Friendship – by Captain Fatty Goodlander

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Friendship

I like the term friendship—someone you journey with through life that means a lot to you. And I’ve been fortunate to have many such friends—friends like George Z, Dave Lovik, and Carolyn Alleruzzo who have stuck with me through thin and thinner. Dave just passed away, I married Carolyn, and George just visited—the two worst ‘bad boys’ of Gage Park High—still hang’n with its lovely valedictorian. (George thought he had the highest IQ in the school, so he broke into the principal’s office to confirm—only to discover that he was second; Carolyn was first.)

Yes, I like the word friendship and some other words—like Anthropomorphism. Because I not only love family and friends, but large, heavy objects that have worked their way into my heart. I once wrote an article—not about what I’ve learned from boats, but rather what I learned from individual boats because of their unique personality.

Crazy? Sure, to a lubber. But not to a sailor who has survived a three-day full gale because of the realization of how much smarter the boat was than I. In fact, my father James E. Goodlander used to tell me as I grew up aboard our Alden (design #213, sistership to Yvonne) schooner Elizabeth, “…listen to the boat, son—she’s smarter than you’ll ever be.”

Good advice—advice which I’ve followed for 66 years of living aboard and through numerous circumnavigations.

Speaking of my father, I inherited much of my passion for Mother Ocean from him—and from how he viewed the world so poetically. For instance, he would tell people that he paid ten dollars for the Dorthea—’five dollars for the boat and five dollars for the team of horses” to drag her to his yard at 57th and California on Chicago’s southside.

Martin, his father and my grandfather—and the man from whom I’ve inherited my middle name—took one look at the boat, blanched, and said, “…it will never float.”

It did—and the modern Goodlander clan had set its course seaward, ach attempting to Chase the Horizon in their own watery way.

But I smile about how long ago this was—before iPhones, believe it or not. Just think of starting out for Tahiti by hiring a team of horses to transport your wreck-of-yacht back home. My childhood was spend sailing with Egyptian cotton sails, wooden planks, galvy & spliced standing rigging, tarred Manila anchor rodes, and kerosene running lights. All, of course, moved around the planet by compass, chip log, and sextant.

Once of the first skills I mastered was caulking—by sound, not rote. For various reasons, seams widened and narrowed, and you wanted to keep one strand of caulking going—not put strand-over-strand. Thus, in order to fill the seam properly you ‘tucked’ and caulked by sound, with the rising pitch allowing the caulker to have enough-but-not-too-much cotton in the seam.

A properly caulked boat would, after many years, still have a hollow in the edge of its mahogany planks from the expanding cotton—a slight trough about three-quarters of the way in (to allow for the red lead and Woosley oil-based seam compound to be laid atop).

Anyway, I have lovely pictures of my mother and father (pre-WWII) courting aboard the Dorthea—after its resurrection.

But, as sweet as the Dorthea was, she was only 22-feet and not a classic. And my father, post WWII, wanted a larger cruising vessel with a pedigree. After searching the Great Lakes for a couple of years, he found a dilapidated Friendship sloop for sale. Only problem—he couldn’t afford her.

But he had to have her—love and lust is like that.

Now Friendship sloops were popular in Maine in 1890 as fishing vessels because of their low freeboard, speed, cargo capacity, stiffness, nimbleness, and their ability to stand up to hard weather (even loaded with fish).

Yes, they had a full keel for stability—plus, they hove-to like a dream. They were stiff in gusts—a nice trait if fish or lobster traps were carried on deck. Their wine-glass transom—combined with their graceful sheer, and long bowsprit—made them lovely beyond words.

…poetry in watery motion.

Because of these qualities, Wilbur Morse (who built the Elizabeth), George Starett, and Stanley Tupper built dozens of them, most from 22-to-38 feet LOD. Usually, they sported an oak deadwood, Eastern pine planking over oak frames—with cedar decks. Sail area was usually between 600-900, depending on if a topsail was flown above the gaff or not. At 10 to 16 tons of displacement, they were light by the standards of the late 1800s—and crazily-heavy by todays.

Perhaps the most famous was the lovely Rosinante, built in 1916 from the pen of William Hand. While only 28-feet, her praises are still sung by the locals to this day in the State of Maine.

But Pemaquid, Alice, and Adventure were equally breathtaking.

Back to my story, my father (with the help of a rich dentist from the Burnham Park Yacht Club) managed to buy that wreck-of-a-friendship, which he renamed Friendship, just in case there was any doubt. She was, for years under his stewardship, a true goldplater—and famous throughout the Great Lakes.

How good of a job did he do rebuilding her in the late 1940s? Well, she is still afloat in the Orlando area—at the age of 120+ and counting.

Wait—there’s more! When I was twelve years old my father was going to build a Friendship from scratch—and wanted me to build one with his son-in-law Joey Borges. So, we snuck into an unused floor of a downtown office building—and lofted her. This was my first exposure to lofting—a fascinating process of precisely drawing a life-size picture of the boat in two dimensions.

Anyway, I was too young and my father was too old—but Joey did, with our help, manage to build her in an old funeral home (go figure!) on Cleaver Street in Chicago. (She was last heard of in Grand Haven, Michigan.)

Thus, I’m intimately familiar with the design. My first offshore passage in the summer of 1952 was aboard one. (See picture of me in my sunglassed dad’s lap.)

Now, shifting to present day, I recently got some rather bad news of a terminal friend.

Here’s the reality of being 74—you’re either watching all your friends die, or they’re watching you do the same.

As I slumped onto my cabin top and tried not to cry… a lovely Friendship sloop named Kerida took the mooring next to mine at the Changi Sailing Club in Serangoon harbor.

Oh, that beloved sheerline bewitched me again! I hopped in the dinghy and chatted up Malcolm Ragan, her proud owner. Malcolm’s father (Dick Ragan, with the help of Singaporian Tan Hee Liong) had built her in Asia in 1976, alongside the Kallang River in Singapore.

So Dick and Tan were hewing her planks as I lofted my beloved Carlotta, half a world away. (The ’70 were the last gasp of backyard boats in America—at least, as near as I can tell. But, evidently, in may have been global also.)

Dick Ragan fell in love with Friendships in 1936 when, at an impressionable age, he caught sight of Gil Smith’s Gazelle of Casco Bay.

You see, back in the day, each design was as unique as its owner—and all the builders, designers, and sailors knew each other—and respected each other.

I learned with pride that she was built with advice from Howard Chappel’s book, “Boatbuilding,” the same book I used to build Carlotta, my 36-foot Ibold ketch. Kerida’s her lines were slightly altered with advice from Wilbur Alden, who built my family’s schooner (and Thatcher Lord’s Bounty aboard which I’ve sailed many Wooden Boat Regattas in the ‘80s and ‘90s).

…see what I mean about ‘small world’ and what Bob Marley might call “one love?”

Kerida is 32 feet, with six feet of draft and 10 feet of beam. She’s built of Chingah, a local Asian hardwood. And her life hasn’t been easy—she’s been almost sunk during the Big Tsunami of 2004 and then fully sunk in March of 2025.

Bob Turner owned her—with Gunther Nutt in the mix as well. And Maurice Ryall owed her too.

Gunter was a woodworker. He owned her for 30 years and vastly improved her interior. Alas, he left her anchored unattended for six years in Phuket—too long for a wooden boat not to be loved.

John Grendon rebuilt her as well.

At least once she was sold for one dollar.

…see how many sugar daddies it takes to keep an ole gal floating?

Anyway, Kerida lifted my spirits in my darkest hour. She perfectly embodied all my nautical knowledge within her lovely sheer. Some people have pets that talk to them—I have boats that whisper to me.

It’s all a circle—all of us, boats and people who sail them, we all turn to dust. That’s as it should be, as it must be. But friendships live on—in our hearts and in our harbors. Joshua Slocum still lives aboard Ganesh, tucked in a place of honor on our bookshelves. Is it too presumptuous to think that these very words on these sheets of paper that you’re holding in your hand, dear reader—might someday inspire AI (or whatever comes next) to construct a boat so pretty and so well-suited to her noble purpose? I hope so. To me, a boat will always be a she—someone to love, to admire, to be nurtured by. My vessels aren’t just containers of air—they’re my private, personal seashells. They protect me—from both the seas and from the ravages of Father Time. And if we literary sailors write down our love—our lifelong passions—that makes them, to some tiny degree, eternal. At least, that’s how this sailor views it.

And maybe there is God—and he knew what to send me to fight off those sorrowful tears… to chase away my blues… a Friendship sloop of stunning grace and tranquility. (end) Editor’s note: Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn are still living aboard—in each other’s arms, basking within their smiles.

CSC
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