Profe Steve

I grew up sailing on Lake Michigan from the age of 15 and owned my first sailboat, a wooden Steans 26, made on Lake Superior, in Chicago during the 1990s. Each year, I sailed up and back to Wisconsin to put it in dry dock and bring it back.

When I got to college in California, I learned more through involvement in the Cal Sailing Club on San Francisco Bay. Many years later, I returned to the Berkeley Marina with my second boat, a San Juan 28, and began to more seriously learn all of the ins and outs and idiosyncrasies of sailing, through my Berkeley Yacht Club and in doing countless laps all around the Bay, its islands, in and out of the Golden Gate, and north into San Pablo Bay.

During some years when I didn't have a boat, I was fortunate to be able to climb aboard a 60-footer in the Andaman Sea off the Malay Peninsula in Thailand, and did some more serious sailing there in the vicinity of the Phi Phi Islands, between Phuket and Krabi Province. Glorious.

This practice continued for a couple of years as I transitioned to my third, current, and possibly final boat, the Malolo ("heavenly place" in Samoan), a Newport 33. Around that same time, I early-retired from teaching and met Patrick, a great old salt and very skilled sailor, who kicked my butt into doing things by the book. All of that time, I didn't realize how reckless and dangerous I was until he taught me better, kicking my butt into being a real sailor.

Patrick mentored and coached me for about a year and a half on Malolo. He was a marine mechanic, so he also did quite a lot of work on it that I was incapable of doing on my own at the time. He taught me many valuable things about my boat, expanding my meager technical skills greatly as we worked our way through each of its systems together.

We had signed up to do the Baja Ha-Ha, leaving this past October, but a few things fell through at the last minute, and we weren't able to do the journey together. Instead, I was able to crew on a neighboring Beneteau 473, which turned out to be a blessing, since it acted as a practice run for my current, expanded voyaging, already underway.