THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502160122
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ron Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
There's a special bond among people who have put their lives in their companions' hands.
Combat soldiers have that bond. So do circus acrobats. So do mountain climbers.
And so do small-boat sailors who cross the ocean under sail.
That's why this is a special weekend for me - the four companions with whom I safely shared a dream are here for the annual meeting of the Lively Point Sailing Club.
We're a loosely knit clan, mostly in the middle 40s except me, the club's old man of the sea. John Callander of Norfolk runs the Old Dominion University graduate center. Jim Hodges of Smithfield is a civilian engineering honcho for the Navy. Bob Lucking of Portsmouth is a department chairman at ODU. Bob Scott is a Chesapeake teacher.
We're held together mostly by our love for the sea - and our journey to Spain and back.
Actually, hundreds cross the Atlantic in small boats every year. But for people like me who think the ocean is a very big and scary place, it was a daring adventure.
And it made special friends out of the five of us who met on the water and turned a fantasy into a major moment in our lives.
For years, we had sailed little boats on the protected waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Then we heard about a cruise from Spain to the New World on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' epic voyage.
For months we talked. Then came the moment of truth. Callander bought a 20-year-old, 35-foot sailboat for $15,000 that with some work would be up to the challenge. He named her Ceilidh and said, ``Shall we go for it?'' We went for it.
We tuned up in '91 with a run to Bermuda and back. The trip was a disaster, five guys accustomed to a captain's role unable to trust anyone else at the helm. Nobody slept well, two abandoned ship at Bermuda, and those of us who completed the journey wondered whether the dream was done.
It wasn't. Callander brought us back together, and in June of '92 he and Scott sailed the Ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) to the Azores, a three-week run where they needed each other's skills to survive a series of storms.
Lucking and Callander sailed the last 1,000 miles to Spain, highlighted by an encounter with an untended ghost boat that reminded them that the ocean can be a killer.
Hodges and I joined Callander in Spain, paraded past the Columbus Monument with 130 boats from 30 countries, and set sail for the New World. Four bigger and newer boats were dismasted in storms. But we slept well off watch on the 700-mile trip to Madeira. The three of us took the Ceilidh on to the Canary Islands, a rough passage with 30-foot seas that kept us linked to safety harnesses all the way.
We made it to Las Palmas, toured the topless beaches with other swaggering sailors, and then Callander and Hodges brought the Ceilidh back to Columbus' first landfall in the Bahamas, a 36-day trip.
It was an emotional reunion when all of us gathered for the first time after the voyage. It was marvelous last fall when we met at Callander's new home on the Eastern Shore, the winds and the seas getting worse - and our wives getting more bored - as we relived the journey.
Those waves off the Canaries probably will grow to 50 feet before this weekend is over, since we tend to treat our trip and our relationship rather boisterously.
Sometimes, though, mellowed by grog, we'll admit there's a special kinship among us, five people who learned to sleep through raging seas while a shipmate kept the Ceilidh afloat.
And we'll agree that Callander picked the perfect name for our ship. To his Scottish ancesters, Ceilid means ``a gathering of friends.'' by CNB