Chapter 1 - Cayucos

Finding Destiner / By Ken Wilcox © Copyright 2023

Toward the middle of March, in the waning winter days of 1964, a truck, lowboy trailer, and a crane rumbled along a country road among the hills outside Cayucos, California. The noisy rigs were on their way to a cattle ranch to retrieve a sailboat. The newly-built, two-cabin schooner, forty feet long at the deck and as tall as a house, stood braced and ready for her twelve-mile haul to the sea. Her shipwright, Don Wilcox, had spent most of three years building the boat under an open tractor shed next to the barn. Hens cackled, dogs wagged, and a few cattle mooed their approval, as Don and his wife, Clarice, beamed at the agrarian miracle rising from the weeds and the cow pies.

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