We Still Offer More!

Making boating easier – and more fun! is what a marina should be all about. That's why Oyster Cove Marina rates number one with many Bay Area boaters. It's an exclusive yet reasonable facility of 219 berths, accommodating pleasurecraft in slips up to 60-ft long.

Oyster Cove is the private Peninsula marina closest to Blue Water boating. Want to cruise to Sausalito, lunch at Tiburon, or sail to Angel Island? How about a day's fishing outside the Gate, or a weekend at the Delta? No other private Peninsula marina is better situated or offers nicer, fresher surroundings.

• Berths 30 feet to 60 feet • Double Finger Concrete Slips • Telephone Available • Five Minutes from SFO • Heated Dressing Rooms & Showers

• Laundry Room • Nightly Security Patrol • Complimentary Ice • Cable TV/High Speed Internet • Recently Dredged • End Ties Available at $5.75/Ft!

385 OYSTER POINT BOULEVARD #8A SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO

(650) 952 - 5540 Page 94 •

Latitude 38

• July, 2007

LETTERS have been the first homeless person. I had no idea who he was until he spoke. "Damn Artie, you're alright after all!" A year or two later, Art returned to become a semi-permanent fixture at Dick Smith's Musket Cove Resort bar at Malololailai, Fiji. In 1980, he, Dick, and a few others started the now-famous Musket Cove YC, membership in which is still just a buck. Artie was member number five. I never returned to Fiji with Antigone, but I did with Sugar Blues, my later boat. When I did, I discovered that Antigone's name board was almost lost among all the other name boards that became a Musket Cove tradition. I was handed Art's Musket Cove YC card during his memorial service in May. He was 79 years old when he started his last passage, having sailed 100,000 miles on his little 32-ft schooner Wanderlure. She's been passed on to a Kiwi mate who will tackle the rebuild. Then she'll sail back to her second home in New Zealand's Bay of Islands. In many of the photo albums laid out at the memorial, Art could be seen wearing one of his favorite T-shirts. 'Life, Be In It', was printed on the front. That thought was apparently contagious, as person after person at the memorial told stories of how Art had changed the direction of their lives. I looked at the Marquesan ukulele on his shop wall, and wondered what story went with it. Back then you could still trade — illegally, of course — .22 shells for carvings. In a small anchorage on Ua Pou, a shopkeeper carved the final tuning pegs on a uke for my then-six-year-old. We bought a liter of Algerian red. He bought a bottle. Repeat ad nauseam. The price included fried goat and hours of strumming and singing. It came to me as I sat at the memorial listening, that this was what it usually boiled down to — stories. One of our choices is what kind of stories we leave when we move on. "Wow, I remember the day Art sold 24 million shares of junk bonds. What a guy!" No, I don't think so. That's not why we go sailing. Life, be in it. Artie was one of the many who sailed for decades without any recognition. Wanderlure sailed between the South Pacific and New Zealand so many times that she could have done it without crew. On the back of Art's logbook, he listed all the islands he'd been to. The total was almost 200, and included Pitcairn, Easter, Norfolk, and the Galapagos. He navigated by sextant and log. That's not quite as primitive as the onehanded alarm clock and calculus tables that Slocum used, but in this day and age, where everyone has a six-pack of GPS devices aboard, it was still something. I'll tack Art's YC card on my shop wall, next to mine, a reminder of days past when we sailed wearing nothing but a smile, and always sailed downwind in smooth seas. Well, I'm not positive about the downwind and smooth part, but that's how I remember it, and it still makes me smile. Fa'a ito ito — go with courage, my friend. Harry and Mary Abbott Antigone / Sugar Blues Washington ⇑⇓IT HAPPENED BEFORE MICK JAGGER WAS TO BOARD A while back you asked if we readers thought Reid Stowe — who on April 21 took off from Hoboken, New Jersey, with his young girlfriend Soanya on their 70-ft schooner Anne for a 1,000-mile non-stop voyage to nowhere — was: A) One of the last great adventurers, B) A wing nut looking for publicity, or C) A hero for trying to spend three years with nobody but a woman half his age. Well, I know Reid, and owe many of the major changes in my life to him. For example, he convinced me to sail to the