Portions
of this article first appeared in Cruising World
Magazine
Sailor
Profile By
James Baldwin
Still Cruising After 80 Years
80-year-old
Jim Melcher and wife Diane circle the
Atlantic on their hybrid-design leeboarder Alert.
Jim Melcher, rendered by his artist wife,
Diane de Grasse.
Among the diverse stream of cruising boats passing through the port of Luperon in the Caribbean’s Dominican Republic last year, one boat and her skipper stood apart from the crowd. Alert is a 33-foot Phil Bolger-designed Manatee leeboarder that stubbornly refuses to fit into any standard yacht category. Alert’s 80-year-old master, Jim Melcher, is equally unique among his fellow cruisers, virtually all of which are considerably younger and much less experienced.
Eight
decades of messing about in boats has left Jim, now bespectacled, gray-bearded
and rail-thin, with remarkably good health and a continuing desire to learn more
about boats and the cruising life as he sails into is sunset years.
Jim has
sailed since his childhood in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when he lived at his
parents summer sailing camp for children on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Watching
local shipwrights at work and listening to stories told by fishermen on the Cape
Cod waterfront further nurtured the boy’s wanderlust and fascination with the
sea. In his teens, fresh out of high school, Jim traveled west to Seattle to
enroll in a boatbuilding school recommended to him by legendary boat designer Bill
Garden.
World War
II interrupted his schooling, but he continued his boatbuilding apprenticeship
serving as ship’s carpenter in the U.S. Coast Guard in Seattle and Honolulu.
After the war, he operated a salmon fishing boat out of Seattle. Some years
later, he returned to Massachusetts, where he married and raised three children
while re-establishing the family's Pleasant Bay Sailing Camp on the cape.
During the late 1970’s, Jim worked part-time for three years building Alert as a replacement for Triumph, his 45-foot Culler-designed leeboarder ketch. “Triumph resembled a Chesapeake Bay skipjack, but Alert is very different and possibly unique since I don’t know of any others that were built,” Jim says. Alert is a curious and unorthodox amalgamation of distinctive features which, considering her design oddities, have combined into a remarkably attractive and functional boat.
Alert and her Chinese gaff rig
Based on
the 19th century Thames River barges, she is round bilged and flat
bottomed, with flat sides amidships to accommodate her outboard hung leeboards.
Her present rig is another peculiar hybrid design: a tabernacle-stepped
“Chinese gaff”.
Jim
claims the epoxy-sheathed, strip-planked Manatee design is relatively simple to
build. Alert’s boards up draft of merely 22 inches and beam under eight feet
make her easy to trailer and a gunkholers delight. The flat bottom and low
profile keel helps her to sit nearly upright when taking the bottom on a falling
tide. For auxiliary power, Alert is fitted with a 3-cylinder 25 HP Sole diesel
with offset, two-bladed folding
propeller.
Fully
loaded for cruising, this ultra-shallow-draft passagemaker displaces 13,000
pounds and, surprisingly, obtains sufficient stability from her six-inch square,
19-foot-long lead-ballast keel weighing just 2,800 pounds. Her designer, Phil
Bolger, tells in his book Different Boats how the stability of very
shallow-draft vessels like the Manatee is quite different from that of a
conventional full-bodied yacht. “(They) don’t have any buoyancy deep under
water, the kind that floats up and capsizes a deep-bodied boat if her ballast
keel drops off,” he writes. Unlike mainstream designers, Bolger’s design
philosophy is free of the dogma of the racing-yacht form and not restricted to
the Marconi rig.
Jim took advantage of Alert’s ease of trailering by hauling her cross-country to Seattle in 1983. Sailing with various crew and occasionally solo, he ventured north to British Columbia, then south to Panama, through the Canal, and among the Caribbean Islands. In the mid-1990’s, Jim single-handed Alert across the Atlantic via Nova Scotia and the Azores, circumnavigated Britain, and explored Europe’s rivers and canals as far inland as Berlin.
Alert careened on a two-foot tide for bottom
cleaning.
As I
boarded Alert from steps attached to the transom-hung rudder and commented on
the arrangement’s simple ingenuity, Jim said those steps saved his life when
an accidental jibe caused the boom to fling him overboard during a storm in the
North Atlantic. His matter-of-fact declaration made it sound as though getting
tossed overboard alone in mid-ocean in your 70’s is a perfectly normal
occurrence.
Speaking
after thousands of miles of bluewater sailing, Jim believes, “A well-designed
shallow draft boat is certainly seaworthy in anything short of a hurricane and
even then it’s easy to seek protection up a shallow creek. She doesn’t slog
as well to windward as a deep-keeled boat, but she has the obvious advantages of
shallow draft. Occasionally a leeboard gets to banging against the hull and I
cushion it by jamming in a small fender. All in all she’s a very capable
cruising boat.”
Alert has undergone numerous modifications in her 23 years. The first major change Jim took was to take a chainsaw to the flush deck and add a raised deckhouse. Phil Bolger disapproved of this major surgery, but the appeal of standing headroom outweighed Bolger’s aesthetic sensibilities. Jim raised the original cockpit seats to a more comfortable height for sitting. He also cut 14 inches off the trailing edges of the leeboards, which markedly improved visibility around them when stored in their upright position without noticeably harming their performance.
Jim and Diane aboard Alert in Luperon,
Dominican Republic.
Down
below, Alert seems cramped compared to modern beamier yachts of her length. Even
so, there’s ample space for the full double berth forward, a well-appointed
galley amidships, and a table with two single bunks in a main salon that’s
happily uncluttered by a centerboard trunk.
The
original Marconi cat-yawl rig worked well for 14 years, but as Alert’s skipper
aged, he sought a more easily handled sail plan. In 1997, Bolger designed a new
rig for Alert which he called a “Chinese gaff”. He shortened the mizzen mast
and converted it to a sheet staff, giving the junk rig’s multi-part mainsheet
a better angle to remove excess twist from the full-battened mainsail. Though
cut down three feet, the boom is still a lengthy 24 feet, and the shortened,
unstayed laminated-Douglas-fir mast is 34 feet overall. A sunken well in the
foredeck allows room for the base of the mast to pivot forward as it’s lowered
in its tabernacle. When needed, a small working jib can be set to help balance
the helm.
Back in
New England four years ago, Alert’s recently divorced skipper chanced to meet,
and then quickly married, Maine artist Diane de Grasse. “At my age I
couldn’t afford a long courtship,” he said with a chuckle. Within months of
their meeting, Diane shocked her friends and family when she quit her job as a
graphic designer for a newspaper and sailed off with Jim on a honeymoon cruise
to the Bahamas. “I’ve always enjoyed sailing,” Diane said. “That was my
first long sailing trip, and I found I love the cruising life.” Diane uses her
artist’s talents to record their travels not in photos, but in dozens of
beautiful watercolor paintings.
In May
2000, Jim and Diane departed Maine for a cruise in Europe. Remembering well his
previous passage across the storm-plagued North Atlantic, the now older and
wiser sailor shipped Alert as deck cargo from Halifax to Liverpool. “The
shipping costs were under $4,000, and we were also pressed for time to make the
Brest 2000 classic-boat festival in early July,” Diane said.
From Cornwall, Alert sailed to Brest, France, in company with a group of boats from Ireland celebrating the historic Celtic voyages to Brittany. As Diane recalled, “A TV crew met us as we arrived in Brest to join nearly 3,000 other boats. That night, the festival organizers fed 20,000 sailors in tents. A few days later, we sailed with a fleet of over 2,000 boats to Douarnenez in a spectacular scene of uncountable sails from horizon to horizon.” The couple then harbor-hopped down the Bay of Biscay and along the coasts of Spain and Portugal. As they cruised into the Mediterranean, Diane’s expressed her interest in archeology and architecture through her paintings and sketches of historic sites in the Balearics, Malta, Sardinia and Tunisia.
Alert's sunken foredeck allows clearance for
lowering the mast.
In the
autumn of 2001, the Melchers
departed the Med to cross the Atlantic to the Caribbean via the Canary and Cape
Verde Islands. They arrived in Martinique on February 4 after a blustery 19-day
passage with winds mostly in the 25-30 knot range. Their Autohelm Tiller Pilot
was frequently overwhelmed, and the resulting accidental jibes led to frayed
nerves as well as broken battens and chafe on sails.
“To
handle the strong winds, we reefed and then scandalized the main by lowering the
gaff’s peak halyard,” Jim said. “Even using a working jib, we had
excessive weather helm. When a lazy jack broke, it dumped the whole works –
boom, gaff, and sail – into the sea. It’s turned out a rather poor rig for
offshore. I’m ready to convert it to traditional full Chinese-junk rig, which
I believe will work better.”
Despite
the rough weather, they managed to mark the halfway point of their crossing with
a champagne party. They even put a note and a $5 bill in a bottle and tossed it
overboard for some lucky beachcomber to perhaps marvel at one day.
Due to a
seized transmission, they made landfall in a cove on the windward coast of
Martinique without the aid of their engine. Once repairs were made, they
continued island-hopping through the Caribbean, reaching the Dominican Republic
in April. “We’ve enjoyed touring the island, especially the ancient capitol
of Santo Domingo, but now it’s time to push on towards home in Brunswick,
Maine,” Diane said. “And I promised my dad I’d be back in time for his 90th
birthday.”
From
Luperon, Alert sailed swiftly through the Bahamas, made landfall at Beaufort,
North Carolina, and then "drove" up the Intracoastal Waterway as winds
were generally unfavorable for continuing an outside passage. From Cape May,
they pressed on outside, ducking into Shinnacock, Long Island, to avoid a gale
before heading for the Cape Cod Canal and familiar waters. Two years after
beginning their Atlantic circuit, Alert's anchor went down in Merriconeag Sound,
Maine, on May 22, 2002. Within a few weeks of settling back into their home
ashore, Jim and Diane made plans to get back on the water and cruise the coasts
of Maine and Nova Scotia through September. Their next goal is to cruise through
the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf Coast.
At a time of life when most sailors their age are cataloging their excuses for giving up ocean voyaging for a less risky sedentary life ashore, the Melcher’s leave no time to regret missed opportunities and, by their steadfast adventuring, continue to inspire everyone they meet.
For more on his unconventional boat designs, read Philip C. Bolger’s books, Different Boats and Boats with an Open Mind. Also, check these links:
Bolger
Boats on the Web
More
on Phil Bolger
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