Aging with a Boat

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On the author’s 21’ cutter, all lines now lead to the cockpit.

The year my wife and I both turned 74, we had our first big sailing scare. This was four years ago, near the end of a pleasant and otherwise uneventful afternoon daysail. I had furled the jib and started the motor, and Patty edged out to the foredeck as usual to douse the staysail. Abruptly she crouched to the deck and clutched her chest with an ominous yelp. “Sharp pain in my chest!” she cried.

“Get back to the cockpit!” I shouted.

“I can’t move!” she whimpered, and the emergency became real. She was in a precarious place, and our 21′ cutter has no lifelines.

I dropped the mainsail in an unceremonious heap—it’s a gaffer, and dousing it normally involves a time-consuming fuss of flaking and rolling—and called 911 for an ambulance to meet us at the dock. I aimed the boat at the marina, locked the tiller, and scrambled to the foredeck to help her back to the cockpit. In five minutes, we were at the dock, where waiting EMTs hustled her to an ambulance.

It turned out not to be a heart attack. The hospital never found the cause; she recovered fully, and there’s been no recurrence. But the event served as a dramatic reminder that we’re not immortal.

Boarding ladder that could be reached from the water.

At least half our sailing friends within a few years, plus or minus, of our vintage have sold their boats, either exchanging them for motor cruisers or retiring from boat ownership entirely. Some have downsized. Their reasons weave through safety concerns, the physical demands of boat handling, and the burdens of maintenance. For wooden-boat owners, the latter may be the most onerous and literally painful issue. A few weeks ago, I spent a couple of hours on the deck kneeling and bending to recaulk the mahogany rubrails at the sheer, an annual exercise, and my back ached for the rest of that day and the next. Patty and I haul out every spring for a typical cavalcade of paint, varnish, and repair projects, and over the past five years our annual boatyard stint has ballooned alarmingly from two weeks to five—with a corresponding bump in boatyard space rental from $350 to $900. We’re not goofing off, and the boat isn’t demanding that much more than before. We’re just getting slower.

It’s no secret that sailing, and more specifically the wooden-boat culture, is awash in a high tide of gray. The average age of the wooden-boat owners I’ve written about for this magazine over the past five years has been 66 at the time I interviewed them. A private industry survey of more than 3,800 wooden-boat enthusiasts found a large majority—63 percent—were between 65 and 84 years old. Under 35? One percent.

Arnt Arntzen’s method of combining lazyjacks with the quarter lifts of a gaff rig’s boom.

Patty and I don’t want to retire from our boat, but neither do we want to risk a mishap that could lead to serious injury or worse. What to do? Well, throughout my 57-year career in journalism, I’ve sometimes resolved issues of my own by discovering what others were doing in similar circumstances. So, I went out and talked to wooden-boat owners right in my marina in Port Townsend, Washington, to find out how they were adapting boat, body, and mind to cope with advancing age. Or, in one case, to learn how one had come to terms with selling a beloved boat.

When I launched PATTY B in 2019, I was already 70 but obtusely had given little thought to accommodating any eventual physical decline. I had been putting in six- to seven-hour workdays building her for nearly three years, but I seemed to spring back reasonably quickly from aches and sprains acquired in weasel contortions around the boat, and my health was generally good. Denial is easy when you’re not actively hurting.

But four years later, after Patty’s fast ride to the emergency room and a realistic appraisal of how fatigued we both sometimes felt after a day of sailing or boat work, I began a systematic look at what we needed to do to keep sailing and maintaining a wooden boat in this eighth decade of our lives. I started by making a list of things to do, or at least consider, arranged under two headings: first, safety and convenience and, second, maintenance.

A few of these were stupidly obvious: For Pete’s sake, stash reading glasses aboard so you can decipher depth soundings on the charts! And Patty built an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of our maintenance chores, with a view toward avoiding overwhelming accumulations.

I had led nearly all the lines to the cockpit when I built the boat; the only reason anyone normally had to leave the cockpit for sail handling was to pull down the staysail. Creating a remote downhaul—a line running along a toerail to the cockpit—was an easy 90-minute fix. I also remembered that once or twice every year the jib’s roller-furler had jammed, and I’d had to go forward, lie flat on the bowsprit, and manually wrench the furling drum into action. Studying the geometry of the furling line’s run to a block on the bowsprit, I could see that moving the block farther forward would reduce friction and probably solve the problem. Again, easy.

A 2:1 purchase for the gaff’s throat and peak halyards.

A more complicated, and much more expensive, suggestion came via Sean Rankins of Northwest Sails & Canvas, who had made PATTY B’s sails. He advised rerigging all halyards for a 2:1 purchase to make it not only easier to hoist the sails but also to provide much better luff tension. I was dubious about any need for rerigging the pipsqueak jib and staysail, 67 and 49 sq ft respectively. But I’ve learned to trust Sean’s advice, and he was right. New lines and blocks set me back more than $400, and the mainsail throat and peak halyards are now crazy long at over 70′, but our pleasure in seeing perfectly set sails is palpable. And it’s half the effort to get them there.

The scariest thing to do on this boat always has been raising or lowering the mast, which pivots in a tabernacle integrated into the cabin front. A gin pole strapped to the mast’s forward face provides leverage for raising and lowering, but even so, someone—me—has always stood in the cockpit with a 10′ wooden fork to urge the mast through its first 20-some degrees of travel. If the fork were ever to slip, a 54-lb mast would be on my head in a fraction of a second. More geometric pondering suggested that with my 4:1 mainsheet tackle moved to the bowsprit, I might have enough purchase to raise or lower the mast without cockpit help. It works—and a foolishly hazardous operation is now history.

The toughest thing to do on this boat during an average daysail is corralling the 187-sq-ft mainsail at day’s end, especially if the wind is still blowing 10 knots. I recalled, though, how a Canadian friend of mine, Arnt Arntzen, ingeniously rigged his gaff cutter ANJA (see WB No. 290) with lazyjacks that splice into quarter lifts. He can drop his mainsail into a neat bundle in 15 seconds, compared to my two or three minutes. I emailed Arnt, who kindly responded with an instructive sketch.

PATTY B, the author’s Sam Devlin–designed Song Wren 21.

PATTY B’s transom rakes at 25 degrees, so there’s not much room on it to mount a production-model reboarding ladder. Since 2019, we’ve carried a folding ladder in a cockpit locker to be deployed from a cleat if ever needed for a rescue. It’s a clumsy operation, and I’ve known that if I were the unlucky man overboard, I would be having to talk someone still aboard through the process—and I sometimes take friends out who have little boating experience. It’s far better, obviously, to have a folding ladder permanently mounted to the transom, operable either by the swimmer or crew in the cockpit. Why, I wondered, am I feeling limited by the manufactured choices? I could build a ladder tailored to this boat. It’s turned into a complicated undertaking, involving first making a working full-sized model with scrap wood and cheap hardware, and it’s still in progress. But it will be ready for the 2026 season.

The most time-consuming ritual on this boat has been maintaining the exterior brightwork: about two weeks of scraping, sanding, and varnishing every year. Finally last spring, in a burst of reluctant practicality, Patty and I painted 75 percent of it. Only the spars, handrails, and toerails remain bright. This was nearly painless once I had finally come to terms with necessity, and it might be the most important reconciliation I’ve made with the realities of aging: If one’s ego is all tangled up with the boat, it’s time to break the two apart. What’s a boat for—to show off or enjoy using?

Finally, I’ve understood that to manage the maintenance I need to shift my attitude toward the work. Temperamentally, I am wildly unsuited to Zen: I’ve always been goal-focused, impatient, quick to irritation whenever a tool fails to work properly or I fail to use it properly. But change can happen, and I am working to learn to see the work itself as a thing of beauty, not as a means to an end. I’m not there yet, but I’m progressing.

Some issues on our list remain unresolved. PATTY B has a smooth, quiet, and reliable two-cylinder outboard motor, but it requires a ferocious tug to start it. What does Patty do if I’m suddenly disabled? I’ve thought about swapping for an electric-start motor, or even a pure electric outboard, fixes that would range from expensive to incredibly expensive. I’ve made no decision yet. I have a custom-made half-tent for the boat, which covers the cockpit and after third of the cabin. A second cover for the rest of the boat, I’ve learned, would be north of $3,000. So I won’t be getting that yet, and maybe not ever. I did, however, improve the existing cover’s rain protection for the cockpit just by experimenting with its suspended height and making new and tighter elastic hold-downs. That’s one more incremental improvement.

It’s alarmingly easy, on reaching a certain age, to get drawn into a swirling cycle of vexations and frustrations and become, not to put too fine a point on it, an old grump. The counterweight is to practice patience and perseverance. What better teacher than a wooden boat?

Bertram Levy, 84, has dealt with advancing age by building himself another boat—repeatedly.

Six years ago, the retired Port Townsend physician launched the 19′ spidsgatter MURRELET. He was downsizing from the 24′ Bristol Channel cutter ABLE, which he had built 40 years earlier. The smaller sailboat, mainly intended for daysailing, was fitted to the realistic appraisal he had made of his physical abilities.

“I wasn’t as steady on my feet as I used to be,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I could jump off the boat at the dock to get the lines. When I wanted to reef, instead of taking 15 seconds it was taking two minutes because I had to balance myself. When I needed to paint, I couldn’t stand on a scaffold and hold the brush and paint and still hold onto something. I was beginning to depend on others, so I felt like I had to sell ABLE. Which was very, very hard.”

But he wasn’t going to live without a sailboat because, as he says, “I’m crazy for sailing.” MURRELET is sized so he can sail singlehanded into the slip, where he can reach over the coaming to slip a line around a cleat. It’s small enough that scaffolding is not an issue. And it should be noted that MURRELET’s mahogany-planked hull is varnished, not painted, so he’s hardly taking it easy. Last summer, he figures he went daysailing five days a week on Port Townsend Bay. And he’ll do it again next summer, though sharing time with the new boat he’s about to complete: STEVEDORE, a 20′ tug-style motor cruiser designed by Paul Gartside.

“Motoring is really boring,” he declares with his signature bluntness. “But we can trailer it up to Alaska and spend three months cruising.” The new boat, he says, will cost about $50,000. “If I bought a decent RV it’d be $100,000 and I’d be parked around a bunch of people playing loud music that I can’t stand. And I’ve really enjoyed this process. I haven’t had a better four years in my life than building this thing.”

Kaci Cronkhite, 64, bought her 28′ spidsgatter, PAX, in 2007, restored her, and wrote a memoir (Finding PAX: The Unexpected Journey of a Woman and a Wooden Boat) about the experience. But she found that her body, once strong and agile enough for serious big-boat bluewater sailing, was losing that tone through an office-bound job and menopause. To counter the loss, she looked back to a concept she absorbed as a beginning sailor in her 30s.

“When I started sailing, I looked for the oldest singlehanders in the anchorage. I thought, that’s who I’m going to emulate. Because they’re still out there. They’re not just throwing muscle at everything. They use finesse, they think for the long term, they are patient.”

She points to the extra-heavy lines on PAX, for example the ⅝″ mainsheet. “Otherwise, I’d be wrapping them around my hand—you know, the thing we’re not supposed to do.” The winch handles are long. She recently switched out the mainsail track for a low-friction UHMW (ultra-high molecular weight) track-and-slide system. She has even found that small investments in better tools, such as ergonomic scrapers and brushes, can make a difference.

I observe that her 90-year-old PAX is not gracefully adaptable to some modern concepts of safety and sailing ease, such as lifelines, which would be an unspeakable besmirchment of the boat’s organic beauty. Kaci again refers back to that reliance instead on finesse and patience. “I never trust lifelines anyway,” she says. “To me, they’re just not real. I pay attention. I hold onto my handrails.”

Maintaining PAX has generally been a 50-50 split between doing it herself and enlisting help, professional or otherwise. Now, she says, she is becoming increasingly willing to ask for help. “I think there is a space for us to embrace being elders,” she says. “And you know, from the times you’ve helped someone older, how good that felt, and what you got to learn because you did it.”

Leslie Lincoln, 67, has owned her Herreshoff H-28 ketch, KHOYA, since she was 19, and she says that now, finally, she can properly keep up the varnish. The reason: a full-boat winter cover she designed and sewed herself five years ago. She’s uniquely qualified for major boat projects, having had a career in maritime electronics and with an early venture into a marine canvas business decades ago. And she’s been building her own Port Townsend home, room by room, over the past 20 years. There isn’t much hands-on work that scares her.

Partly this must be innate ambition and versatility. But the practical skills have been nurtured through her long relationship with KHOYA. “Working on the boat taught me how to use my hands,” she says. “When I was 20 and first went out to sea, we had to fix things—there was no choice. It gives you a lot of self-confidence. A wooden boat is an incredible teacher.”

Her sailing life today is somewhat constrained by an old ankle injury that’s made hopping off the boat during docking problematic. “I used to singlehand all over the place, but now it’s harder to jump off the dock, so it’s best to sail with others. Yet the joy of sailing KHOYA is more rewarding than ever.”

She insists that maintaining her boat—mostly by herself—is far from a burden. “Last October, I was on my hands and knees recaulking the deck, and I had to get down and up and down and up, and my knees and legs got stronger because of it. After doing that all day, I had to carry the boat cover down to her dock—I was exhausted, but I could physically do it. The boat is a continuity in my life that’s very important. And it makes me very happy.”

Bill Stanley, 79, has a FOR SALE sign on his 32′ Alden cutter, VEGA. It’s time, he says. He has owned the boat since 1982, briefly living aboard in Seattle, and he has taken nearly annual cruises north to Vancouver Island or farther up the Inside Passage to Alaska. The maintenance has been weighing heavily. He’s had multiple joint replacements, and his balance has grown less reliable. The unusually high bulkhead sill at VEGA’s companionway is becoming harder to negotiate. His wife died in 2020, and since then he has spent most of his time on the boat singlehanding. He didn’t greatly enjoy the solitude. And then, a couple of years back, as he was rowing out to an island anchorage in a borrowed inflatable, the dinghy’s bottom detached. Reboarding VEGA alone from a deflated dinghy without a firm bottom to stand on was extremely difficult. “I think it was then that I started to realize I’m not as agile as I used to be,” he says. “That was the turning point.”

Despite his long relationship with the boat, he says the decision wasn’t painful. He examined the image people seemed to have of him as a sailor and realized it was not how he defined himself, nor was his profession as a physician. “I’m not defined as what I do,” he says. “I think I’m defined by my relationships. And after retirement, I’m busier than ever.”

What does he recommend when growing old with a wooden boat? “I’d say get somebody to do the maintenance. And have a reliable first mate.”

Old Salt—a design with old salts in mind

“What if we designed a boat, and at every design decision we chose to look out for the older sailor?”

Sometimes such rhetorical questions bloom into missions, which this one did. It launched five years of discussion and back-and-forth drawings between Joshua Colvin and Brandon Davis, finally materializing into a stitch-and-glue plywood catboat kit intended for production in spring 2026. Josh, the publisher of the online magazine Small Craft Advisor, earlier collaborated with the New Zealand designer John Welsford to create the 12′ SCAMP. Brandon is the owner of Turn Point Design, a Port Townsend design and CNC-cutting firm specializing in marine fabrication.

The Old Salt concept began with typical catboat proportioning of a 2:1 length-to-beam ratio: 15′3″ × 7′6″. The cockpit is deep, wide, and uncluttered, with the centerboard trunk offset into the starboard seat riser. The boat weighs about 450 lbs, with provision for an equal weight of water ballast in the bilge. It’s apparent that it aims to emulate the stability of a much larger boat; the designers expect Old Salt sailors are unlikely to be eager to practice capsize-and-recovery drills. “SCAMP is amazingly seaworthy for a 12′ dinghy, but it’s still a 12′ dinghy, and if you make a big mistake you’re going to go for a swim,” Josh says. “The Old Salt is going to be a boat where if you make a mistake, lose your balance and slip to the lee side or something, you’re not going to go over.”

Old Salt, a design aimed at aging sailors.

The rig might prompt sighs of covetous envy from anyone who’s spent a tedious launching-ramp hour rigging a small sloop or yawl. There’s a 20′ carbon-fiber mast in two fit-together sections that store in the boat and a flat-top, battened sail. There are no stays, and a heavy batten in the sail’s foot functions as sort of a boom without the hazard of hard timber swinging overhead. The mast weighs less than 15 lbs, and to make stepping as easy as possible, there’s a 34″ long “toaster slot” in the cuddy cabintop. Pop the mast in at a slant, rotate it to vertical, close a hinged door and pin the mast in, and you’re ready for the sail. The boat is designed for the crew to never leave the cockpit, and a quarter-round cutout is sawn into the cabintop to support someone working at the mast.

Tradeoffs eternally haunt boat designers: make one performance aspect better, and another one becomes worse. In Old Salt’s case, the very broad beam and embracing cockpit enclosure erase any possibility of rowing, although two paddlers could nudge it along for short distances. The designers are working with EP Carry, a Seattle-area electric outboard manufacturer, on a motor specifically tailored to fit. Josh says other electric outboards or a small gasoline outboard also would work. But any kind of motor adds expense and potential complications that oars wouldn’t.

The boat is also designed to be forgiving.

The Old Salt’s most intriguing aspect is that it seems likely to appeal not just to old salts. It looks not one bit frumpy; the curvilinear sweep of the cuddy cabin is stylish and svelte, and the proportions are right. If you’re hot for performance, the designers point out that not filling the ballast tank would provide a ratio of sail area to displacement that would nudge well into race-boat territory. If that isn’t thrilling enough, they’re offering a “Tequila package” option of a bowsprit and asymmetrical spinnaker. Without the ballast, Brandon expects the boat to be able to plane with the spinnaker, and maybe, “on a screaming reach,” with mainsail alone.

If it all works out, there could be gray-whiskered sailors on the water looking for whippersnappers to humiliate. Call it the revenge of the old salts.

Lawrence W. Cheek, of Whidbey Island, Washington, is a regular correspondent for WoodenBoat.

Simplify, and watch for useful tweaks

Old Salt—a design with old salts in mind

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