December 2022
A tale of close calls in friendship, and yacht brokering
I enjoyed reading the story of Dave Sharp’s adventure in delivering Alexis from Christmas Cove to Newport. I first met Dave when he was searching for a boat just before he made up his mind to buy Alexis.
While I can guarantee that if he had bought the boat, I first saw him eying, he could have had a much faster trip back to R.I.; however, I could also guarantee he would have had a lot more long-term wooden boat maintenance on his hands. This story illustrates a boat related to the connection between Dave and me that nobody could have planned…
The first time I went for a sail with Dave Sharp was aboard his Alexis. But that was not my first time aboard a sailboat with him. The first time I was afloat on the same boat with Dave was on board the Laurent Giles-designed 35.5-foot ocean racer Tilly Twin. Tilly’s design was commissioned by W.E. (Fred) Cartwright in 1950 and was built on the Isle of Wight in the U.K.
Cartwright raced her in various RORC events, most notably the Channel Race of 1956, described in great detail by K. Adlard Coles in his book “Heavy Weather Sailing.” The boat was sold in 1958 to Horace Beck, a literature professor at Middlebury College, who was also a yacht racing enthusiast. Horace eventually tired of competing in a boat that was penalized severely by the CCA measurement rules and sold her to Ray Brogan (my dad) in 1961.
Our family cruised aboard Tilly for ten seasons before we sold her to John Watson in 1971. The next time I saw her, she was for sale at the Fall 1978 Wooden Boat Show in Newport. I happened to be at the show and was pleased to see John and Tilly there, so I invited myself aboard to say hi.
Standing in the cockpit, I was introduced to one David Sharp, a prospective buyer. I’m sure I took the opportunity to wax poetic about the adventures I had aboard Tilly Twin from the age of nine to 19 – but I can’t remember the details of that conversation because I was focused on the moment of being aboard Tilly again, after not seeing her for so many years.
It’s clear in Dave’s recent article about sailing Alexis back from Maine (“Downeaster Alexis,” Oct/Nov 2022) that it wasn’t long after our initial meeting aboard Tilly Twin that he opted for a smaller, less challenging (overwhelming, really) wooden boat maintenance task.
Tilly was a big boat, double planked mahogany, oak frames, iron floors and bronze fastenings – a nightmare of galvanic challenges for upkeep and a key reason for my dad deciding to sell her. She was: 32-foot LWL, 9-foot beam, 7-foot draft, 17,000 pounds displacement with 8000 pounds of lead ballast keel. She was designed to compete in RORC offshore races and built for high strength, if not longevity. According to Dave, it was just too much boat for his lifestyle and responsibilities back then.
Sometime in the Fall of 1979, I was looking for a job more aligned with my training in ocean engineering when I applied at Raytheon in Portsmouth, R.I. The team of interviewers included Dave Sharp. Neither Dave nor I can recall whether we recognized each other from our meeting aboard Tilly the year before. Still, soon after I got hired, Dave and I discovered that we had a mutual interest in sailing, and discussions naturally included stories about growing up around boats. At some point, a light bulb went on – both of us recalling our initial meeting aboard Tilly – and I, of course, put Dave on the spot for not choosing Tilly. But, in retrospect, I can’t really fault him for his choice.
So, about that first sail… Dave and I were working together on the sonobuoy program at Raytheon. There were many long days and weekends as we developed that design for high-volume production, along with numerous trips to the Navy’s testing area off St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We worked pretty hard, and we didn’t feel the least bit guilty when we chose a perfect day to play hooky from work after lunch to go for a sail. We bought a couple of six-packs of beer and a couple cigars and spent the rest of the day sailing Alexis in and around Newport. We have been messing about in boats together for the last 43 years, most of which have been without the beer – or cigars.
My dad got to meet Dave numerous times, and he was happy to know that I had a good friend in Dave as a fellow boater. He found it amusing that Dave had once considered buying Tilly Twin, and in spite of his fond memories of sailing Tilly, he agreed that Dave had made the right decision not to own her.
Dave retired a few years before I did, and I’ll never forget the time he called me at the office to tell me about the boat he had just found on his search for a cruising power boat. Dave: “This boat is going to be a great deal for someone, great price, super quality, well laid out for cruising, etc., etc.…; it’s 35 feet, but that’s just a bit too much boat for me. I’m looking for something more like 30 feet.”
He sent me the link, and I opened it to see, to my surprise, that the “great boat” Dave decided not to buy was the last boat my dad owned! It was the former Romance II (renamed Caroline by a later owner), a T Jason 35, Downeast style lobster boat that Ray took delivery of, with no interior amenities other than a steering wheel, when he was 76 years old. I helped him deliver it home from Maine, in that condition, through a tremendous blow with huge seas on the nose, all the way to the Cape Cod Canal in early June of 1998. My siblings and I helped him complete the boat in his backyard in So. Attleboro, Mass.
He used it for a couple of years until my mom’s (Lynn Brogan) and his health no longer permitted them to continue their 50-year romance with the sea. He was floored, of course, when he found out that Dave was considering buying Romance II. Ray lobbied hard, trying to convince Dave to buy the boat, and would have been ecstatic had his last boating project eventually found a home with our friend Dave. To say the least, we all found it a little bit more than interesting that our mutual connections due to work, and boating, also include this borderline bizarre happenstance of close calls in yacht brokering – 40 years apart.
Pat sails his 1984 Stellar 30, Lapwing, out of Portsmouth, R.I., which he and his wife, Mary, have owned since 1989.
