Small Sailboats For Sale

Summer Sports Series: Kayaking the Toms River

I’m not a beach person.

For one, I grew up minutes away from one of the worst beach communities on the eastern seaboard, Seaside Heights. Enter any arcade, pizza joint, or bar along Seaside’s now infamous boardwalk and you might think you’ve walked into that desert cantina from Star Wars . Unlike the “wretched hive of scum and villainy” from the movie, you won’t find any walrus men, droids, or Wookies. Instead, you’re likely to run into an equally odd assortment of humanoids that, as far as I’m concerned, can only exist in Seaside. I’m not being figurative here either; I’d like to imagine that they literally cannot leave the boardwalk without falling off into bizarre dream world overrun with sandworms like in Beetlejuice .

But more than my distaste for the seedy Seaside underworld is my aversion to the water. 

In my opinion, the ocean is an alien environment fraught with monsters and other perils. It is the place where man’s vulnerability is most evident.  And while I haven’t experienced any traumatic, near-drowning episodes that would explain my reservations about spending an extended amount of time in the water, I’m not looking to invite any either.

It isn’t that I’m necessarily afraid of the water. I grew up with a swimming pool in the yard; I’ve ridden on boats and driven Jet Skis around Lake Travis in Austin, Texas; I even went white-water rafting on the Lehigh for my bachelor party. Of course, I didn’t suggest, prompt, or initiate any of these activities. Again, not because of fear - I just have a healthy respect for the water and avoid it as much as possible. As such, it would be unlikely for one to catch me spending what little down time I have these days in or near the water.

Yet, during Bob Kislin’s big Memorial Day sale, I found myself struggling to strap two small kayaks to the roof of my wife’s car, searing the undersides of my forearms on its molten surface in the process. By that point, I was all in. After adding in the cost of paddles, life vests, a roof rack that could house two boats, my “sale” kayaks had cost me the better part of a paycheck, and the only thing I hate more than the water is losing money. If these things ended up killing me, I figured I could at least double one as a coffin and still get me money’s worth.

Now, I could credit Kislin’s beautiful parking lot display or friendly, knowledgeable staff for this impulse purchase. Or, I could say that it’s all a part of my summer-long journey to connect the physical and metaphysical parts of my life through outdoor athletics. But instead, I’m just going to blame it on my wife. After a long season coaching lacrosse for me and an even longer track season for her, she thought the kayaks would be a way for us to reconnect this summer.

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It is now almost thirty years ago that Tom and Becky Coffield honeymooned at Lake Shasta, California. Having eloped the week before, they pooled their meager resources to spend a few of what would prove to be the most life changing days of their young lives at a small cabin on this mammoth lake. While there, something wonderful and mysterious happened to them. A craziness seized them. An obsession took root and grew wildly out of control. Life Was a Cabaret is the story of this passion and of the 25,000 mile, six year odyssey that ensued. It was a miraculous journey of joy, of foolishness, and of terror. It was a journey of innocence and discovery. And sometimes one wonders if it is not “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But it is, nonetheless, their tale.

They were not born into sailing; they were not born into prams and sailing dinghies and the traditions of Cape Cod. Over a pitcher of margaritas an idea to buy a small sailboat unexpectedly morphed into the dream of owning a live aboard vessel. Not knowing anyone who sailed or lived aboard a boat, they had no idea what such a boat would cost – or even where to buy one. They groped their way from total ignorance to actual ownership of such a vessel over the course of the next year. They became dock rats, scouring waterfronts from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. They enrolled in a self-taught cram course on boat ownership and bought their sailboat, Cabaret, nine months after they’d conceived the idea.

Unable to sit idly for seven years until the boat was paid for, the Coffields left their idyllic moorage and life in Portland for the excitement of ocean escapades in Newport on the Oregon Coast. Like a portent of great fortune, both secured good jobs once in port and began a year too unbelievably wonderful to be true. But the call of the sea was now in their blood, so in short order they left their new nest and headed Cabaret north to the archipelago of Southeast Alaska dreaming to strike it rich in this land of ice and snow.

Their two years in the north country were sheer poetry – poetry that echoed from the isolated islands to the solitary bays that beckoned them to enter and take their ease. But, having finally “struck it rich” and paid off the boat, their wanderlust could not be contained despite the addiction they had to the vast and silent land they found so enchanting.

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