Fuji Yachts

VENTURER: A SHORT HISTORY

By her owner : Hal Post (click on name for e-mail)

JUNE 24, 1999

My first view of the Fuji 35 sloop I have named Venturer (and have owned for over 18 years) was in Harris Harbor, Juneau, Alaska, in 1978. It was owned by a young couple who had purchased it in Seattle. I think they bought it from a Seattle Fuji salesman who had owned it for only a short time. The boat had a 1974 serial number, but wasn't actually commissioned until 1975. The boat was named Weezie's Breezie at the time, derived, I think, from the nickname of the male half of the owner couple. The first time I went aboard her was one night in Sanford Cove off a ghost village once called Sumdum, a two day sail south of Juneau where I rafted my 25' Tanzer sloop Maybe up to her and a third boat called Joie de Vie. (The next day we took the Joie de Vie and Maybe on into Ford's Terror, the only body of water in the world, to my knowledge, named "terror". But's that's another story ! ) The three of us and a fourth boat, the Spanish sloop Pepe Bandero had all paused here en route to the Little Norway Festival in Petersburg, Alaska. The couple who owned the Fuji had their new baby aboard. They had once lived aboard the Fuji in Harris Harbor, but with the arrival of the child, they had moved into an apartment in Juneau. The group made up the crews of the four sailboats had just shared a great meal of clams and whelk and king crab on the largest of the boats, the Joie de Vie, a 43 Cascade. (The Joie is now moored in New Zealand, where she traveled after our Petersburg adventure.)

It was a couple of year later, after I had moved Maybe north to Whittier, near Anchorage and had suffered through one of the wettest Alaskan summers I could remember, that I decided it was time to get a bigger boat and to keep it somewhere where the weather was more kind. My wife resists the memory, but it was she who made the comment , after I had brought Maybe through the Gulf of Alaska- "Hal, you really need a bigger boat." I started the search in Portland and maintained it all the way to Vancouver, Canada, looking for that next boat, and eventually decided on a weathered but rugged looking sloop in Seattle. It needed sanding and varnishing, but it had quality storm sails, a wind powered steering vane, an eight man survival raft, and various other devices designed to enhance survival on the open seas. I learned it had been equipped for a Hawaiian voyage, and had embarked with a crew of three for those islands, out of Seattle, but had been forced to turn back after some time on the stormy Pacific when one of the crew had become so dangerously seasick and dehydrated as to call for the abandonment of the expedition. I started negotiating with a salesman, and eventually discovered I was bargaining for the same boat I had once stepped aboard in Sanford Cove in Alaska. It was offered by the young couple in Juneau with the little baby. We struck a deal, I bought the boat, named it Venturer, and for several years moored it in the Seattle area, that marvelous water wonderland of picturesque islands and ports and passages in Washington and British Columbia.

I sailed it whenever I could get down there from my home in Anchorage, from Easter to Thanksgiving, berthing it at Lake Union, Port Hadlock, Tacoma, Bainbridge Island, Port Townsend, La Conner, Everett, and other places as costs and circumstances shifted over the years. We poked about throughout the San Juans and the Canadian Gulf Islands, both sides of Vancouver Island, tying up or dropping anchor at Bellingham, Anacortes, Sydney, Port Angeles, Neah Bay, Friday Harbor, Vancouver, Oak Harbor, Victoria, Point Roberts , Lopez and dozens of other locations.

After a couple of years of Pacific Northwest adventures, a couple of friends and I decided to do something a little different. We packed up the boat until she was low in the water and pointed her out the Straits of Juan de Fuca. hung a left about fifty miles offshore, and headed down to California waters, on our way to Hawaii. Unfortunately we were setting just a little too low in the water and after a couple of days we realized that we couldn't start the engine for battery charging. Water had been forced up the exhaust into the engine, and even with the early intervention of one the crew who knew something about diesel engines, we were unable to start it, our batteries being too low. So, we decided to go on to Hawaii anyway. And we did, until after having been lambasted by a good storm which caused us to heave to for a day, we talked it all over and decided to cancel the trip and head in to Catalina Island, off Long Beach California. It had been a twenty two day voyage, and that felt like enough at that point. We were 850 miles of the coast when we turned back.

So Venturer was berthed first at Avalon, then at Long Beach and later at Chula Vista at the very bottom of San Diego Bay. After a year or two in Southern California a group of friends and I decided to take her to Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of the Baja Peninsula, Mexico. Before heading south we decided to do a short run out to Avalon on Catalina Island just to check everything out, and while motoring in that direction the engine gave a bang and stopped. We then sailed it to the mouth of Dana Point Marina, got a tow into a berth, called a mechanic, and discovered that the engine crankshaft had broken. My insurance provided a new Perkins 4-108 40HP engine and a rebuilding of the transmission, I installed a Loran, and I took off north again to return the boat to the delightful waters of Washington. With the help of family members and various enlisted crew members, sometimes single handing it, I brought her first to San Francisco, then out to look over the Farallon Islands, off shore from San Francisco, then slowly north to Oregon, stopping almost every night at some port along the way. I ran out of time at Newport, Oregon however and left her there until a good friend and my son-in-law arranged to have her trucked back to Seattle, where she stayed for several more years, cared for by my daughter and her husband between the short times I could find time to come down and climb aboard to play with her.

In those following years she once traveled out to Barkley Sound, on the outside of Vancouver Island, as well as to exotic Princess Louisa Inlet in Jervis Sound as well as to numerous of her old haunts in the islands. She also had new deck fiberglass installed.

In the Spring of 1992 after some further improvements: a new jib and a new mainsail made by the finest sail maker in Seattle; a set of stairs mounted on the mast; a couple of solar panels, and an automatic pilot, I had her trucked to Duluth, Minnesota after enlisting in the 1992 America 500 sailing rally, organized by Jimmy Cornell. It was the five hundredth anniversary celebration of Columbus's discovery of the Americas and was scheduled to rendezvous in Spain in two separates fleets at different times, and then assemble in Grand Canaria in the Canary Islands from whence we would all take off to rediscover America. With the occasional help of a splendid cadre of friends, but most of the time single handing, I brought Venturer along the shore of Lake Superior, down into Lake Huron, and eventually into Lake Erie before dropping the mast and heading into the Erie Canal and the Hudson River.

Before heading out into the Atlantic I installed a Magellan GPS and a single sideband radio, and great quantities of groceries, after which three of us took off for Bermuda. In Bermuda the auto pilot was shipped back to the US for repairs, my two crew members left for other duties, and when the auto pilot finally returned I enlisted a young Bermudan who had never been to sea before, and we took off for the Azores, hoping to avoid any hurricanes. We did, but we didn't do so well at avoiding storms and squalls. After a pause at Horta and other Azorian islands we arrived in Spain to rendezvous with part of the America 500 fleet.

After numerous ceremonies in Spain and some repairs and replacements: a new VHF radio; some new lines; the installation of a saltwater pump; this portion of the fleet sailed first to the Madeira Islands and then to the Canaries where we joined the other squadron of the fleet which had preceded us there. (Venturer's name is actually cited on a monument which was constructed to commemorate the event in Grand Canaria.)

In mid-November, 128 sailboats carrying over six hundred crew, ranging from a ship over a hundred feet, to two which were but 24 feet (one with only an outboard motor for auxiliary power) headed west. Venturer was one of the smaller boats, but with a crew of three we still beat Columbus' time and arrived at San Salvador in the Bahamas in 30 days, well back in this stretch of ships that reached a thousand miles at times. It was one great voyage, and there was one great party in Georgetown at the end of it. Venturer had made the trip without significant difficulty beyond the loss of the auto pilot (again), and some generator trouble at the very end of the trip. ( I was enormously pleased and impressed to find that the manufacturer of the autopilot actually honored their word, and some nine months after I had purchased the device in Seattle, they accepted it back and returned every penny I'd paid for it.)

I added a new outboard motor to the dingy in the Bahamas and settled in. Venturer paused for a number of months in the Bahamas, then traveled through those shallow water islands to Florida, where I found moorage in Ft. Lauderdale for several years. At one point a passing hurricane put some water into her and she received a new starter, and a new bilge pump. On another occasion while traveling to New York and back on the Intercontinental Waterway she had her transmission overhauled, and on another occasion she had about 18 blisters sanded off her hull, and some wood work done on her lazarette covers. After a stay in the Hudson above NYC she headed back south again, spending one winter in North Carolina, and following a stretch on the outside between South Carolina and Florida I brought her into Jacksonville, where she is now moored on the hard, waiting for a new owner. I'm ready to turn her over to someone who has the time and the funds to restore her to first class condition. She's a good boat, looking for a good owner.

Hal Post June 1999