Schooner or Later

I will preface the description of this beautiful, hand painted oil piece by saying I have never ever been on a schooner. It would come as no surprise for people close to me to find out, I am not from schooner ilk, let alone Cottage ilk or even Summer Camp ilk, but most of all, I am certainly not of Schooner ilk. And no offense to anyone who is, I believe I’ve met less than a handful of people my age in life that know how to “Sail”. 
And yes, there's definitely an “air” about them. And no, it’s not mysterious at all. And that’s fine. It takes all kinds of people. 

But necessity wise, to “my people”, a Schooner has always been way way way down that list. Like owning a Gun Range, a Lexus, or a Subway franchise. I haven’t the need for it but more importantly, I haven’t anywhere near the money.

While consulting franchisedirect.com for the very first and probably last time, I was moved to see that while a Subway franchise fee will set you back only $15,000, the estimated operating costs of opening a Subway restaurant for just the first three months is somewhere between (these are 2022 figures as well) $182,000 to $506,900 dollars. USD. That’s close to $250K Canadian on the low end. Wild. I then turned my attention to yachtworld.com, another website I can’t say I’ve previously spent much time doomscrolling on.

It was there I found a much more varied estimate, with numbers ranging from $12,000 to $12,000,000 for a boat. I decided to check out the used listings, just for kicks.

I perused the listings of these gorgeous water castles, trying to find something that looked like the boat in this oil painting. It’s worth a peek if you wanna see how the other half play around in the water. Finally, I found something similar. A 1927 Schock Staysail Schooner. My new, just now decided, dream schooner. It’s 42 feet long and was built in Costa Mesa, California during the golden age of American Schooner building. The description refers to the boat as ‘her’ throughout and I am tempted to do the same. She’s had a recent makeover (interior painting) and there’s a nice photo of a black lab standing next to her. She’s 97 years young, and you’ll have to get over to Northern California to get a closer look at her, but she’s gorgeous.

She comes with a $229,000 price tag, which honestly, compared to a model like the 2006, 133ft Graf Modern Classic schooner, an “ideal family boat, even for young children", ringing up at the till at $6.4 million dollars, feels like a steal. I think about a lazy Wednesday at Sea. And then a lazy Thursday at Sea. And then a lazy Friday and so on and so forth. 

Here I am in the Duran Duran video for Rio. But I’m doing very little at all. I’m not racing a sailboat. There’s no bikinis around. I'm just laying around on the boat. Reapplying sunscreen. Flipping over onto my front, then flipping again to get my back. Every day, just laying out in the sun on my schooner, sea breeze through my hair, ocean mist splashing up on my face. I can’t swim but in this scenario, I might as well be a fish and I am capital C Comfortable. 

I wonder if the original artist of this piece, inscribed only by “J.H.” ever had such a life. Yes, these waves seem to be violent, white capped and crashing into the side of the Schooner, but certainly there were some lazy days to be had. Days where the anemometers barely moved. A subtle breeze. Stormy weather passed, day dreaming on deck. I can see this painting on a wall somewhere, in your space, where it’s comfortable and you’re doing just the same. It’s a nice feeling.