ill Hapgood’s of-
fice is,  ap-
propriately
enough, carpeted
with a steely shade of blue.
It’s the color of the ocean
on an overcast day — a
blue that Hapgood knows
very well. Eleven years
ago, the realtor sold his
house and all other assets
so that he, his wife, Pat,
and his daughters, Julie
and Jennifer, could live
aboard a 29-foot boat,
Melissa, while travelling
through the Caribbean,
Europe, and Panama.

“Page M22° August 29, 1990."

“This Week

Long-distance sailing is best in a small boat —.

The thought of cramming
four people into an area as
large as the storage shed in
many North American
yards might not appeal to
everyone. But the Hap-
goods, who built their first
boat from a kit and then
raced so they'd know how to
sail, didn’t suffer from
claustrophobia.

“If youre going to live on a
boat, it doesn’t really matter
whether it’s a 50 foot or a 29

foot,” Hapgood says now. “Hither -

way, you don’t have privacy. In
terms of size, the only real dif-

ference is that you have to

twice as far to get to

bathroom.”

BOAT BUILDING and RESTORING

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and sextant. In this photo, Bill Hapgood uses the sextant to determine the course the family

boat, MELISSA, will take.

“And when you're in a place

like the Caribbean, you spend a

lot of time on the deck, and on
the beach . . . the boat is just a
bedroom. Size isn’t an issue.”
In fact, says Hapgood, the
small sail boat was a good choice
for the three-year journey. “The
small boats are light, and they're
safe to handle. When waves
come up, and they can get pretty
high, a big boat goes to the top of
the waves — but it has to come

e

down. And it comes down quite

- hard,” he explains, moving his
hands to suggest the motion ofa
boat enduring a storm. “In
Melissa, we were like one of
those Tupperware soap con-
tainers. We just bobbed in the
sea.”

Many of the larger boats the
Hapgoods encountered didn’t
bob at all —they remained dock-
ed at marinas because their
owners couldn’ afford to operate
them.

“It’s easy to be tempted by all
sorts of fancy equipment,” Hap-
good says. “But if you put all
your money into your boat, you
don’t have enough to live on
while you're travelling. We saw
some of the best equipped boats
in the world, but they weren’t
going anywhere. Their owners
were holed up in marinas,
working odd jobs to scrape
together the money to do some-
thing.”

And travelling, even across
blue expanses of nothingness, is

not inexpensive. Althou
people believe travel by boat will .

h.
be cheap because sailors are
self- sufficient — drop a line into
the water and a good supply of —
nutritious, free, food appears at. -
the dinner table — medical and
boat insurance consume sizable
chunks of a sailor’s savings, as_
do repairs and the good times on

shore.

“We spent hardly anything on
food,” Hapgood recalls. Never-
theless, the family’s trip cost
$50,000.

“If we'd bought the fancy goods
that it's possible to buy for a
boat, we'd never have been ablgy:
to get along for the three years.
That $50,000 would have been
gone before we'd started,” Hap-
good points out.

The Hapgoods’s two conces- #

sions to high-tech sailing were
the purchase of a ham radio —
“the most important electronic
tool you can have” — andga
refrigeration unit, which was

Continued on Page 23

AN IMAGE FROM THE PAST, SYLVIA has been used in historical
re-enacimenis and is always popular at the boat festival.
The ketch was once a Baltic trading vessel. Photobyshirey Hewett