Fairhope Retrospective

In my first years as a professional after my graduation from Arizona State University’s School of Engineering, I made a decision to live and work in Pensacola, Florida. If you can imagine a boy who was born and grew up in Phoenix,AZ packing up his stuff and loading it into his metallic-blue Chevy Corvair (unsafe at any speed) and venturing forth, bound for the Deep South. Why would a Westerner choose to go to the Gulf Coast? Try visions of sailing on limitless blue horizons while teaching the art of trimming a foresail to soft-syllable’d, long-vowel’ed southern girls, while the background music of Bob Marley pulsed out of a boombox somewhere down below decks. Hmm. Uh, where was I?
Oh yeah, why I decided on my first engineering post on the Gulf Coast. I was 22- need I say more?

These were, of course, the salad days. I sailed mostly on OPB’s (other people’s boats). Due to my experience on dinghy sailing & racing during my college years on Interlake and Coronado 15 class boats, I found myself a crewmember in demand. I also enjoyed an associate (read that “cheap”) membership at the Pensacola Yacht Club. I quickly learned that the owners of the big boats always needed crew and rarely needed money. Virtually my exact opposite. I quickly learned one of the truisms of the yacht club nautical life: older skippers that won races were often ecstatic in victory to the point of limitless crew bar tab privileges! This world was where I was first exposed to a magical place called Fairhope, Alabama.

Weeks before my introduction to Fairhope, I began to hear about the mythical Dauphin Island Race. Due to be hosted that year by the FYC (Fairhope Yacht Club), it was spoken of with much enthusiasm, energy and not a few exchanged insider jokes. I was selected by my adoptive skipper for both the delivery crew and the alternate helmsman post for the race. All I knew about the DI Race was what I heard around the club docks. All of it was good. Two hundred-fifty boats on the line in ten starts bound for a straight line race from Point Clear, AL south to the non-descript sandbar called Dauphin Island. At the end of the line, a massive circus tent was erected that held a rocked-out reggae band, a Bacardi-sponsored open bar (to those that held the mystical talisman of the competitor wrist-band) and a rumored raft of winsome Mobile girls who were ready to dance and meet the victors of the lifting breeze (us). All was true. We believed that life could not get any better… we were right.

Since that storied time, I’ve often thought of Fairhope, Alabama as a place that stayed in its place as an unchanging icon of sun, soft accents and gentile style। And just last November, I went back and found it to be so। After walking through the flowered streets and exchanging polite greetings to the folks I met on the sidewalks, I found that it was not a place that I wanted to return to… it was a place from which I never wanted to leave! I now have a boat that would also find a favored place at the starting line in this year’s DI Race।
All I need are some young, energetic crew members… life is a circle.