The Dream Chaser

It was love at first sight. She dazzled my Father and he lusted after her and pined for her for nearly a decade until she was his. She was a ship. And her name was the Dream Chaser. And for my Father she the last great love affair of his life. It is not much of an exaggeration, and certainly not for the purposes of this narration to say that, once he possessed her, he was content to die in her embrace. We carried my Father off the Dream Chaser, took him straight to the hospital, a venue from which he was never to leave and in less than a month he was gone. At his Memorial Service, as he had requested, there was a portrait of my Father, and beside him, equally large was a photo of the Dream Chaser. He and his ship. If he could have had his way, he would have preferred to die aboard her.

The Dream Chaser is a Cape Horn '65 trawler, Hull #4. She comes from sturdy stock, some might even say her roots are working class. Her forebears were fishing trawlers and commercial ships and she herself was designed to over-winter in the ice off Antarctica. And while the Dream Chaser has unquestionably great bones, her interior is all polished wood, the best appointments, refinement and glamour, undeniably a yacht for those with discriminating good taste. My Father, a man never at a loss for words, was rendered speechless when attempting to convey to others just how beautiful he thought the Dream Chaser was in his eyes. She was built in Nova Scotia, Canada, at the Theriault shipyard in 1999, so like my Father, was Canadian born, although both she and my Father ultimately became Americans. I do not think there is any detail about her that my Father had not committed to heart.

The Dream Chaser was originally commissioned by Ron and Caroline Teschkes as the ultimate family passage making trawler, and she was designed from the start to withstand and make an epic journey down the coast of South America to Cape Horn and then on to the ice floes of the Antarctica, where they intended to spend a ten-month season alone with their children. The Dream Chaser and the adventure the Teschkes planned to have aboard her was featured in a cover story in the 1999-2000 Winter Edition of PassageMaker, The Trawler & Ocean Motorboat Magazine. It was not long after the magazine came out that the Dream Chaser was put up for sale for the first time. My Father had a copy of the magazine and I am still not sure if he read the article first or actually saw the Dream Chaser first hand. Regardless, once he found out about her, he could neither stop talking about her nor get her out of his thoughts. I soon lost count of the number of times my Father spoke about the Dream Chaser. He was utterly enamored, and absolutely mesmerized by both the ship and with the idea of sailing her around the world. He spoke in glowing terms about not only the Dream Chaser, but also about the Teschke family. My parents had been divorced for decades and my Father had already gone through another marriage, his children were grown and scattered around the world, and yet in retrospect I think the Dream Chaser represented to my Father all the things that might have been. The Dream Chaser could not have been more aptly named.

In the late '90's my Father was living in Ft. Lauderdale, a stones throw from his CT 41' ketch, the Stone Raven. The Dream Chaser was being offered by Bollman Yachts, in the neighborhood, so to speak, and yacht broker John Buchanan remembers my Father making at least three and possibly four trips to see her. And when the boat was ultimately sold to the Blantons and re-christened the Jeanne B, my Father checked in with John nearly every year to see what her status was, "like clockwork".

In the years that followed, my Father's health waxed and waned. He had already had several heart attacks and bypass surgery. He suffered from congestive heart failure, his leaky valves letting almost as much blood back as they pushed through his veins and arteries. He had Type II diabetes, gout, liver and kidney problems and the number of prescriptions he took flourished and multiplied like rabbits. In the Winter of 2006-2007 my Father suffered a heart attack and this time he
did not bounce back in the same fashion as he had previously.

November dragged into December, and December into January and he was in and out of the hospital for weeks at a time.

He was recovering in Vancouver and he hated the wet and the cold and the grey and the damp. There was nothing about the view from a hospital window that he liked. To cheer him up I would bring him sailing magazines and then, one day on the internet, I found the listing for the Jeanne B, as the Dream Chaser was now called. I printed out the pages, all of the photos of the interior and exterior and took them to my Father in the hospital. It cheered him up immensely. I started doing more research online and printed out everything I could find about Cape Horn trawlers. He couldn't get enough. My Father was convinced that if he could just get on board, be bathed in sunshine and surrounded by salt water he'd be good as new in no time at all. I must confess that my primary purpose was finding a way to cheer him up and get him out of the depression I feared he was sinking into. I was hoping to get my father to agree to move into an apartment. My Father fully intended to go sailing. And around the world at that.

When my Father was out of the hospital, I was doing his grocery shopping for him, cooking for him as often as possible, walking his dog, Sarah, getting his prescriptions and when he wasn't actually in the hospital, taking him to see all kinds of doctors and specialists.

For the first time in his life my Father actually let me drive him. And not an hour in the day went by when my Father didn't say that what he really needed to get better was to be on "his" boat as he began to refer to the Jeanne B, although he called her the Dream Chaser. And my Father began to suggest that what I really needed to do was to sail around the world with him. Knowing that any such an endeavor inevitably meant that I'd be nursemaid, cook and galley slave in addition to my duties as "First Mate" I demurred as graciously as possible. My Father was undeterred. ...more