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Model
Sailboat Salts |
Copyright 2004-2006 Zina Saunders All rights reserved |
Rene, age 73, started sailing model
boats 35 years ago, and graduated to sailing big boats all around
the world. When he isn't getting shipwrecked in the Galapagos
Islands, he can be found competing in the weekly races held at
the sailboat pond every Saturday morning. I was a portrait painter, myself, for 25 years. I painted portraits of a lot of women. They were what I call trophy wives...but that's not entirely true, it's just that painting attractive women today is basically painting makeup; you're a makeup artist. If you took the makeup off, you might find a real person underneath there, but they don't want that. They wanted to look even better than their makeup, which I was pretty good at. I started at Yale, and Yale teaches you, if not to be a great painter, at least to be a pretty good critic, and I didn't really like the stuff I was doing. I loved doing it—painting is fun—but I just one day stopped. I didn't entirely stop painting, but I stopped doing the portraits. The way I first started sailing, I would come down here and I'd see these very, very pretty boats sailing in the pond. They didn't have radio control then, they just free sailed, and I went home and built a little boat and sailed it. And that's how I started sailing big boats, too. I've sailed seven oceans, I've done a lot of single-handed passage making; I've sailed from Europe to here, single-handed. And that all started with model boats. I literally went from model boats to big boats. A friend of mine, John, and I used to do week-long hikes, mostly up in the Adirondacks. We thought that was a lot of fun, but we ran out of trails after a couple of years, and one day I said to him, "At the Boat Show they've got some model boats, and I want to go see it." And while we were there, I saw a little 22-foot boat with a little cabin and a couple of little bunks in there and a little stove, and I said, "John, let's buy this boat, because then we could sail to some really wild places that you can't get to any other way and then we can go hiking from there!" I never did see the model boats at that show, but we bought that boat, and taught ourselves to sail it. And never went hiking again! What I like about sailing model boats is partly the aesthetics, but mostly I think it's the competition. Going out and just sailing around is my idea of watching the grass grow. That bores me to tears. But the competition of racing model boats: I like that. And I'm lousy at it! All the years of experience I've had and I'm still pretty bad! And as far as the big boats is concerned, it's not the competition so much, it's the adventure. Seeing if I can get from point A to point B and stay in one piece. I once wrecked a boat in the Galapagos, and I spent two months on literally a deserted island. Even in the 20th century, it still happens. I wasn't scared to death, but I thought my chances of getting out of the experience alive were probably 50-50. There was zero water, and no rainfall. Just rock lava. I sucked on these cactus...if you bite off the cactus you can get nourishment from that. It's bitter tasting, ghastly stuff. I think I saw that in a Western movie years ago. |