“No one knows when the first boat was built, or where, or by whom, or why. Boats began before history; boats are part of our cultural memories. Why else do people gather at the waters edge when tall ships appear?”
Dick Wagner, founding director, The Center For Wooden Boats, Seattle
It never surprised me that I ended up working on a boat. All of my life I’ve been drawn to boats and water. It’s something I’ve never been able to get away from. I always long to be on or in the water. Vacations are planned around this. Can we scuba dive? Is there surfing? On a trip with my whole family a few years back just a quick sailboat trip with my father was one of my fondest memories. Maybe the second fondest to fighting a coconut with my brother in law Ken.
And this memory with my father stands out for the simple fact that my love of all things aquatic comes from him. When I was born he owned a 24′ Sea Ray. Not long after it was replaced to the boat I grew up sailing on until I was well into my teenage years. A 22′ Catalina so perfectly named “Idiots Delight” (my mother made the deal that if he buys it she names it). Almost every weekend of my childhood was spent on that boat.
I wish I had something like that for my children to enjoy. Something that they may not realize at the time, but later on with age they will understand that something so small as a little sailboat was larger than life. It’s hard to do that working like we do. We don’t have every weekend or a whole summer at our disposal. Our time at home is rushed and often filled with so many things to do it seems impossible to fit a whole weekend of relaxing aimlessly on the water somewhere impossible.
But it’s not impossible. We can make time and we often think of other things as being important when really the most important thing you have to do is a bunch of nothing with the people we love. I’ll just learn from the lessons of my father and name my own boat.
Tugboat Dad's Blog 
It’s so true that as an adult I appreciate our time on the sailboat so much more than I did when we were kids. At the time I remember thinking, “Another weekend on the boat, ugh!” But now, I would give ANYTHING for a weekend with all of us sailing around False River!
And that was a pretty epic coconut battle!
Sometimes we can’t really appreciate things until we we look back on them.
And, that was a pretty crazy coconut battle.
My 18 year old told me somethin like “you always say there wasn’t time, or you ran out of time; you should quit that, you decided what you wanted to do with that time. Everybody gets the same amount, quit saying you ran out of it.”