When we rounded Lover's Key and were in the passage to Estero Bay, I dropped the main sail and jib, then started the auxiliary to motor through the Big Carlos Pass Bridge. We had to wait until the bridge operator got my signal, stopped traffic, and then raised the draw, but that was the only way to get into Estero Bay. The fifty-three foot mast on The Southern Belle was too tall to make it under the bridge if the draw was down. There's been talk about building a new bridge with a sixty-foot clearance, but I really hope they don't. The extra clearance will just increase boat traffic and I like it like it is.
The Southern Belle is a Catalina 42 MKII I bought three years ago, and she was sort of a spur of the moment purchase. I'd been sailing a Catalina Capri 22 for about five years and she suited me just fine. I did my sailing on the weekends and usually traveled along the Florida Gulf coast. It was a nice place to sail and I could sail all day, pull into a marina for the night, and then sail back on Sunday. I was always within sight of land, so if something happened, I could always make one of the ports that dotted the shore and get it fixed. If it was serious, the US Coast Guard was only an hour or so away.
In between my sailing weekends, I was a Senior Financial Analyst for Barkley, Biggs, and Anderson, an investment firm that managed investment portfolios for several 401k's offered by some major corporations as well as some personal portfolios of well-to-do retirees. There are a lot of both in South Florida, so I was doing very well. I was thirty-nine, divorced, and pulling down a little over a hundred grand a year before taxes. My ex was bleeding me for about forty thousand a year, but I still had more income than I could spend without being extravagant.
I said that for a reason -- that in between my sailing weekends I had a job. That's because after eighteen years of working, that's how it felt. I was living for Saturday and Sunday on the Cat 22, and enduring the rest of the week as best I could.
It was in January, four years ago, my ex's lawyer sent my lawyer a letter informing me that my ex had remarried. What that meant was I could stop paying her alimony. For the rest of the year, I put that money into low risk stocks and my own 401k. The next January, when I did my taxes, I totaled all my assets and then did some thinking.
If I kept working, I'd continue to be bored out of my mind five days a week. My assets would continue to increase, but what good would that do me? I had no taste for expensive cars, and living by myself and working fourteen hours a day, I didn't need a mansion. All I needed was a bed and a place to take a shower.
I did need some sort of income though, if only so when I decided to retire I wouldn't have to worry about money. With what I already had, I didn't need six figures. I just needed enough to cover my expenses so I didn't have to touch my long-term investments. When I went sailing the following Saturday, I discovered the answer to all my problems.
I'd seen the charter cruise boats before, but I really didn't have any interest in them. They took people on day cruises or overnight cruises for a fee. I didn't need to pay somebody for a day cruise to wherever their standard route was. I had my own boat and could go where I wanted to go.
As I watched a young couple board the boat next to my slip though, I realized I could do the same thing. I just needed a bigger boat. I could sail every day, or at least every day I had paying customers, and if I had a bigger boat, I wouldn't need my apartment. I could just live on the boat.
Every night for the next week, I browsed the Internet for local used boats for sale, and the next Saturday, I looked at the best of the boats I'd located. I figured I'd need at least a forty-foot boat in order to have a couple cabins for customers and still have a place for me to live. It would also have to be rigged so I could sail her by myself. That meant a self-furling main and self-tacking jib, running rigging that ran back to winches in the cockpit, and an automatic pilot. It would also have to be pretty nicely fitted out inside so my customers would feel like they got everything they paid for. I couldn't charge Hilton rates for a Red Roof cabin.
I found The Southern Belle at the fifth marina I visited, though she was named The Rich Witch then. She'd been bought by a former stockbroker and his wife, and then fitted out for blue water. She even had a six-foot dinghy with an outboard motor hanging from davits at the stern instead of an inflatable with oars.
His intention was to sail around the Gulf for a year to get comfortable handling her and then head out on a cruise to Europe. Those plans came to an end when he had a heart attack and passed away. His wife wasn't so keen on sailing by herself and put The Rich Witch up for sale.
I liked the boat for a lot of reasons. She had two cabins under the cockpit with access to a head, and a captain's cabin in the bow with its own head. In the middle was a spacious galley and eating area. Everything looked almost new from the shining stainless steel of the stove, sink, and refrigerator/freezer to the rich wood and red leather of the seating.
The wife had listed her at a hundred and eighty thousand. I had her surveyed and she appraised at a hundred and fifty because her spare sails had been repaired and her bottom hadn't been cleaned in a couple years. After a quick sit-down with my bank, I made an offer of a hundred and forty thousand, and we clinched the deal at one forty-five.
Her slip was rented for another three months, but that marina didn't allow living on board. After another Saturday of visiting marinas, I rented a slip at Snook Bight and on Sunday, motored into that slip and tied up. I gave a month's notice to Barkley, Biggs, and Anderson that Monday morning, and arranged to have her hauled out and her bottom cleaned. By the time I cleaned out my desk at work and said goodbye to everybody, she was named The Southern Belle and had a new set of sails in her sail locker, and I'd sub-let my apartment and moved aboard.
Like her former owner, I wanted a little time to get the feel of her before venturing out with passengers. After two weeks of sailing up and down the coast, I stocked the fridge and filled up the water and fuel tanks, motored out of the Estero Bay passage, then raised the sails and steered a course for Pensacola. A week later, I was back at Snook Bight and making contact with several travel agencies in the US. I also paid a kid studying computers in college to build a web-site for me explaining what I offered and the prices. I was no longer Mark Johnson, Senior Financial Analyst. I was now Mark Johnson, sole owner of Southern Belle Charters and captain of The Southern Belle.
I got several inquiries over the next few weeks. The cruising season in Florida is the winter months, and most inquiries I got were asking about cruise dates between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. I soon had three bookings, not as many as I would have liked, but enough to keep me in food and fuel. I'd tap into my savings until I was getting enough charters to make the payments on The Southern Belle.
I still had one problem though. It was easy to take calls when I was docked. Out on the open water though, I'd quickly lose my cell phone signal. The Southern Belle had a marine radio so I could communicate with any port and the US Coast Guard, but not with potential customers. I needed a land base and somebody to stay there to take reservations anytime I was out.
The office I found was on the second floor over a hairdresser and a boutique, but it was affordable at less than four hundred a month. A cheap desk and four chairs mostly filled the hundred and twenty square feet, so I didn't need much more than a person. After interviewing several applicants, I hired Rita Mayweather.
I hired Rita over the other applicants for several reasons. It was my experience in financial planning that most people will trust someone in their thirties or forties more than someone much younger or much older. Rita was thirty-five according to her application. She was also really easy to talk to. There are some people like that -- you sit down with them and it's like you've known them all your life. That's how Rita was.
Rita was also pretty nice to look at, but not absolutely gorgeous. That was important too. At the three financial businesses I'd worked at, women who were pretty plain had some trouble retaining clients. Women who looked like they'd just stepped off the cover of some fashion magazine had problems retaining clients too. Women like Rita were the most successful and I knew the reason why because Marsha had explained it to me.
"Mark, when you see a woman who doesn't look like she cares how she looks, what do you think?"
I said she probably wouldn't care about my investments either and Marsha nodded.
"Now, when you see a woman like Tiffany, what do you think?"
