My family operates a shipyard in Victoria that specializes in refits of medium range luxury vessels ranging from cruisers to catamarans. Tern is a forty six foot luxury sailing vessel and we had just completed a major refit on her.
Tern is a single mast sloop with full cabin and full accommodations and first class all the way. We had just replaced the gas engine with a new six cylinder diesel and completely refurbished the interior. The teakwood and mahogany had all been redone by our finishing craftsmen . It had new carpet, cabinets and the exterior and bottom paint was all redone. The cabinets, mattresses and all the components including radio, radar and global positioning systems were put in new. It had a new fresh water converter and a new diesel fired furnace unit. The mainsail and the jib were both replaced along with the sheet winches and all the rope rigging. The shaft and prop were all refurbished and the boat had been in one of our dry docks for almost four months and was now ready to go. Nothing was spared to get the best into this boat. I had just done a shake down on it yesterday and it was in our marina now waiting to be picked up.
Tern belonged to the Harmon Pulp and Paper Company from Juneau Alaska and had been brought here last fall and left with us for the refit. The main reason for the meeting we were having today is that we had got a request from the President of Harmon paper who just happened to be an old buddy of my dad's. He wanted us to deliver the boat to Juneau and was a little fussy about who would sail it. He actually requested that it would be me that would deliver the boat and he asked if he could supply the crew made up of his daughter and her boyfriend and that they would come with me on the trip.
I grew up on the water and have an engineering degree as related to ship building and marine survey. I am one of the youngest members of the power squadron which is a marine safely organization and I'm trained in VHF digital radio, radar and navigation so I more then qualify to do this and have done this sort of thing on many occasions including running a catamaran to Hawaii two years ago. I also know the inside passage up the west coast to Juneau and it's not really a problem to me but the trip will take almost ten days and the question is whether I have the time. I am single with no ties so it would be only business commitments that would keep me from it.
My dad just asked me out right if I would do a favour for him and his old friend and just like that I was booked to go to Juneau. His daughter and her boyfriend would be arriving at the airport the next afternoon and I would be picking them up. I hoped that they knew a little bit about what they were doing. I was told that the daughter had spent a lot of time on the boat so she would probably have a bit of a clue. The boat really took a couple of people to sail it properly but we would be running on the diesel engine a lot of the time anyway when we were in the smaller areas of the inside passage. I hoped they would be of help and didn't really want to spend too much time training them.
The next afternoon I was at the airport to meet the incoming flight arriving from Chicago via Vancouver. I waited in the luggage area and had no description really of who I was picking up. Someone touched my arm and I turned and standing beside me was a very pretty blonde girl in her early to mid twenties with a red haired guy standing beside her. She asked "are you Bobby from Island Marine?"
I answered "yes and you must be Tracy Harmon." She smiled and I got my first good look at her. She had long blonde hair and was dressed casual. She was not much over five feet tall with a cute smile and just a touch of light freckles on her nose and to me she looked gorgeous and for some reason I knew at once I was going to like her.
"Yes I'm Tracy, pleased to meet you Bobby and this is Kevin." The guy came forward and we shook hands. I have a built in radar and for some reason I got bad vibes off him right from the beginning. Tracy seemed to be friendly and very cheerful. She was slim and very shapely with a bit of a tan so she had obviously spent some time outdoors. I was actually a bit concerned with the knowledge of my crew but we would wait and see. In the back of my mind I had the feeling that training Tracy might not be that hard to take. Anyway, we packed up their bags on a cart and took off back to the city and chatted about their trip here.
It was fairly late in the day so I took them to a hotel and made arrangements to meet with them for breakfast the next morning and we would go to the boat and spend the day outfitting it with food and the usual stuff that might not already be in the boat. I would fuel it and do a few last minute checks on it and later that day or the next morning we would leave and go north. The trip was about five hundred miles and I hoped to be able to do close to eighty miles on some days. We would not travel fast and hoped to be able to go under sail for a good portion of the trip. I also hoped that we would get some good weather with no storms and not a lot of rain.
I met them for breakfast the next morning and Tracy was dressed unbelievably cute. She had her hair in a long ponytail , was wearing a ball cap and a Chicago Bears jacket with low cut jeans. She looked like she wouldn't be afraid to get her hands dirty. As for the guy that was with her he was a different story. He made the mistake in the first hour of treating me like I was someone that was hired to perhaps carry his bags for him. I straightened him out on that and I saw Tracy smile at me when I told him and laughed, " the way this works is that I am the captain and unfortunately you will be the crew." I could tell he didn't care for that but the fact he didn't was not going to cause me many sleepless nights.
I looked after the final outfitting and fuelling of the boat and Tracy took on the job of taking inventory and filling the stores with food, bottled water etc. Tern had a good size freezer so we could take some frozen food and she seemed to know what to take as if she had done that before. I gave them a company pickup to use and they looked after the shopping. I was pleased to see the beer and the bottles of wine going aboard which meant it was not going to be a dry trip. I was happy to see there was beer instead of champagne and steak in the fridge instead of sushi and tofu and that told me a bit about her. The more I saw of Tracy the more I liked her and I could see she liked me and we were starting to get along great.