From Monkey to Moonfleet: A Love Story in Three Boats

Every love story begins somewhere, and mine began with a monkey. It is not the romantic, hearts and cherubs kind of beginning, more the recently divorced woman living with a ferret variety. But since it’s Valentine’s Day, and since I have now sold my house, three airplanes, my truck and any land-based sanity I once had for a man and a boat, it feels like the appropriate time to explain how it all happened. This is the story of how I kissed several frogs, fell for a primate, and ultimately married both a sailor and the sea.

Once upon a time (and that’s how you know things are about to go terribly wrong), I was freshly divorced and hunkered down on my little horse farm in Wellington, South Florida. I had sold seven horses in the divorce (a sentence that still sounds like a really good thing), but had nevertheless still managed to pack my farm with lots of animals: two post-divorce frazzled kids, an odd looking dog called Scrappy Cankles, one bearded dragon, a free-roaming ferret, two chickens (Gwendolyn and Marigold), a guinea pig named Hercules, and a barn cat who came with the farm and was therefore the boss of all of us.

It was chaotic, unhinged and wonderful. It was my version of healing myself and my kids. It was love in its purest, feathered, slightly feral form.

But I was lonely.

After several years of healing - and by healing, I mean aggressively embracing my fear of being alone by training for marathons, attending yoga retreats, a horse back safari to Africa and a cruise to Alaska - I finally decided I was cured and fine being on my own if it was meant to be, but I was also ready to possibly meet my forever (again) person if there was someone out there for me.

Enter Match.com.

Apparently if you have a pulse and at least three limbs, you are considered fair game on this dating app. Despite clearly stating I was not interested in anyone under 35, under 5 feet tall, or over 200 pounds, this did not deter the youth brigade, the vertically ambitious, and the magnificently obese from having a go. If anything, it appeared to embolden them. There were tears. Not mine - one date burst into tears before appetizers. “I have spent years coming to terms with my feminine side,” he weeped. ”And you need to embrace it too”. “No thanks, here’s a hankie” I said. There was also The Girth Incident: One gentleman’s Match.com photos featured only his head. I politely expressed concern about not seeing a full body shot and - in what I believed was diplomatic British clarity - mentioned I was slightly concerned about his “girth.” I learned that day that in American English, girth does not refer to circumference of the waist, but another body part located further south. The resulting photographs which flooded my inbox were…informative. I never did receive the full body shot.

By this point I was fairly convinced that my romantic future would involve chickens and maybe a few more ferrets. Then one day, while despondently swiping left through the melange of misfits interested in becoming my suitor, I came across a monkey. A chimpanzee, to be precise. No other photos. Just an ape, eating a banana. I was intrigued and ran through the possibilities…

1. This guy was so ugly he wasn’t even confident enough to post one body part.
2. This guy was younger than my son.
3. He was a fatty.
4. Or he might just could be a cynical genius.

Then I read his profile. Oh Gods of Grammar, steady my beating heart! This monkey could write! Full sentences. Great syntax, a witty lilt, and even the sly use of the Oxford comma. And….

He was a pilot. A sailor. An adrenaline junky monkey. Who cares if he was a portly dwarf - his many impressive qualifications at least put him in the correct age bracket…I messaged him immediately:

“What a handsome monkey you are.”

Six months of pen-pal courtship followed. I learned that my monkey had spent 27 years in the Navy, retired, and then immediately transitioned into being a helicopter test pilot for Sikorsky, flying Black Hawk’s for a living while he made a home for his teenage Daughter.

Okay, at this point I considered I would still like him if he was a stout hobbit.

He also dreamed of retiring to live on a sailboat.

Err….OK! I think I love the ocean…? I mean I enjoyed my Alaska cruise despite the tragic lack of wifi…And then there was that school trip to France I attended: I ate a moist cheesecake on the British channel ferry in gale force winds while everyone else was sliding around puking. I am almost a seasoned sailor!

When we finally did meet, I was relieved to discover he was neither 500 pounds nor simian. He was six feet tall, devastatingly handsome, and very much human. This doesn’t happen to people like me, but I decided to go along with it until someone figured out the mistake, or the drugs wore off.

On one of our first dates, he introduced me to “the other woman” — a 35’ custom Polish monohull sailboat. Being a Naval College graduate he had learned many essential things; like how to look hot in a white uniform, how to tie complicated knots, and how to sail. We went sailing and this gorgeous man taught me how to say things like “Ready about!” and “Helms a-lee!” while I turned the boat in a big circle with a giant wheel. Of course we weren’t meant to go in circles but Ken kept on flexing his muscles and hauling in “sheets” (which I learned are ropes) and I just kept on turning the wheel and grinning like the brainless woman I had become in his presence. And around and around we went. I called it The Date of 37 Tacks. I was terrible at sailing. But I was in love with the sailor.

We named the boat Moonfleet, after the obscure English nautical smuggling novel of the same name. We fell in love and got married aboard, anchored in the intracoastal waterway in Jupiter. Our kids doubled as crew and wedding party. Our eldest two children, Kourtney and Grant, were ordained online for $35, because nothing says sacred union like a downloadable certificate, and our youngest, Elsa, was ring bearer, boat decorator and chorus.

We sailed Moonfleet to Treasure Cay in the Bahamas, Ken’s Dad and his Wife flotilla’d with us on their trawler. We all enjoyed a huge wedding blessing party with friends and family from all over the world. It was glorious.

This period was also when I began accumulating what I call BRIs — Boat Related Injuries. Sailboats, I am convinced, are designed by compact Scandinavians with no toes. I was forever banging my head or impaling a foot.

And then there was “heeling.” When a sailboat leans over at an angle that suggests imminent death, and guarantees regurgitated lunch, sailors call this “heeling.” It is meant to mean the boat is doing what it’s designed to do - but that angle of existence for me was a big no no. There is nothing healing about heeling. To try and overcome my aversion to sailboat inversions I attended many lessons at Palm Beach Sailing School, where a patient instructor tried to convince me physics was on my side.It was not. I did become quite good at helming though….just so that when the boat started to lean over I could steer it back into the wind so it became nicely upright again. Not quite the point as it then stops moving.

Though I really tried, sailing was just not my thing.

Eventually we traded Moonfleet 1 for Moonfleet 2 — a Gemini catamaran: We had recently enjoyed a ”bareboat charter” on a catamaran in the British Virgin Islands. “Bareboat” my delicate reader, does not mean that one is bare whilst boating…unless you are German, and then it is mandatory. Bareboating is when a charter Captain checks you out to make sure you are competent sailors before handing you the keys to someone else’s boat and wishing you luck. I quickly realized, during the check out, that even though Ken was going to be the Captain, as First Mate, I was expected to know some sailing shizzle too. I thanked the Gods of sailing that all of that copious turning into the wind was enough for me to scrape through. We subsequently had the best vacation of our lives, so clearly owning our own catamaran would fix everything.

We picked Moonfleet 2 up in Sarasota and sailed her across Florida through Lake Okeechobee and the Indian River. I had enthusiasticaly enrolled our two youngest kids as crew. During the three day passage we had no working fridge, no gas for the stove, no dinghy engine, an ominously deflating dinghy which gave us an extra thrill as we rowed through the crocodile infested waters to try and find something hot to eat. I loved it. My children were less convinced.

We had fun sailing the catamaran in a flotilla to the Florida Keys and to the Bahamas. However, I found all too soon that in heavy weather, even the catamaran’s enthusiastic jolting and lurching triggered my anxiety into warp speed. One memorable attempt out of Lake Worth Inlet for a “sporty day sail” had me crawling across the floor whimpering and looking for a life jacket, while Ken barked “Trust in Moonfleet” into the wind with reckless abandon, like I imagine Moses did when he parted the Red Sea. It became clear: it was me or the boat.

Although I think it was a close call, fortunately he chose me.

After Moonfleet 2 sailed out of our lives, we didn’t sit down and have a dramatic conversation about it. There was no solemn folding of nautical charts, blowing of bugles or ceremonial lowering of sails. I mean one never truly knows when you do the last of anything.…But I could feel it, the quiet way Ken packed his dream of living on a boat into some internal locker labeled “Gone With the Wind.” It was as if he’d carefully folded it, zipped it into a canvas sail bag, and slid it into the corner. Marriage is full of these small, silent stowages.

Instead, we pivoted skyward. I learned to fly. Ken took up aerobatics, because apparently flying in an experimental military helicopter as a day job was insufficiently stimulating. For a while we became an aeronautical family. Surprisingly, despite my aversion to sailboat inversions, I had no problem with unusual attitudes in the air and zipped around Florida in my flying lawnmower quite happily. At one point we had three planes, my little Cessna 172, a family hauler called a Baron Foxstar and a pithy little vixen of an aerobatic plane called a Pitts Special. Three planes sounds either wildly impressive or deeply concerning depending on your tax bracket. Ours was the latter.

Then one day Ken’s parents asked if we wouldn’t mind checking on their Kadey Krogen trawler while they were in Maine for the summer. “Just pop over now and again,” they said casually, and of course, because we had planes, we could. So we did and flew to the west coast one Summer morning and spent a weekend aboard a trawler.

And that was it.

How on earth had I not known about these boats before now? No living life on the lean. No medieval angles designed to scalp tall women with long toes. And barely any weird pirate incantations you had to say to get the boat started. Just start engine, point bow, and astonishingly you got somewhere! And comfortable! These boats were floating condos. Slow. Solid. Unbothered. And after one night, when I said, “I could live on this,” I saw something reignite in Ken.

To me these trawlers were the mules of the ocean — not glamorous, not racing toward anything, but stubbornly reliable. They did not need to prove themselves. They simply moved forward in a sensible and firm fashion, but if the ocean decided to pick a fight with one of these full displacement brutes, they were ready to defend their passengers to Davy Jones locker. Apparently they were designed along the same lines as North Sea fishing boats, which is why they did so well in open water, but to me they looked like Popeye boats, and I would make a perfect Olive Oil.

Within what seemed like days, Ken had located a Kadey Krogen dealership not far from us, in Stuart, Florida, and a broker named Bill had a boat in our budget for sale. It was as if it was meant to be. We drove over full of excitement, and then my heart sank.

Although this boat had “good bones” as they say, it was older and had the sad, tired look of a bar tender in the beer tent at a fair. She looked exhausted, and had a slightly sticky aura of a vessel that had hosted too many sunsets and not enough cleaning products. Mystery stains lurked across the woodwork, the floors and the upholstery. And it wafted of weariness and dodgy plumbing. I sat slumped in a dark corner while Ken and Bill the broker communed in the sacred language of engines. My thoughts drifted to how I was going to break it to my husband that his boating future needed to stay firmly stowed in his locker of dreams. I had drifted into my usual “Engine talk trance” until I heard Bill say, “Well, we do have another boat for sale. Larger. Much newer. Of course the price reflects that.”

Of course it does.

“Well, since we’re here, we might as well look,” Ken said, in the tone of a man who is going to zip right past any bad decor and head straight to the engine room.

And then we stepped aboard the Kadey Krogen Expedition 55.

Sixty glorious feet of luxury ocean living. Light. Space. Cream upholstery that did not scream of a suspicious past. LED lighting. A pop-up television. A galley with a Viking oven, a Bosch dishwasher, an actual full-size fridge. I wandered through her like someone who had accidentally opened the wrong door and found Narnia — but with stabilizers. Digital stabilizers, to be precise. Little mechanical angel wings that keep the boat from rolling from side to side in rough weather.

And then we saw the engine room. It looked like the set of a science fiction film. Gleaming, orderly and impossibly capable with not one but TWO massive John Deere engines - and we could stand up in it! Ken and I looked at each other, both of us beaming from ear to ear. This was it. This was she. She who must be bought. Then we saw the price. It was three times what we had intended to spend on a boat. My God, this boat cost as much as an ocean side condo! But it was a condo you could traverse oceans in!

We went home to “think,” about it.

Around that time Ken had been complaining of back pain. Not unusual for a career helicopter pilot — especially one who transitioned from 27 years in the Navy to test flying for Sikorsky, which involved strapping himself frequently into vibrating metal prototypes and quite literally being a crash test dummy. And especially not unusual for someone who spends his free time pulling high Gs in aerobatic planes. So initially we assumed his body was finally rebelling from the years of this abuse. Ken went to have a some tests and that was when he was misdiagnosed with a terminal illness.

For a week he kept the fact that he thought he was going to die from me. By the time he told me, he had received a second opinion that it was only arthritis and he was in no danger of dying any time soon. The emotional recoil was violent. Rage at the misdiagnosis. Hurt that he hadn’t told me. Relief so enormous it felt like vertigo. And then, slowly, something else…

Clarity.

If you are handed a week in which you believe your life is ending, and then it isn’t, something shifts. The horizon rearranges itself. Life seems more finite, even if it’s not ending right away.

We began to ask different questions. Not “Can we afford this?” but “What are we waiting for?” We decided we didn’t want another weekend toy. We didn’t want to wedge boating time into all too short weekends. If we were going back onto the water, we were going all in and embracing it as our next chapter. So we sold all of the planes. We sold our cars. We sold our house. We packed our youngest off to college.

And we bought the boat.

And nearly nine years after I swiped right on a monkey, we untied the lines on Moonfleet 3 — our Kadey Krogen Explorer — and began again. It turns out I hadn’t denied my sea dog his dream. I had just been steering us toward the right vessel.

I fell in love twice. First with a sailor.Then with a steadier way to sail through life.

And that, dear Valentine, is how a lonely horse-farm divorcee ended up floating around the world with her Captain Silver Fox… and not a single ferret in sight.

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