Susan Peterson Gateley

Issue 36 : May/Jun 2004 Most sailors don’t miss the motor after they part with their first auxiliary-powered sailboat. But it’s been seven years since I bid farewell to my 23-foot homebuilt woodie, and I still wish I’d kept her engine. It was a solid, all-American, 300-pound chunk of iron that took form in a heartland foundry perhaps a decade before my own 1951 birth.

Issue 42 : May/Jun 2005 You usually get a sailboat surveyed because someone, most likely an insurance or finance company, has told you to or because, as a potential buyer, you want one to establish her value. Surveys do not come cheap, $14 to $15 a foot is the going rate for a survey in the upstate New York area where I cruise. Assuming you really do have to get a survey, you want it to meet your needs. This is not a given.

Issue 43 : Jul/Aug 2005 “I wonder why people refer to boats as ‘she.’ Why not call it an ‘it,’ ” a charter guest aboard our sloop asked me one day. I shrugged and muttered something about the romanticism of the sea and sailors and admitted that I really didn’t have a clue as to why boats seem to have a gender. Then, a few weeks later on a windless afternoon during a long, boring, slow passage under power with plenty of time for pondering, I came up with a possible explanation.