Schooner Mahdee // Bootstrap Adventure
On the Wind Sailing
Andy Schell
4.8 • 593 Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2015
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
#87. Andy spoke with Brenda of the schooner Mahdee, which is currently berthed in California. Brenda and her husband David got inspired to go sailing in their college years while on a cycling trip around Lake Superior. Eating from a camp stove, they looked at a sailboat on the lake and thought, 'that's how we ought to travel!'
Years went by, and Brenda and David traveled all over the world following his career as a Navy Pilot while Brenda picked up Engineering jobs. Finally, in 2006, their dream came true when they bought and begant the lengthy restoration of the classic 1931 schooner Mahdee. Since launch, they've cruised the west coast as far as Alaska, and are full-time liveaboards, having sold everything ashore to follow their dream. Check out Mahdee's transformation on blog.mahdee.com.
Their latest project is Bootstrap Adventure (bootstrapadventure.com), where they're attempting to create a marketplace for outdoor adventurers to buy and sell gear, knowledge and experience.
Want to go ocean sailing with Andy? Book a berth on 59-north.com/events.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is Anna Vinners, live from Sweden. |
| 0:02.8 | Welcome back to the 59 North Sailing podcast with your host, Andy Schell. |
| 0:07.0 | Enjoy the show. |
| 0:08.8 | Greetings, and welcome back to the 59 degrees north podcast. |
| 0:13.3 | I am your host, Andy Schell, and this is episode number 87. |
| 0:17.3 | Big thanks to Weems and Plath, our sponsor again this week. |
| 0:21.2 | I have a neat little origin story about Weems and Plath. |
| 0:23.8 | They have a really cool history going on almost 100 years now. |
| 0:27.3 | But back in May of 1919, eight years before Charles Lindbergh's famous solo flight, |
| 0:33.1 | three small planes set out from Newfoundland in Canada, |
| 0:36.3 | heading for London in an attempt to make |
| 0:38.1 | the first transatlantic flight. |
| 0:40.3 | Only one of them made it. |
| 0:41.3 | 2,500 feet below, on board a station tracking ship, a young navigator, Lieutenant Commander |
| 0:47.3 | Philip Van Horn Weems, familiar name, from the US Navy, gazed up and thought there must |
| 0:53.8 | be a safer and simpler way |
| 0:55.5 | than using a small armada of ships as navigation beacons for the flight. So, a neat little way of how |
| 1:02.9 | Weems and Plath got started and, of course, got into Celestial Navigation and started navigation |
| 1:07.3 | tools and all that other stuff. Peter Trogden, who is the current steward of Williams and Plath, is constantly coming out with new stuff. I was in his office a couple weeks ago in Annapolis and he showed me some of the prototypes, one of which is a pair of binoculars that they've brought out to compete directly with names like Steiner and Fujianan. So Wimson Plath has this really slick pair of binoculars. I've got my hands |
| 1:28.3 | on a pair of them that I'm taking with me on the Caribbean trip in a couple weeks. So I'll have a |
| 1:33.1 | full report on how those work. But check out the binoculars and all the stuff that weems and |
| 1:38.1 | plath sells at weems dash plath.com. Again, that's weems dash plath.com. And thanks very much to Peter and his team at |
... |
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