that people began to learn how bad it was farther up the coast. Twelve were killed in Crescent City, and damages were well into the millions. By comparison, it would be an easy recovery for Morro Bay and Cayucos.

As things settled, Don and Clarice returned to the dock to inspect the damage. Miraculously, Destiner had endured the spooky episode without a scratch.

In mid-April, the sails finally arrived from New Zealand, and Destiner was ready for her inaugural cruise to the outer bay. With the county assessor’s deadline looming, the Wilcoxes exited the harbor early on the morning of April 25^th under a cover of darkness, slipping out of reach of the tax collector for good.

April can be blustery along the Central Coast, but the weather cooperated that day, and they motored past Morro Rock and around the jetty with ease, avoiding the breakers that can challenge less-attentive boaters.

“Been there, done that,” Clarice would say, recalling a prior transit into the storm-struck bay aboard Destardi, Don’s first schooner. They had also once experienced a knockdown at night near San Francisco while aboard Destardi, hence they’d learned plenty of respect for temperamental seas.

Below deck, a newly enlisted feline, Mai Tai, safely curled himself into a furball in the safety of a padded wicker basket, perhaps to indulge in his own dreams of adventure. He was a lovable shipmate who never complained.

At last, the crew of Destiner was at the eastern edge of the world’s largest ocean, where the possibilities are infinite. It was time to kill the engine and run up the sails. In the light breeze, Don raised the gaffs and all six working sails. I can imagine drums rolling and trumpets tooting somewhere along the shore. Under full sail for the first time, the Wilcox ship would have been a beauty to behold, as they headed northward on their first actual shakedown cruise.

But good looks won’t get you far if there’s too little or too much wind in the way. As the breeze stiffened, Don dropped the jib and stays’l and reefed the main. The weather quickly became an attention-grabber, though not exceedingly contentious. They decided to drop most of the sails and heave-to over lunch, just to see how the boat behaved. No problems there.

As the bluster diminished, they continued under power to San Simeon and began to realize they had a problem. The air-cooled diesel engine was making the cabin unbearably hot, with the inside temperature soon exceeding 100 degrees F. Clearly, there was a ventilation issue below deck that needed a fix, and soon. They shut down the motor and by 8:00 p.m. were abeam the lighthouse at Piedras Blancas. They let the evening pass quietly. At daybreak, they spun the boat around under power and returned to Morro Bay, sweltering much of the way. The cabin temperature topped out at 115 degrees F.

Don still hoped to elude the tax man in case he was prowling around, so they avoided the central waterfront and anchored in the boat basin at Morro Bay State Park a little to the south. Don crafted an adapter and fan to help blow some of the engine heat out of the cabin. It wasn’t perfect, but it reduced the inside temperature to below 90 degrees F.

After several more days of tweaks and weather-watching, they departed again, this time turning south on a course to their new home port in San Diego. They left the bay at noon on May 2^nd, rounding Point Conception at midnight, thankful for the fair weather and friendly seas. Yet again, the best of conditions rarely seem to last. By three in the morning, they were in a forty-knot gale, gusting to fifty--the schooner’s first real test. Thankfully, the gale was short-lived. The log entry reads: Very exciting 30 minutes. They were in Santa Barbara by noon. To Don’s great delight, the schooner he’d designed himself had performed even better than he’d hoped.

For the next month, Don, Clarice, and Second Mate Mai Tai hung out at the visitor docks in Santa Barbara and Ventura, planning adventures, making minor modifications, and waiting out the weather. They were in no particular hurry to go anywhere, at least not yet. At last, they could kick back and enjoy the thing they’d labored over for years. The crowning achievement was to finally endow the transom with the name, Destiner.

At the end of May, they spent a day getting to King Harbor, a little past Santa Monica, then continued on to Long Beach. It was time to officially register the sailboat with the Coast Guard. Destiner was classified as an “oil screw yacht,” meaning diesel-powered with a prop. A man came aboard, measured the interior and calculated the displacement at twelve tons. With the registration complete, Don carved the numbers into an overhead beam in the cabin. They resupplied and took on thirty-five gallons of diesel, he said, at seventeen cents per gallon.

Fawn and Hugh met them by car in Long Beach for a two-day cruise to Santa Catalina Island, just twenty miles offshore. Even Hugh summoned the courage to join Don at the helm. On the way to the island, they encountered a Navy ship behaving oddly. Two Navy jets buzzed them overhead. The log read: Conducting mysterious exercises . . . forced to change course several times. Otherwise, it was beautiful sailing, he wrote. Destiner performing very well. They spent a lovely night tied up at Avalon, then nosed south the next day to San Diego. Well inside the entrance to San Diego Bay, Don, Clarice, and the in-laws coasted peacefully into the couple’s new home port at Shelter Island.

In the weeks that followed, life aboard Destiner couldn’t have been any sweeter, as Don, my dad, and Clarice, my stepmom, plotted their first foray into the magical universe of the South Pacific.

Seven years later, I would meet them both for the first time.

Don was still bending frames when Waters came by a second time. He’d compiled a list of naval architects who could design him a boat, and handed the list to Don.

“So, tell me, Don. Who should I hire to design my boat?” he asked.

Don looked the list over. All the right names were there, including one of the best, William Garden of Seattle. It was a good conversation and Waters was shortly on his way. Some time passed before he  returned, but when he did, he carried with him an expensive set of plans for a forty-five-foot sloop. He unrolled the stack of plans on the hood of the hearse and invited Don to have a look.

“How’s business these days?” Don asked the mortician. “Not too good I hope.”

Waters had a healthy sense of humor, but he’d also known his share of tragedy. A year earlier, while he was doing double duty as mayor of San Luis Obispo, a plane crash in Toledo, Ohio, killed half the city’s Cal Poly football team. Even a mortician needs to go sailing once in a while.

Don leaned over the hearse to browse the plans for the sloop. The sailboat had been designed by Garden, a revered, later iconic, naval architect who had already developed fifty designs for workboats by the time he was twenty-four years old, later adding pleasure boats to his vast repertoire. In an interview later in life, Garden acknowledged there were so many of his boats on the water, they seemed to have spread like “dandelion fluff.”

Waters planned to name his own 45-foot wisp of fluff Juanita, after his wife. Reportedly, Juanita-the-wife wanted nothing to do with Juanita-the-boat. The mortician, however, was dead serious about his sailboat. But there was a catch. Waters wanted the sloop built in a shed behind his house in San Luis Obispo, twenty miles away. It would entail some commuting. Don gave it some thought. He knew he could fashion many of the parts at the ranch. And he was perfectly set up for bending frames, sawing lumber, shaping, drilling, caulking, and the rest, and it wouldn’t take much to shuttle his tools and a few supplies around. The extra income sure wouldn’t hurt. They stood looking over the plans and Don turned to the last sheet.

“Don, I’d like you to build my boat,” Waters pleaded, “and I’m prepared to pay whatever it costs.”

Don smiled at the man’s persistence. He’d have to put off finishing Destiner for a while, and any plans to sail away anytime soon. He’d already given up a very fine boat-building job in Alameda with W.F. Stone—another iconic name in the world of 1900s traditional, wooden boat-building. The experience had enabled him to build his first schooner, Destardi, as an apprentice, and now his more perfect second schooner, Destiner, so that he and Clarice could truly live the dream. He rolled up the plans and handed them back to Waters.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” he said. “But you’ll need to pay for the materials up front and you can pay me by the hour.”

Mr. Waters was elated. The two men shook on it.

Don immediately began work on the patterns for Juanita’s iron keel so that it could be cast in Oakland without delay. Then he ordered the first truckload of lumber and fasteners. Some of the highest quality lumber would come from a yard in White Plains, New York, and Don suggested that Waters fly him out there so he could inspect and handpick the wood for the sloop. Waters agreed. He wanted the best and was willing to pay for it.

When the keel was delivered to Waters’ lot, Don stopped work on Destiner and focused on Juanita just long enough to bring her to the same stage of construction as the schooner, which allowed the heavy work on the two boats to be completed in tandem. Then, for a number of months, the focus was entirely on Juanita. In under two years the Waters sloop was ready to launch.

In March 1963, a big, green truck hauled Juanita to the boat ramp at Morro Bay. The sloop was eased into the water with the crane, which remained there long enough to help install the single mast, boom, and rigging.

Don knew from the start that Waters was not an experienced sailor, so when all the bolting, screwing, threading, knotting, testing, and tweaking were finished, he agreed to accompany the mortician on a shakedown cruise to San Francisco Bay. Clarice and Juanita were also aboard. The cruise went perfectly, with the weather close to splendid, and Mr. Waters clearly delighted with his new sailboat. A certain spousal crew member reported that Mrs. Waters also enjoyed the trip.

A year later, Destiner was ready to take the plunge.

The same truck and crane that had carried Juanita to the sea was now at the Hartzel ranch, there to fetch Don and Clarice’s spanking new schooner.

“Where’s the middle?” the crane-man asked.

He wanted to get Destiner’s weight properly balanced on the hook, not just because it made the job easier and would reduce the odds of turning three years’ effort into a sack of pretzels, but because there was no insurance to cover any damage should something go awry. When Don first approached the crane operator about hauling his boat, the man had advised him that insurance for a job this small was prohibitively expensive. Don certainly wasn’t going to pay the hefty premium himself. The operator kicked the dirt a little as he considered the odds, then agreed to take his chances. There was pretty good incentive for both of them to get it right.

The men wrapped two slings under the center portion of the three-and-a-half-ton, cast-iron keel and secured them to an I-beam above the deck and supported by loops of cable and the hook. Don stuffed old tires behind the cables to prevent them from chaffing the finish. He gave the operator a lift-her-up signal as the man in the crane revved his engine and took up the slack. After a final thumbs-up, the crane gently began to lift. Fawn and Hugh stood aside, while Clarice captured the day’s events on film.

Destiner was almost as long as the barn and she creaked softly as the weight was transferred from the ground to the slings. Then the mass floated free like a plump eaglet fledging the nest. When the hull was frighteningly high, enough to just clear the Hartzell’s barn and shed, the crane swung around gingerly and paused while the driver jockeyed his truck and trailer into position beneath the dangling schooner. Fawn and Hugh were quite impressed by the bulk of the ark and the magic of the crane.

After a few more waves of the hand, Destiner’s full weight settled onto the trailer. Don had built a hefty cradle out of timbers to support the hull once the crane let go. Secured with chains, the cradle would keep the boat standing upright during the haul to the ocean. From the rear, the schooner looked deceivingly top-heavy, like a red and white cow sitting on a fence.

Don climbed aboard once again to further lash the masts, booms, and gaffs to the deck. He’d already attached the shrouds, stays, blocks, and other hardware to each mast so that they could be lifted into place by the crane once the schooner was in the water.

The boat-loading process went smoothly, but the effort had taken some time. All agreed it was best to hold off on launching the boat until the next day. The drivers chugged away in the noisy crane and returned the next morning. Recounting the story to me years later, Clarice couldn’t recall many of the finer details, but I like to imagine her bringing out butterhorns and black coffee that morning to celebrate the big day. Once the crew finished off their symbolic butterhorns, the men would have rechecked the load and fired up the truck. Don rode in the cab, while Clarice and her inlaws followed in the Cadillac. She would flash the headlights from behind if anything seemed askew.

On the way to Morro Bay, she bragged to Fawn and Hugh about how the Caddy had also been quite the workhorse. A year earlier, they’d driven to San Francisco to pick up two forty-foot long, eight-inch thick, spruce timbers shipped down from Vancouver, Washington. They would be shaped into the two masts. Loggers had specially selected the tallest, straightest, strongest-looking trees they could find, and both timbers were virtually free of knots. Don strapped one end of the bundled timbers to a boat trailer and attached the other end to the rear bumper of the Cadillac. They secured an oversized-load permit from the California Highway Patrol, but were nevertheless pulled over about seven times, she recalled. Somewhere en route, a friendly trooper offered to call ahead to let his fellow officers know that a sixty-five-foot-long Cadillac was headed their way and to “Let ‘em through.”

Now, the main issue was not about length, but height. A few days before the launch, Don measured the total height of Destiner from keel to cabin-top and added the bed height of the truck to calculate the clearance needed get the boat all the way to the dock at Morro Bay. He attached a long pole of corresponding height to the front bumper of the Cadillac, then drove the route from the farm to the launch site, checking for clearances below power lines, bridges, tree limbs, and other obstructions. His nickel survey determined there was just enough room all the way to the harbor.

The Cadillac shadowed the proud schooner as the caravan rolled along. At the intersection with Highway 1, there was little traffic, with the comfortable rays of morning sun burning through a light fog. The driver turned onto the highway and accelerated southward toward an overpass. He looked over at Don.

“You sure that bridge up there is tall enough to squeeze this little boat under?” he asked, without slowing down.

“Yup, I already measured it.”

The man floored the throttle and they shot under the bridge with a foot to spare.

The truck and the Cadillac met up with the crane as the boat parade passed through downtown Morro Bay. The new sailboat caught the eye of everyone she passed, and some began to follow her to the seashore. Kids rode their bicycles close to look up the curves of the mystery ship. Business owners and patrons along Main Street leaned from doorways and gas pumps to see what the commotion was about. Two plump sailboats in two years. This Wilcox fellow must be doing alright.

The truck made wide turns through the downtown district, passing by a local boat yard to reach the Embarcadero, which looks out across the narrow channel to Morro Rock. The Rock, a towering volcanic plug nearly six hundred feet high, is a spectacular nearshore landmark well known to virtually every West Coast sailor, though it can also be a haunting sight in the dark and the fog.

The caravan reached the broad, open lot near the fuel dock and swung around to where the crane could pluck the boat from the truck. With the slings in place, the sailboat was lifted and swung over the dock, then lowered not quite to the water. By now, a sizable crowd had gathered to witness the big event.

Just before letting her go, Clarice got into position with a bottle of champagne, taped and ready to fly. She’d practiced beforehand and meant to get it right on the first attempt. Don looped a rope around her waist so she wouldn’t fall off the dock. On a count of three, she let her rip. With one good whack Clarice christened the schooner Destiner as the inlaws and onlookers cheered. They cheered again as the crane deposited the sailboat into the calm water. The momentous day had arrived. It was Thursday, March 19th, 1964.

Don readied the masts and the crafty crane operator dropped them into place without a hitch. The two masts, squared at the base, fit perfectly in their tapered sockets. The crane-man let go an audible sigh of uninsured relief as he jumped from his mount and tipped his hat to the applause. He collected his three-hundred dollars in pay, shook hands, and rumbled off with the trucker.

It would be another two weeks before Destiner would be ready for her first sail. The rest of the rigging required further installing, attaching, cinching, and adjusting, and there were still details to finish on the inside. The schooner’s six Dacron sails, custom ordered from a sailmaker in New Zealand, had yet to arrive. They could essentially live on the boat now, so they cleared out the rental house and Don hauled his tools down to Fallbrook.

As the last pieces fell into place, they motored around the bay a few times, getting acquainted with the boat, and keeping a close eye on the Lister and the bilge. As expected, the boat leaked for the first week or so until the planking swelled and the joints in the hull tightened up. They provisioned the cupboards, cooked in the galley, tried out the head and shower, slept in the berths, and rowed the little dinghy about. Don downed a cold beer and Clarice chugged her iced tea, while they endured the excruciating chore of relaxing on the deck.

Things would grow more interesting in the warming spring days and weeks that followed. The county tax man had marked his calendar and made another call at the ranch. To his dismay, he discovered that the boat was gone. Of course, she wasn’t hard to track, so he hustled down to the harbor to find Destiner cozied up to the dock. He confronted Don and once again demanded to know her value. And once again, he was rebuffed.

“She doesn’t have any sails!” Don protested. “She’s not seaworthy!”

The man wasn’t taking the bait this time and calculated a value himself for tax purposes. If payment wasn’t made within so many days, the schooner would be impounded. It was his final warning, before the man drove away. One minor, perhaps sneaky, issue stood in the way, however. The boat had no title and was not registered, thus there were no identification numbers that could be associated with the vessel. Even the name and home port were missing from the stern, a sly move on Don’s part.

Then came the shocker. On March 27th, a week and a day after the christening, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America struck Prince William Sound, Alaska, sending a powerful tsunami rolling down the coast of Canada and the western U.S. The waves would kill four beach campers near Newport, Oregon, and twelve more people on the northern California coast. The grim news, however, had not yet reached Morro Bay. The wave was headed right for them, but nobody had a clue it was coming.

During those three years, Don toiled and tinkered, while Clarice brought home the bacon as a bank teller in Morro Bay, a short drive down the coast. Married on Pearl Harbor Day in December 1960, the newlyweds from Alameda had decided to let go of their familiar lives in the city, build a boat, and live the dream. It was a bold move, though not a crazy one. Don knew his craft well. This was his second schooner, substantially larger than the first (a thirty-footer), and notably more compliant with certain spousal expectations. And, he would admit, much better suited to blue-water sailing.

The couple had arrived in Morro Bay in early 1961 after cruising the back roads south of San Francisco aboard Clarice’s ‘49 Cadillac Club Coupe. The Caddy represented the bulk of her net worth after an amicable divorce two years earlier. Though not well off, they drove in style, and could have balanced fine teacups on the dashboard if not for the endlessly wriggling roads. Their new lives together were full of promise and they were just getting started. They were in their thirties, Don the younger by a couple of years.

An unwritten prenuptial accord had called for finding a little place to rent, a simple cottage, somewhere near the coast with enough space in the yard to build a dream boat. During prior sailing adventures, Morro Bay had made an impression, and they found the pretty town of a few thousand pleasingly free of the big-city distractions surrounding San Francisco Bay. They rolled into town in the Caddy, picked up a local newspaper, and spotted an ad for a rental house. They met the owner, Mr. Hartzell, out front and told him of their plan to build a boat.

Hartzell, a local rancher, sized up the likable couple.

“Hell, we can do better than this,” he blurted. “I’ve got an empty house up at the ranch outside Cayucos. Might be just the place.”

They followed Hartzell northward on the two-lane highway, then up a country road to the main house at the cattle ranch. The Hartzell Ranch spanned a vast, water-colored landscape of gentle hills, oak trees, and open fields, where beef cattle, horses, chickens, and dogs were dutifully husbanded by the hands, the Hartzells, and their able-bodied offspring. Clarice thought the main house looked very nice, surrounded by well-kept gardens. The empty rental stood close by, small and weathered, but adequate. Outside was a tractor shed and barnyard with all the room in the world to build a forty-eight-foot lean-to in which to build their forty-foot boat.

The Wilcoxes handed Hartzell forty dollars cash for a month’s rent and quickly moved in. They retrieved what they owned from Alameda, scrounged around Cayucos to supplement their meager furnishings, and made the place cozy.

While Clarice worked at the bank, Don finished his plans for the boat. He incorporated features from other traditional schooners, borrowing ideas from his boat-builder friends across central and southern California. He’d imagined himself sailing alone at times, as he’d often done before, so he located the cockpit aft rather than amidships in order to watch every bit of the schooner while cruising on the open sea. The comforts below deck would also have to please Clarice, and she wasn’t shy about offering her advice.

The plans were soon complete, and the lean-to went up in a hurry. Don hauled his tools and some construction materials down from storage in Alameda, then set to work turning his plans into full-size patterns, or lofting, that would guide the fabrication of every part of the hull. He hung them neatly on the wall of the tractor shed.

Since a boat like this is built from the bottom up, Don had already custom-ordered a 7,200-pound, cast-iron keel from Phoenix Iron Works in Oakland. When it arrived, four men spent an hour muscling the hulk off the truck. Using poles for levers, they inched the monstrous weight to the edge of the truck bed and carefully slid it down a pair of heavy timbers. Once positioned on the ground, the deadwood—apitong from Malaysia and Douglas-fir from the Pacific Northwest—was shaped and bolted to the keel, thereby exposing the first ephemeral hint to her being.

It was as if there was already a space in the universe waiting to be filled with a sailboat. Which is to say, if a sculptor removes from a stone the bits that don’t belong, then a boat builder adds all the pieces that are missing.

Next to be added were the floor timbers and the temporary molds and ribbands, which gave shape to her hull and a vague fertility to the notion of buoyancy. Then came dozens of white oak frames boiled in saltwater, eight at a time for three full hours. Each frame was bent into place by hand and clamped inside the ribbands. The bending of a frame had to be completed within two minutes, since the hard oak retained its shape as it cooled.

This kind of work is certainly more tedious than it might sound, for it took a year to bring her this far. But so began the transformation of tidy piles of lumber, heavy steel, and hardware into a two-cabined, clipper-bowed schooner.

For their part, the Hartzells were happy to host the seafaring Wilcoxes as tenants, and quite enjoyed the weeks, months, then years of slow-motion bedazzlement. The hands might take a break from branding cattle or fixing fences on occasion to check on the progress of the boat. Words and smiles would be exchanged, perhaps a cold beer, maybe a coke. The Hartzells themselves were certifiably friendly, as evidenced by a matriarch of the Hartzell clan being crowned CowBelle Mom of the Year by the local cattlewomens' association.

Three feet of rain fell that first full winter, impeding progress on the boat, but delighting the farmers outside Cayucos who credited the Wilcoxes, builders of the ark, for the sorely needed rainfall. As word spread that a couple was building a sailboat over at the Hartzell Ranch, visitors began showing up unannounced to see what the buzz was about.

“I felt guilty for all the traffic coming onto the farm,” Don said later. “We weren’t doing anything to promote it. Hartzell didn’t seem to mind too much.”

The county tax assessor also heard the rumor and decided to investigate this tangible and potentially taxable property. He spotted the schooner’s skeleton at the ranch and stopped in to inquire about her value. The boat was real property, he said, and taxes were due.

“She isn’t worth anything!,” Don exclaimed. “She isn’t finished!” He wasn’t pleased.

The assessor grumbled as he backed off, but warned that he’d be back again to check on the boat’s progress.

In Year Two came the planking, twenty-three courses on each side of the hull, each long plank of Port Orford cedar or Douglas fir perfectly fit to the curve of the sea. The final “whiskey” plank was in place by the end of the second summer. To the traditional boat builder, fastening that last plank to the frame is a major milestone worthy of a nip.

The seams were then caulked with cotton and hammered in tight. As Don framed in the bulkheads, the two cabins, and the deck support, his project had come to resemble, unmistakably, a sailboat.

As promised, the county assessor dropped in again and asked Don to give him an estimated value.

“Well, she’s still not finished, as you can see,” he said.

“Your boat’s got to be worth something, don’t you think?”

“She doesn’t even have a motor yet! No deck, no sails, no rigging, no rudder. She isn’t worth nothing!”

Frustrated, the tax man went on his way, promising once again he’d return. And he did so several times more, only to be rebuffed.

The diesel engine arrived from Canada—an air-cooled, three-cylinder Lister made in England. Don installed it from above through an opening in the framing. He connected the lines and hoses and ran the engine a little to be sure it was a keeper. It was. The propeller shaft was next, pushed through a four-foot long hole that he carefully drilled with an inch-and-a-quarter bit. To keep the drill straight, he fabricated an alignment jig with two sets of bearings. Even the bit took some engineering. He had to cut off the end and weld the rest to a four-foot extension. When he was done, the hole at the far end was only a half inch off its mark, well within tolerance. Then came much of the hardware, water and waste tanks, interior plumbing, wiring, and controls.

When Don laid down the teak decking, the schooner had truly entered the nautical realm. She was indeed worth something.

In the third year, the cabins were completed, the fixtures and furnishings screwed and bolted into place. The interior woodwork oiled and varnished to a fine, unpretentious elegance. The equally elegant taffrail was secured around the aft deck. He wanted the wheel to be special too, as perhaps the most intimate part of the boat. A six or eight-spoke wheel is common, but Don had used seven varieties of wood to build the boat. Why not fabricate a seven-spoke wheel using one of each variety? So he made three wheels, each with seven spokes, and installed the nicest one. The others could hang on a wall at his folks’ place in Fallbrook.

The hull was painted white above and red below, with a sea-blue stripe at the waterline. The rudder and propeller were installed at the stern, and endless remaining details were completed inside and out to ensure an auspicious launch. When the hull and its contents were nearly finished, the hefty masts, spars, and bowsprit were shaped by hand from square timbers. The endless ripsawing, chipping with his adze, planing, and sanding might have been enough to trigger hopeless dismay for most mortals. But he kept at it, one shaving, chip, and sawdust particle at a time, until each step was complete.

Finally, the bowsprit was attached, increasing the overall length of his creation to fifty-two feet. To finish things off, he built a small lapstrake dinghy, also painted white, that they could carry aboard the schooner and row to shore.

As the third winter waned in early 1964, Don and Clarice both felt an unspoken giddiness about the approaching launch day and their return to sailing, to living on the boat and guiding her to exotic places.

Don consulted with the Hartzells as thoughts turned to the problem of moving the beauteous hulk from the farm to the bay. He began to gradually dismantle the lean-to and, always thinking ahead, cut up the lumber for firewood to warm the house at the end of winter. With the lean-to out of the way, the crane would have clear access to its sea-bound booty.

Don’s parents, Fawn and Hugh, drove all the way up from Fallbrook to share in the excitement of the launch. They looked over the mastless ship standing proudly in the barnyard. It smelled beautifully rank of fresh paint and varnish. Fawn would have been much less subdued about her own giddiness than her landlubbing husband, and would have envied the adventures that were about to commence for Don and Clarice. Hugh, not so much. He never liked the water and had grumbled as far back as World War I, when he was assigned to chase after amphibious airplanes at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state.

When launch day for the new schooner arrived, the truck and crane approached the farm and Don could hear them coming. He twiddled the ends of his mustache and inspected his masterpiece one last time. He tossed a few final items through an open hatch, careful not to mar the new woodwork inside. With a nervous grin at his parents, he made a final descent of the tall, wooden ladder that he’d been up and down a thousand times.

Clarice wasn’t about to miss the launch either. She turned in her notice at the bank and left her teller job shortly beforehand. From below, she snapped another photograph of the new dream machine, though she’d taken plenty already. The schooner truly seemed to come alive that day, painted deep red to the waterline and gleaming white above. She sparkled in the morning sun and lacked only her upright masts, sails, rigging, and her own reflection in the sea to evince her fuller glory.

The eighteen-wheeler, a 1949 International Harvester, turned sharply through the gate and growled like a bear up the tree-lined driveway. The heavy crane took up the rear spitting sooty exhaust. The drivers parked their rigs and all shook hands in the settling dust cloud.

The crane operator took charge of the situation, assessing clearances, and plotting equipment positions for a delicate lift of the bulky sailboat. Kids and farm animals scattered as the crane man lined things up in the barnyard, extended the crane’s great arm well above the treetops, and unreeled a lead of pulleyed cables bearing a heavy steel hook. Over the fence, a side of beef weighed in with a moo.

“She looks real pretty,” the crane man said. “Does she have a name?”

“She sure does,” Don said. “Destiner.”

He’d hardly spoken her name.

NEW: To better appreciate those who support my work, paid subscribers at the annual rate ($50/year) will now receive a free signed copy of one of my latest guidebooks: Hiking Whatcom County, 7th Ed., or A National Jaunt: Footster’s Guide to Washington, D.C., including free shipping (U.S. and Canada). I’ll be in touch once you subscribe. Enjoy! —Ken

I began to write this unusual story more than a decade ago—an account of my search for the schooner Destiner, at the same time I was becoming acquainted with the man who designed and built her—my dad. After he passed in late 2012, I lacked the emotional energy needed to wrap up the final chapters. I’d only gotten to know him and his boats later in life, since I was still in diapers when my parents divorced. Many years sailed by before I eventually tracked him down.

So, yes, it’s a story of a boat and of getting to know the man, and admittedly even myself. The story will appear here. The original chapters as written were a bit long, so I need to break it up some to make it a little more newsletter-friendly. I’ll arrange things so that readers can dive in anywhere, with quick links to the start, as well as “Next” and “Previous” chapters.

By the way, if you stumble on my story and happen to know something about the boat’s early days, I’d love it if you got in touch. Destiner was launched at Morro Bay, California, in March 1964. She sailed the South Pacific for a time before returning to her home port at Shelter Island, San Diego.