Chapter 2 - Juanita

Finding Destiner / By Ken Wilcox © Copyright 2023

It might not have taken a full three years to build Destiner had Don not agreed to construct a second sailboat for another man simultaneously. Fred Waters, a San Luis Obispo mortician, had heard about this fellow, Wilcox, from Alameda who was building a doggoned schooner up at the Hartzell Ranch. He dropped by the farm in his hearse one day and surveyed Don’s project. At that point, it barely resembled a boat, sail or otherwise. Nevertheless, Waters was so excited by what he saw that he offered to buy Destiner on the spot. The embryonic boat, of course, was not for sale.

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.