Magazine editor and former boat show promoter Georgs Kolesnikovs still remembers his first sight of Passagemaker, the legendary vessel that launched in 1963 and helped inspire the modern recreational trawler.
It was 1996, and the boat was moored in a harbor in Baltimore while her then owner underwent cancer treatment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Kolesnikovs, who was organizing a boat show in nearby Solomons Island, Md., drove north to Baltimore with a get-well card for the owner.
RON MONTAGUEPassagemaker sits "on the hard" in Trinidad."Even at 100 yards it's a distinctive-looking boat, even to this day," he recalled.
He sat down on a nearby bollard and told the woman who is now his wife, "I'm overcome by emotion. For me this was the boat. This was like Henry Ford's Model T, the boat that started it all," Kolesnikovs said."That's why it had such an impact on me."
Six years later, Kolesnikovs, who is now 65 and a magazine editor living in Canada, heard through the grapevine that the boat had been sold, and that the new owner was a bit down on his luck. Passagemaker had been pulled out of the water and was now "on the hard" at a boatyard in Trinidad. The boat was up for sale.
Although he knew he wasn't destined to buy the boat for himself – "God didn't intend for me to own a wooden sailboat" he quips – he was inspired to launch a fundraising effort to buy and save the boat, called Friends of Passagemaker. He hoped to restore the boat and to headquarter her in a maritime museum.
But saving this bit of history, he found, would not be easy.
CAPT. ROBERT BEEBE
Until Passagemaker was built in 1963, Kolesnikovs explains, most ocean voyaging was either done by sailboat or large motor yachts outfitted with large crews. While sailors have circled the globe for centuries, the first man to circumnavigate the globe in a motor yacht was a Chicago industrialist named Albert Gowen, who bounded the globe in 1921-22 in a 98-foot boat called Speejacks with a crew of nine, outfitted with machine guns and rifles.
Captain Robert Beebe, a naval officer and boat designer, changed all that. He believed that amateurs – even a middle-aged couple – could travel the world with speed and comfort if they did so under power.
MYSTIC SEAPORT, DANIEL S. GREGORY SHIPS PLANS LIBRARYCapt. Robert Beebe He ultimately designed a boat he called Passagemaker that, as Kolesnikovs explained, that would allow voyagers to "travel across oceans in comfort, safety and dispatch" piloting the boat, if they wanted, in a robe and slippers.
Beebe, born in 1909, was an Army brat whose love of boats was cemented during his childhood growing up in the Phillipines, when his father was stationed there as commander of the garrison on the island of Zamboanga.
"I don't think one day passed that we were not out on those marvelous, clear, tropic waters right out in front of our quarters," he wrote in his book, "Voyaging Under Power," first published in 1975. The third edition of the book, revised by James F. Leishman, was published in 1994 by International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press.
"I have never forgotten those days and have been a tropics buff ever since, and a boat nut as well. In a dugout canoe my brother and I, together with some of the neighboring kids, fought more pirates, found more buried treasure, and raised more mysterious shores than any kid today possibly could," Beebe wrote.
He ultimately entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, graduating in 1933, with a first posting to Hawaii, where he conceived the plans for his first sailboat. But it was during World War II that his avocation as boat designer really blossomed. He was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, one of the largest ships in the world. As ship's navigator, he occasionally had downtime, and he whiled away the hours designing boats on sheets of discarded drafting paper.
It was during that time he conceived the idea for a boat he called a "post war cruiser" powered by fuel not wind. This new kind of motor yacht would open up new, speedier routes for ocean voyagers above and beyond the narrow lanes of trade winds used by sailboats.
However, it wasn't until long after the war, when he retired from active duty in 1962, when he was able to find the time and the funding to built his dream creation. Work on Passagemaker began in January of 1962.
The 50 foot boat had a waterline length of 46 feet, 6 inches; a beam of 15 feet; and a draft of 5 feet, 4 inches. She weighed 27 tons and could cruise at 7.5 knots. Passagemaker had a long keel and an ample stern cabin, a small pilot house and elaborate rigging – a ketch design, fitted with paravanes – that would keep the boat sailing smoothly. The single engine was a Ford 330 HP, fitted with an oversized, fixed propeller, and tankage to hold 1,200 gallons of fuel.
PASSAGEMAKER IS BORN
She sailed from the builder's yard in Singapore on March 18, 1963. After rushing to finish and trying to avoid a gathering monsoon in the Indian Ocean, she sailed smoothly through the Pacific, the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean, making it to Rhodes, Greece, in keeping with the six-week schedule, according to Beebe's book.
