This Christmas we celebrated in Farmington.

This is a quick video of a boat off Cape Horn sailing under storm jib alone.   Just a simple day at sea.

 And yes, the camera always makes the waves seem smaller.

Only my son John would give me a website for Christmas!

One trip I have always wanted to do is a classic one: Sailing around Cape Horn. I had thought of going from East to West, but after a bit of research decided on a trip from Punta Arenas through the Staits of Magellen and around the Isla de Hornos from West to East.

It looks like a simple little rock, one that you might see off the coast of Maine, or Britainny. The difference is that it is at the end of the world and has for centuries represented the pinnacle of a sailing challenge.

The date is set for March – April 2008. The boat will be skippered by a colleague from the NYYC. And I will be looking forward to telling you more as the planning continues.

The Area and the Islands

In 1992, after a big push to finish out the boat, putting in electronics and unexpectedly at the last moment, putting in a new engine, Commotion was ready to head to Newport and then on to Bermuda.

Every other year there is a simple race. Marblehead to Halifax. It is 400 miles and is generally done in about 3 days depending on the wind. And the fog. And Navigator.

It is a race we would end up doing three times – first on Finesse and then two more times on Commotion, getting a little better each time and even winning our class one year.

This year the boat was Finesse, a C&C 38 I bought in 1990 to get back into racing. The crew was somewhat seasoned and generally enthusiastic consisting of Mark Madison, Godfrey, John, Will Blackall, Todd Drake, Jay Karas and Peter Deary. The trip was fairly simple, race to Halifax, spend the evening and then leave the boat for the boys to bring back to Marblehead.

On the way we had nice wind for the initial crossing, no wind off the southern tip of Nova Scotia and then too much wind closing Halifax in the afternoon.

How many times can a C&C 38 broach under spinnaker when it blows 35 knots and most of the crew are new to the boat? More then once is the answer but we made it into town in one piece.

Halifax is an amazing maritime city and worth noting for the 18th century citadel that overlooks the harbor, as well as the maze of interconnected bars that make up the 5 Fisherman light night entertainment complex. Needless to say I left the boys with Will Blackall running into old school mates and wondering how they were going to be feeling when they set out on the delivery home the next day.

Why? Because when you are asked to look at something you truly believe in, you should. What? The Governor’s Commission on Tax Reform. Not necessarily the most exciting area, but definitely one most everyone cares about.

It was 1972 and I was asked by Governor Thomas Meskill if I would chair the commission.

While not the easiest project I’ve worked on, we managed to keep the state income tax out of CT until the late 90s.

In 1959, four years out of Business School, and after 1 short year as a consultant at Arthur D. Little, 3 years of trying to get VenCap, a startup venture fund, to have a hit, I took a position offered by one of our principal investors, Oliver R. Grace.

The company was called Andersen Laboratories, was based in West Hartford, CT, and had about 30 people, mostly engineers, developing circuitry for missile guidance systems.

To quote the marketing literature of the time,
“Andersen Laboratories, Inc., was founded in 1951 to meet the rapidly increasing demand for specialized high quality solid delay lines in the radar, sonar, automatic computation, missiles and rockets, nuclear, and countermeasures fields.” Seemed simple enough.

We did proposals and when potential clients were walking through we brought in friend and family to fill the workstations and we grew.

At the same time I managed to grow as well and applied to a great organization I still support today, the YPO.

Summer, 1954

In 1954 while finishing my first year of the two year program at the Business School, I roomed with a Frenchman name Gerard Fabry. Both of us faced the question of whether to use the summer break to get work experience in a consulting firm or merchant bank, or to try something different.

We decided it would be interesting to drive to Rio from Boston in a 1952 MG TD.

My father was kind enough to put up the bond that we needed to cross and I managed to get a sponsorship from the AAA to give us an the aura of officialness so critical in Central America at that time.

The deal was simple: I would use my mechanical skills to keep the car going if Gerry can manage to learn enough Spanish to get us across the borders. Amazingly we made it and had some even more amazing events along the way.

A Coup in Guatemala
The plan was to drive as far as we could through the US, Mexico, and Central America, and then put the car on a boat to go around the Darien Gap in Northern Colombia.

To this point, the trip had been fairly smooth. We had broken the leaf spring suspension and replaced it with hard wood in the Andes, which amazingly worked, although was particularly hard on Gerry when he had to walk the two days it took us to find a town with welding equipment.

We had also discovered how really different Spanish is from French, and that most people traveling across Central America don’t use trucks, not British Sports cars, but we hadn’t had any political trouble. Until Guatemala.

Castillo contra Matamoros and here are two business students driving out of the mountains at the same time. For whatever reason, the press decided we had some expertise and interviewed us for a front page article. Must have been the AAA papers.

A State Funeral in Brazil
Rio, even after a long drive, is a beautiful city. Although I wanted to sell the car and enjoy the city in a style to which it deserved, my Father would have none of it and insisted we don’t threaten the bond and ship the car back.
Haphazzardly, while we were there, the ruling president Getulio Vargas commited suicide. To our surprise, when we went to see why the crowd had gathered, we were ushered right into the mourning room to view the body and were included in the official state procession.