Once upon a time, in the early 1970’s I decided to build a sailboat “Someday”.  Well with life and careers and stuff, someday faded off to just a distant dream to be occasionally dusted off and then put away again.  In 2000, a good friend Andrew Raring passed away and with his passing, Andrew drove home the message that our “Somedays” are, indeed, limited.  Later that year, we were visiting our son and daughter-in-law in Rhode Island when I picked up a copy of “Wooden Boat” magazine and saw an add for the very sailboat I had fallen in love with in the ’70’s.  The Weekender by Stevenson was my “Someday” sailboat and in March of 2001, Mary and I began construction.

Some 2500 wood screws later, we had our beautiful little boat completed and ready for a July 4, 2001 launch at Salem Lake in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  She became our haven from the stressful world of careers and troubles and we named her “OurDotCalm” for the internet craze that was then my career and the peace we found in sailing her.

Over the next several years we towed her all over the Southeastern US.  Her Ports of Call included several trips to the Chesapeake, Fort Loudon Lake near Knoxville, lakes throughout North Carolina including; Lake Norman, Philpot, High Rock, Oak Hollow and others.  She went to Ocracoke Island and to Lake Hartwell in Georgia.  Large waters and small, she took them all in stride and never in all the times we sailed her did she ever let us down.

Eventually, we moved on to other boats and OurDotCalm began to spend more time on her trailer under a tarp than she did playing pirate ship on the high seas.  When we retired to Tennessee, there just wasn’t any place to keep her so we moved her to our daughter’s place in Mt. Airy, NC where she languished unloved for a time.

Early this year, our oldest son informed us that he wasn’t going to be able to take her to Rhode Island as he had planned and we began discussing options to transport and store her in Todd, North Carolina.  We really needed someone to love this boat and we decided to offer her to our friends Jim and Carolyn Hatchell – a wooden sailboat is always a work in progress so we didn’t know if they would be interested but they were happy to take her under their wings and though we hated to see her go, she has a new home.

Now we come to the point of this article, Jim realized that we wouldn’t have a tangible part of our “Someday” boat so he offered to send us the trail boards as sort of a birthday present for Mary.

The boards were hand painted by our Son Kas and now proudly hang on the wall in our round house.  If you click on the picture of the boards above, you can see that the letters of the name are entwined with a grapevine and grapes in a sort of tribute to the relaxing glass of wine that Mary usually had to accompany her book while we sailed off into the next adventure.

Our thanks to Jim and Carolyn for sending this small bit of OurDotCalm home to us.