Steve, age 81 and a half, is a free sailing skipper, who eschews the little radio-controlled sailboats that have become the fashion at the pond.

I've been sailing boats here since about 1950. Before radio-controlled boats, we used to preset them for a point of sailing, that is, either sailing close to the wind, away from the wind or across the wind. And you just let the boat go; you let it sail itself. And I still sail that way all the time.

I like free sailing a lot. I've found it's totally fulfilling not to have radio control. To me in seems like yesterday when nobody had radio, and we had a wonderful time, so I guess, in a sense, it's reliving those years. I enjoy watching the boat respond to the wind shifts, and I have nothing to do with it, so an analogy might be, if you walk your dog on a leash, the dog has to do what you want it to do. But if you take her off the leash, she runs around and you can get great pleasure watching her dashing here and there. So I like to let the boat go out and do her thing.

I did do some radio control sailing. In fact we had a fleet of boats we all decided to build together and for a couple of years we were racing them with radio, and I enjoyed it...it was very much like racing a full size sailboat. It's virtually the same thing, except that the response is much quicker. You have to be extremely alert to race these boats competitively.

A case in point is the skipper of the Australian boat that beat Dennis Conner came down here after he had won the Americas Cup and they gave him a boat to race under radio and he came in last, every heat, every time! He was not used to the speeded-up response time required to sail these things, to take advantage of every little shift of wind.

The main thing, as far as I'm concerned, is, when you're on your full size boat, you can't see it, and I've built a number of full size boats, and I've never seen them sailing! I've always been on them! Here you can sit back and watch the boat do it's thing. It's an entirely different sport. Well, it's not really a sport, exactly, it's more like bird watching or something.