The Seafair Sedan That Started It All

I sold my 53-foot Gulfstar motorsailer a little while ago.

- Tom Neale

I hated selling her, and I miss her dearly. But the idea is to get a boat that’s smaller and much faster. We’re no longer raising and educating a family aboard, so we’re looking hard to find just what we want.

I’ve bought and sold many boats since my first one in the 1950s. I know by now that each phase of life finds you wanting different boats. If you know just what you want, it can be relatively easy, but often it isn’t easy to know just what you want. Once upon a time, however, I knew exactly what I wanted.

I had already owned lots of boats. They were all wood — most of them pine — and they did what pine boats do so well: They rotted. But I saw hope. I read all the boating magazines I could get my hands on, and I’d been reading about this magical stuff called fiberglass. I couldn’t believe it was true, but the magazines and the folks who’d been out and about in the world said it was. Fiberglass boats seemed the answer to my prayers.

I’d only had open skiffs, although I had built plywood cabins on the bows of several of them. But I could sleep in those cabins and “go inside,” out of the rain. I liked the idea of a cabin boat, and I knew I’d like the idea of a fiberglass boat. I really wanted a fiberglass yacht with a cabin. I read avidly about them. Unlike the other teenage boys who were “only reading the stories” in their favorite magazines, I was also looking at the pictures. I was in lust … but with the 18-foot Glasspar Seafair Sedan.