Jim Sharp - With Reckless Abandon: Memiors of a Boat-Obsessed Life

Mulling over the almost twenty years since my retirement, I have become rather philosophical about the surprising outcome of my career. Had I not been shut down, it may have meant several more wrenching years negotiating the sale of my Adventure to a strange hand. Any new operator would have had to be a very special person to satisfy the likes of me. As it was, Meg and I had time to become a couple and get comfortable with each other. I bought a ring for her pretty finger in 1990 in Bangkok on an exciting world voyage aboard a Russian freight and passenger ship. We were married a year later, emotions soaring, on the top of Mount Battie overlooking Camdens spectacular Penobscot Bay on a spanking, crystal-clear Maine day.

We have since traveled, cruised, and visited many lands all over this Earth, boated together through almost every canal, river, and lock on the European continent, and navigated through hundreds of waterways in and around these United States. Meg still insists that if I had two good legs, she would never have been able to keep up. What a mate! My two sons, of whom I am boastfully proud, have gone West to seek their own fortunes. Topher became a respected doctor at Stanford University Hospital and was married to a beautiful Hungarian gal, also a doctor, in the medieval Castle of Vesprem, Hungary, on Mothers day, 2002. Strangely, that was the same day sister Chris passed away in North Carolina. The two docs recently honored us with our first grandchild, a hale and hearty little girl. Zeb is (like his Pop) a free spirit, hiking with his dog, bursting through snowdrifts on a snowboard, biking over the mountains, and working in security for the University of Nevada.

As for Sharps Wharf, the twenty-some rentals I had created for my retirement reduced me from shipwright to landlord. It became more of a chore and a bore, much less fun than when wed been banging and crashing with the dooryard filled full of a variety of vessels so I sold it in 1997. Of course, I am still addicted to the sea and run the Maine, my 44-foot lobster boat type yacht from Camden in summers. In winter, were usually aboard the Funky-Old-Thing, a 47-foot shoal-draft river trawler, in Southern waters.

Although I am now more than three score and ten and leaning hard on my cane and my dear wife, I realize that my early retirement at fifty-five years was a blessing. The post-polio syndrome (early deterioration of the nerve cells destroyed by my polio) was setting in at that time and the legs were already starting to weaken. It was time to hand the opportunity over to the younger generation. The big-schooner business, no matter how you slice it, takes a vast amount of energy and is taxing even for the able.

However, in looking back over fifty years of schoonering and messing about in boats, I come off with a wondrous feeling of contentment. I think I have never been happier except, perhaps, on one of those bygone summer days when standing proudly at the wheel of my old Adventure with a hat full o wind in that ungodly mainsail, thumping the knots off and throwing spray all over Penobscot Bay totally infected with reckless abandon.