HOW can I tell the story of Clair de Lune? How can one old timber sailboat cause so much emotion?
This story is a rescue mission, an impractical, expensive adventure that we simply felt compelled to do. The restoration of a very special sailboat. In contemplating such a task, we were, as Spock from Star Trek would say, “irrational, illogical human beings.”
BACKGROUND
When my husband Don was ten, his father Bill White started building Clair de Lune in Vancouver, Canada. She was launched before he turned sixteen and he inherited her at eighteen upon his father’s sudden passing.
In the summer of 1977, aged 24, Don started a four year world circumnavigation, which I joined him in when we met on South Molle Island in Queensland. We completed the…