Retired from newspapers and television, currently sailing Thelonious II, a 1984 Ericson 381.
Thelonious was purchased in November, 2012, in Marina del Rey, CA, after a brief flirtation with a Grand Banks 36 in San Diego. On a sea trial there, on the flying bridge of this stately motor vessel plowing at 7 knots under the hum of twin Lehman 120 diesels, I imagined myself a tugboat captain in Rotterdam in 1943, perhaps being sent out to rescue a torpedoed tanker, and then coming home to Sophia Loren, as in the movie of Jan De Hartog's novel "The Key." I reflected on the great cruising range afforded by 400 gallons of diesel under the deck, and how that would get me, if not to Rotterdam, at least to Catalina Island a couple of hundred times. Observing all the room on board, I imagined how easily I could entertain a dozen people in Gucci loafers, and how good that might be for business. But then I recalled that I am not in business and never have been, that most everybody who fell in love with Sophia Loren (in the movie only) drowned in flaming bunker oil as Nazis watched through periscopes, and that deep down inside I hate motorboats and always have and that although older now am not really exactly dead, and have no interest in golf, which seems to go so seamlessly with the ownership of a Grand Banks 36.
Then the broker called to say that the owner was backing out of the sale after a full survey, check deposit, etc. What! I'll sue! Well, the broker explained, I was certainly within my rights, but in his experience it was somewhat difficult to force someone to sell you his boat. It just was, as a practical matter, you see. The broker was very sympathetic, as befits someone who had shown the boat 27 times and now would never receive a commission. I expressed as much outrage as I could muster, but was already smiling before I hung up. Whew! I was astonished to discover how much I did not want to become the owner of a Grand Banks 36. It was as if a large weight the size of all the obsolete navigation equipment in my garage had been lifted from my shoulders. I didn't know why this was such a strange feeling. It was like the relief you feel, as a single man, which I hardly remember, in almost but not quite asking out some attractive person you are chatting with of a summer evening in an outdoor cafe just before she says, "Do you like Tangerine Dream?" (shows you how long I am out of circulation). Or maybe it is all because I have a hunch that a Grand Banks rolls like a pig in a quartering sea.
The Ericson 32-3 was moored at a floating dock and the tide was very low, so you looked down at it. I shielded my eyes from the afternoon sun with my checkbook. From the quarter view astern, the Bruce King lines were remarkably lovely. The reverse transom almost perfect, the cockpit rational, the sheer lovely and natural, the cabin house proportional. And the mast tapered beautifully. Of all the masts on that dock, it was the only one that didn't look like a vent pipe on an oil rig. Even flagpoles are tapered, for Pete's sake!
So now I am not the owner of a luxury tugboat but of a 27-year-old Ericson. Naturally there is quite a list of things to do to it, but each one is quite inexpensive and won't take very long, unless each one turns out to be very expensive and to take ten times longer to complete than any intelligent person would have ever thought even remotely possible.
The boat is named Thelonious after Thelonious Monk, the jazz player and composer whose reinvented chords, rhythmic innovations and periodically unusual personal behavior reminds me of the ocean in all its moods.
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