I grew up on the water. Vladivostok, the Sea of Japan, late 1960s. My parents worked, so my summers from the age of eight or nine were spent at the public beach — first learning to swim, then learning the platforms: three metres, then five, then ten. I still remember how high the ten looked.
At fourteen I joined a spelunking club whose older members turned out to be inventors. In 1977 they built one of the first windsurfing boards in Vladivostok. A paraglider followed; then a skateboard. Flying never appealed; windsurfing did. By sixteen I was on the local yacht club's windsurfing team and crewing on an 11-metre cruising catamaran in Peter the Great Bay.
The competitive results came on the windsurfer. Second place in the Soviet Far East championship — enough to put me on the Far East team for a national regatta in Leningrad sponsored by Катера и яхты, the Soviet maritime magazine. The starting line had members of the Olympic team on it. I have not raced at that level since. The catamaran was the opposite of all that: long, slow cruises through the islands of Peter the Great Bay.
The first lesson: October, two miles offshore
In 1977 a few of us in the club pooled what we had and bought a six-oar yal — a seaworthy ship's boat rigged with a split-lug sail on a single mast. That October, while we were relocating her at the end of the season, we capsized about two miles offshore. The hull settled half a foot underwater. There were six of us aboard.
In summer it would have been an easy swim. In mid-October it was not. We sent our strongest swimmer ashore, and the rest of us hung onto the hull while hypothermia and cramp argued for our attention. We got lucky. A handful of local fishermen had been on the beach earlier and had noticed our sail without paying it any attention — and noticed when the sail was no longer on the horizon. They launched two motorboats. Roughly forty-five minutes after the boat went over, we were aboard them. That was the first real safety lesson of my life.
The second lesson: my wall of shame
The next summer I earned the entry that still leads my wall of shame. We took the same yal on a week-long cruise around the local islands. I was the youngest aboard but in charge of the sailing and the safety of the crew. We anchored off an uninhabited island and stern-tied to shore. While we slept in a tent on the beach the wind shifted, and the boat was washed onto the rocks. None of us was ever in real danger. The yal was repaired. She was never the same boat again. I think about that anchoring decision often.
Seattle, the Gorge, and the 19-foot Cobalt
After I emigrated to the United States in the late 1980s I went back to windsurfing — first off the rocks at Elliott Bay, near what is now the Olympic Sculpture Park, and then, when I had outgrown what Seattle had to offer, on the Clatskanie and finally in the Columbia Gorge near Hood River. The Gorge is where I learned what windsurfing actually is.
By the mid-1990s I was chartering out of Anacortes for family weeks in the Gulf Islands and the southern fringes of Desolation Sound. For a few years I owned a 19-foot Cobalt with a Volvo Penta inboard and took her, against most reasonable advice, as far as Nanaimo, the Discovery Islands, and Princess Louisa Inlet. I will not forget the face of the US Customs officer who asked where I was coming from on one of those returns. I said Princess Louisa. She looked at me. She looked at the boat. She looked at me again. I do not know whether she thought I was lying or simply mad. Size matters in those waters. The Cobalt was seaworthy enough; fuel range was the limit, which is why I never reached Desolation Sound on my own boat. More than once I could not get across the Strait of Georgia at all and ended up spending three days in Pender Harbour instead.
Credentials and recent passages
Living in Estonia in the second half of the 2010s, I decided to make the paperwork match the experience and earned both IYT and Estonian skipper certifications. Since then I have sailed with friends on a 95-foot yacht in the Caribbean and from Naples down the Amalfi Coast, and every summer I am invited on a 72-foot motor yacht for the Seattle-to-Desolation-Sound run that my own boat could never quite make.
Why this site, why now
I registered sea.net in 1994 — the year I learned what a domain name was. For nearly three decades it sat dormant while the rest of life took its turn. Semi-retired now, I am finally building the site I have meant to build since the year I bought it.
The cruising knowledge worth writing down is the kind nobody tells you until you have already learned it the hard way. Sea.net is where I write down what I would have wanted to read first.
— Igor Klimenkoff
Seattle · editor@sea.net