By Wind Over Water

Introducing our new column

We’d like to welcome aboard Sean Grealish, whose new column called By Wind Over Water will appear monthly here at Small Craft Advisor. As with all of our regular columns, you can find a link atop the homepage to access those columns specifically. Enjoy! —Eds

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Article by Sean Grealish

Since we find ourselves at the outset of the By Wind Over Water column I thought it only fair to introduce myself (and also the good ship Lazydog) and tell you what I hope to accomplish in this column for however long it persists.

The ship herself you have already met in a way, as my first written piece for Small Craft Advisor was a profile singing her praises. Lazydog is a Haven 12 ½, Joel White’s “imitation is the best form of flattery” adaptation of Herreshoff’s original daysailer of the same waterline length. Built up north in Kaslo, BC in the 90s by some detailed cabinet makers who turned out not to be passionate sailors, she was purchased by my father the same year I was born, 1999. With a retirement move pulling my father farther away from the pacific coast, Lazydog now resides with me in Bellingham Washington.

Growing up battling the shifty breezes of Portland’s Willamette River, I did the usual teenager dinghy racing in Lasers, FJs, 420s, Aeros and 29ers around the Pacific Northwest. It imbued me with a love of spending long days out on the water that I carry to this day. However, my weight was an ever growing issue, and once my 250-plus pounds rendered me uncompetitive against my 150-pound highschool peers I fully burned out of dinghy racing. Offshore racing became my draw, with the bigger boats, navigation and the tactics of a drawn out, sleep-deprived chess match proving to be an arena I thoroughly enjoyed. This period saw incredible adventures, with two Transpac races to Hawaii, and many more nights raced at sea from Cabo San Lucas to Lake Michigan and Newport, RI. It also gave me my first foray into skippering ambitious undertakings. In 2018 I led team BlueFlash to finish the Race to Alaska, where with an average age of 19 we became the first all “youth” crew to accomplish the task. Many have since surfed our wake, and I am unsure who currently holds the “youngest” moniker for that adventure up the Inside Passage, but we were proud to be the first to show that years of grisly wisdom weren’t required to complete the challenge. But then the universal experience of COVID pandemic canceled many of my sailing ambitions and laid waste to my love for the sport. I hardly sailed more than a few times for three years. After graduating college I moved far and often, while I sampled seasonal jobs and cities around the American West. Even if I hadn’t burned out, sailing had to take a back seat as I figured out what I wanted for myself in life, and where I wanted to be while it was happening.

With a growing love of cycling improving my fitness, and the discovery of “bikepacking” offering a simple and minimalistic approach to long and far reaching adventures, the fog layer draped over sailing in my mind began to burn off. I began to wonder if a rediscovery was possible, far from the often pointless over-competition, expensive budgets and hypercomplexity of diehard racing. Perhaps I could embrace the simplicities I’d grown to love in bikepacking and return to what had first captivated me about sailing: the breaks from life to enjoy a more natural place, taking the wind as it came. The 2022 Wooden Boat Festival sealed my fate. A regular attendee during my childhood (Lazydog has featured on several occasions), I’d had a long hiatus during my racing years but was tempted back for the first post-covid gathering. By then I knew what I wanted my future with boats to entail, but I needed a roadmap to follow; Small Craft Advisor, Small Boats Monthly and Alex Zimmerman’s book Becoming Coastal were more than happy to provide one. The following winter my father and I parked Lazydog in my parent’s garage and set about overturning the results of years of minimal use and maintenance. By the time I trailered Lazydog up to Washington in 2023, we had replaced her jib club and spinnaker pole, repainted the decks and bilge, and every varnished surface shone brighter than it had in 1999. Nowadays, I escape the clutches of my masters research at Western Washington University to the San Juan Islands onboard Lazydog whenever I’m able, with my passion for sailing healthy once more.

I’d like to thank you, dear reader, for surviving the above autobiography (I prefer to write about things other than myself) and now turn my focus towards what I hope to do with By Wind Over Water in SCA. One of the immense benefits of the SCA online platform (Substack) is the ability to have real conversations in the comments below articles. My columns will range in focus and scope, from planning tips (as I have already discussed here) or the affordability of small boats, to island adventures or how to grow our community. Yet it is my sincere hope that the topics covered within By Wind Over Water elicit not only perspectives, tips and experiences in the Substack comments, but also prompt discussions to be had outside this platform amid woodshop shavings and on the helm.

So fair weather and a following breeze until we next cross tacks, by the wind and over the water. •SCA•