When I first saw a Portland Pudgy at a boat show, I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought it was kind of ugly, and had a good laugh about it with the friends I was with. But I came from that initial unflattering impression all the way to buying one and loving the boat.
This week, we bid goodbye to this trusty, well loved and used friend.
Our brand new Pudgy sitting on the shop floor, waiting for pickup.
We bought the boat over a decade ago to have a “kid’s car” for our two young sailors to be able to get off the boat and explore on their own. Though both kids liked the boat and used it, Will developed a passion for it and sailed it for hundreds of hours and over a thousand miles over the time he was cruising with us.
But he left for college in 2015,and now Danielle has been off at school for two years as well. Except for a few weeks when we had crew with us last year, the Pudgy was seeing little or no use.
Will graduated and settled into a job in Anacortes, Washington. He’s bought his own boat, a Capri 22, which he’s been racing and cruising all around his local waters. He’d love to have the Pudgy for a tender, and we’d love to send it to him. We’d hoped to sail Evenstar back to the U.S. and visit him in Washington.
But with our plans to sell the boat and our inability to leave New Zealand with the current global crisis, the odds of us making it to the U.S. before we find a buyer look slim. The Pudgy has been weighing on our minds; because of the deep emotional attachment to the boat we didn’t want to just sell it if we could get it back. But the cost to ship her back to the U.S. is nuts; even though she’s a solid boat, the cost to ship it to the U.S. is better saved for a new boat.
The other day though, I was walking down the dock with a friend and he mentioned he was “looking for a little rowing or sailing dinghy for his son.” His boy is about the same age Will was when we got the Pudgy.
The solution seemed obvious.
We talked it over, and we thought the idea of selling the Pudgy to another family boat with a young sailor was much more appealing than scrambling to sell her or give her away at the last minute if we found a buyer for Evenstar.
The second we took her off the bow and put her in the water, the Pudgy started attracting attention again. Will always got a lot of questions about the boat everywhere he sailed, and in this part of the world I don’t think there’s another one. By the time our buyers decided to go ahead with her, neighbors had already told me they wanted the boat if the first buyer didn’t!
Poster child.
There are so many good memories associated with this little boat for our family, and it will always be specially linked to our son. He’s sailed with sea lions, seen a sea turtle larger than the boat, handled it in 30+ knot squalls, gone on camping trips to islands, ferried friends around the harbor, and sailed, rowed, and power it so many miles. He was literally the ‘poster child’ for the Portland Pudgy, appearing on the boat on their web sight and product literature.
As we bid adieu to the most-traveled Portland Pudgy in the world, we wish her new owner many happy future memories!
If we’re getting this mushy and sentimental about sailing off the kids’ dinghy, selling Evenstar is going to involve ugly-crying.
