Gentle Readers, this is a special missive from one of the Great Americans.
– Vic

Windy,
The Table of Knowledge, and the End of an Era

Well, my personal era, at least.

The famous “they” say that the two happiest days of a boat owners’ life are the day that he buys the boat, and the day he sells it. I can tell you that it’s not quite that simple.

I bought my boat in June 2001, and sailed her from Boothbay Harbor, Maine, to the Chesapeake, and then down to Key West. And then, I returned her via truck to Galesville, Maryland where we spent 12 years before donating her to a charity organization that takes care of poor and under-privileged kids.

There’s a lot that happened in between. First, there was the sailing and the joy of being underway both offshore and in more protected waters. Then, there were the ancillary adventures and the cast of characters who came along by happenstance who shaped and defined my nautical existence. I just said good bye to a large part of that history.
Windy was, and still is, a J-28 built in 1987. She owned me for 18 years, and I will never tell my wife how much money I put into her care and feeding. She was a joy to sail – nimble and fast (in a good breeze), and comfortable – lots of cold beverages and great music. Now, she belongs to another.

I named Windy after a famous character from Fairhope, Alabama, where I grew up. We moved down there from Jackson, Mississippi, back in 1963, and my step-dad was the president of what would later become the largest title insurance company in the US.

In Fairhope society of that day, there were three things you had to do to be a member in good standing – join the Fairhope Yacht Club, become a parishioner of St. James Episcopal Church, and get a pool and tennis membership at the Grand Hotel resort in nearby Point Clear. My parents did all three.

It was at the Grand that I met Windy for the first time – he was the recreation director and lord of all things aquatic, with a staff of young lifeguards and hostesses who catered to the hotel guests and the pool members.
Windy was a legendary sailor who wind-surfed up into his late 80s.The local TV stations did several specials on him. God broke the mold when Windy was born. I can still hear him say “Hey buddy.” Small wonder that I named my boat after him, with a hail port of Point Clear, and in the process pissing of all my old friends who were thinking about doing the same, but I beat them to the punch.

Being a lifeguard at the Grand was every local young man’s dream, and there were some legendary characters who went through that catechism – think Caddy Shack but at a pool, and what a pool it was – 150 x 150, almost a million gallons, and it became the focal point of young horny adult life in Baldwin County.

Sadly, Marriott chose to fill it in after they purchased the resort in 1979 to build additional rooms, so it is another bygone relic, as are the lifeguards since they replaced it with shallow water pools with no diving boards to avoid liability.

The antics and escapades of some of us swimming, diving, sailing, skiing, and drinking gods of the lifeguard stands still live on – way too many to mention here and maybe too outrageous, but those of us that were there know that it is all true. I was fortunate to spend my five years at the University of South Alabama employed as a lifeguard at the Grand – still my best job, ever.

It was Windy who taught us all how to swim, dive, sail, and ski (we learned how to drink and have fun with our female party guests on our own).

He retired shortly after I went to work and bought a small schooner, called the Schooner or Later, and ran a charter business out of the Fairhope Yacht Club on the side as well as being a regular at the yacht club.
He lived up Fly Creek (the yacht club is situated at the mouth) and if he had a few too many beers at the bar, he would just dive into the creek and swim home.

One of his more notable charters was by a sorority at South, and he brought them down to the Grand and tied up at the fishing pier we had out on the bay just to show off the dozen or so good-looking coeds he had on board cavorting around in their skimpy bikinis. That was Windy. I had the good fortune to sail with him on the schooner a couple of times after I went on active duty, days which I will treasure forever.

My sister Jan, who unfortunately passed away at age 50 caused by an opioid overdose in 2011 before it was chic, painted a picture for me of the Schooner or Later taken from Windy’s business card. It features a Mobile Bay sunset, the boat, Windy (wearing his signature Greek fisherman’s cap), and a Fairhope Yacht Club burgee at the masthead.
I consider it to be priceless. Jan was a fun gal, and we had many an overseas adventure when she came to visit. In retrospect, her premature death back then was a harbinger for things to come – the proverbial canary in a coal mine.

I sailed Windy (the boat) down from Boothbay to Newport – stayed there for several weeks while I participated in the Navy’s Global War Game, and then further south to the Chesapeake, berthing the boat at the West River Marina in Galesville for a couple of years. From there, I followed my orders to Key West and for the first and only time in my career, took 30 days of leave to sail her south – what a great trip, and even better since it was paid for by my PCS (Permanent Change of Station) orders.

I lived onboard in the Navy marina at Boca Chica Key for three months until I could get my family moved down into family housing, and developed some bad habits in the interim, like hanging out at the Schooner Wharf listening to Michael McCloud on Saturday afternoons, going from there to Captain Tony’s, and then to Sloppie’s to catch Pete and Wayne’s set.

After that, it was a short walk over to the Green Parrott on Whitehead Street. My wingmen were Diamond Dave and Pirate Bill. Dave is a former Marine aviator and well-known, notorious CBP pilot, and Bill was an A-6 pilot from NAS Whidbey Island. We had had a nodding acquaintance and mutual friends back in the 80s but never got to know each other, but became close friends 20 years later.
I retired down there in Key West, and moved back up to DC to take a government civilian job. I wanted to sail Windy back, but due to time constraints and the demands of my new employer, I couldn’t do it – so I loaded her on the truck but put her right back into the slip at West River where I had departed from four years earlier.
I worked my ass off for the government for two years, suffered from burnout, and decided to go the commercial route as one of my friends offered me a plum position in a tech startup. As such, I could work wherever I wanted so I chose the marina. There, I encountered a whole ‘nother cast of characters who lived on their boats, and who were dealing with the vagaries of life in and around the Imperial City.

While some people came and went, it coalesced down to four of us. Me, a retired Navy captain and scourge of drug runners and roadside bombers; Kyle, a restaurant manager who’s dad is an accomplished author who completed a distinguished career at the Library of Congress; Big Wayne, who was a porn entrepreneur in LA (think Burt Reynolds’ character in the movie Boogie Nights) and; Billy, a former mobbed-up wise guy from Jersey who was a deep sea master diver and worldwide archeological explorer who had retired from underwater adventuring to run the marina.

Like Vic’s friends from Willow and the Amen Corner (an analogy to the Roundtable at the Algonquin Hotel in NYC), we held court at the Oyster Gazebo. There, we would discuss and pontificate on current events, politics, religion, movies, sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and anything else that fired our imaginations. I usually had my laptop at hand; Kyle always had his iPad, so fact checking was de rigueur – no mercy for bull shitters. Our gatherings got so popular that we developed a coterie of observers and hangers-on when we gathered who were there just to hear the outrageous things we would come up with.

After a couple of months, someone (we don’t know who) taped an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper on the picnic table that read “The Table of Knowledge” and so it became:

Lots of things happened there over the next dozen years – fire, deaths, betrayal, adultery, and other social tragedies. In many respects, it was a nautical Peyton Place given all of the petty politics and drama between the boat owners – all involving lawyers at some point.

The most notable things were shimmying through the earthquake of 2011 in the gazebo, and the summer when Billy and I tried to ride out a hurricane a la Skink (an inspiration derived from Carl Hiaasen’s novel “Stormy Weather”), using a big Igloo cooler full of beer as a wind screen – we wimped out at 50kts. Since then, Kyle has moved down to Jacksonville and now manages the biggest strip bar in town; Billy had some health issues and moved back in with his family in Jersey –his mob friends letting bygones be bygones; Big W has hooked up with a sugar momma in Severna Park, not a surprise given his gigolo proclivities, and me. I’m still here but writing my final installment as the last man seated at the Table of Knowledge. My boat is gone, but the memories remain.

Copyright 2019 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com