Sailor Profile By James Baldwin
Still Cruising After 80 Years
80-year-old Jim Melcher and wife Diane circle the
Atlantic on their hybrid-design leeboarder Alert.
Jim Melcher, rendered by his artist wife, Diane de Grasse.
Among the diverse stream of cruising boats passing through the port of Luperon in the Caribbean’s Dominican Republic lin 2002, one boat and her skipper stood apart from the crowd. Alert is a 33-foot Phil Bolger-designed Manatee leeboarder that stubbornly refuses to fit into any standard yacht category. Alert’s 80-year-old master, Jim Melcher, is equally unique among his fellow cruisers, virtually all of which are considerably younger and much less experienced.
Eight decades of messing about in boats has left Jim, now bespectacled, gray-bearded and rail-thin, with remarkably good health and a continuing desire to learn more about boats and the cruising life as he sails into is sunset years.
Jim has sailed since his childhood in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when he lived at his parents summer sailing camp for children on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Watching local shipwrights at work and listening to stories told by fishermen on the Cape Cod waterfront further nurtured the boy’s wanderlust and fascination with the sea. In his teens, fresh out of high school, Jim traveled west to Seattle to enroll in a boatbuilding school recommended to him by legendary boat designer Bill Garden.
World War II interrupted his schooling, but he continued his boatbuilding apprenticeship serving as ship’s carpenter in the U.S. Coast Guard in Seattle and Honolulu. After the war, he operated a salmon fishing boat out of Seattle. Some years later, he returned to Massachusetts, where he married and raised three children while re-establishing the family's Pleasant Bay Sailing Camp on the cape.
During the late 1970’s, Jim worked part-time for three years building Alert as a replacement for Triumph, his 45-foot Culler-designed leeboarder ketch. “Triumph resembled a Chesapeake Bay skipjack, but Alert is very different and possibly unique since I don’t know of any others that were built,” Jim says. Alert is a curious and unorthodox amalgamation of distinctive features which, considering her design oddities, have combined into a remarkably attractive and functional boat.
Alert and her Chinese gaff rig
Based on the 19
th century Thames River barges, she is round bilged and flat bottomed, with flat sides amidships to accommodate her outboard hung leeboards. Her present rig is another peculiar hybrid design: a tabernacle-stepped “Chinese gaff”.
Jim claims the epoxy-sheathed, strip-planked Manatee design is relatively simple to build. Alert’s boards up draft of merely 22 inches and beam under eight feet make her easy to trailer and a gunkholers delight. The flat bottom and low profile keel helps her to sit nearly upright when taking the bottom on a falling tide. For auxiliary power, Alert is fitted with a 3-cylinder 25 HP Sole diesel with offset, two-bladed folding propeller.
Fully loaded for cruising, this ultra-shallow-draft passagemaker displaces 13,000 pounds and, surprisingly, obtains sufficient stability from her six-inch square, 19-foot-long lead-ballast keel weighing just 2,800 pounds. Her designer, Phil Bolger, tells in his book
Different Boats how the stability of very shallow-draft vessels like the Manatee is quite different from that of a conventional full-bodied yacht. “(They) don’t have any buoyancy deep under water, the kind that floats up and capsizes a deep-bodied boat if her ballast keel drops off,” he writes. Unlike mainstream designers, Bolger’s design philosophy is free of the dogma of the racing-yacht form and not restricted to the Marconi rig.
Jim took advantage of Alert’s ease of trailering by hauling her cross-country to Seattle in 1983. Sailing with various crew and occasionally solo, he ventured north to British Columbia, then south to Panama, through the Canal, and among the Caribbean Islands. In the mid-1990’s, Jim single-handed Alert across the Atlantic via Nova Scotia and the Azores, circumnavigated Britain, and explored Europe’s rivers and canals as far inland as Berlin.
Alert careened on a two-foot tide for bottom cleaning.
As I boarded Alert from steps attached to the transom-hung rudder and commented on the arrangement’s simple ingenuity, Jim said those steps saved his life when an accidental jibe caused the boom to fling him overboard during a storm in the North Atlantic. His matter-of-fact declaration made it sound as though getting tossed overboard alone in mid-ocean in your 70’s is a perfectly normal occurrence.
Speaking after thousands of miles of bluewater sailing, Jim believes, “A well-designed shallow draft boat is certainly seaworthy in anything short of a hurricane and even then it’s easy to seek protection up a shallow creek. She doesn’t slog as well to windward as a deep-keeled boat, but she has the obvious advantages of shallow draft. Occasionally a leeboard gets to banging against the hull and I cushion it by jamming in a small fender. All in all she’s a very capable cruising boat.”
Alert has undergone numerous modifications in her 23 years. The first major change Jim took was to take a chainsaw to the flush deck and add a raised deckhouse. Phil Bolger disapproved of this major surgery, but the appeal of standing headroom outweighed Bolger’s aesthetic sensibilities. Jim raised the original cockpit seats to a more comfortable height for sitting. He also cut 14 inches off the trailing edges of the leeboards, which markedly improved visibility around them when stored in their upright position without noticeably harming their performance.
Jim and Diane aboard Alert in Luperon, Dominican Republic.
Down below, Alert seems cramped compared to modern beamier yachts of her length. Even so, there’s ample space for the full double berth forward, a well-appointed galley amidships, and a table with two single bunks in a main salon that’s nicely uncluttered by a centerboard trunk.
The original Marconi cat-yawl rig worked well for 14 years, but as Alert’s skipper aged, he sought a more easily handled sail plan. In 1997, Bolger designed a new rig for Alert which he called a “Chinese gaff”. He shortened the mizzen mast and converted it to a sheet staff, giving the junk rig’s multi-part mainsheet a better angle to remove excess twist from the full-battened mainsail. Though cut down three feet, the boom is still a lengthy 24 feet, and the shortened, unstayed laminated-Douglas-fir mast is 34 feet overall. A sunken well in the foredeck allows room for the base of the mast to pivot forward as it’s lowered in its tabernacle. When needed, a small working jib can be set to help balance the helm.
Back in New England four years ago, Alert’s recently divorced skipper chanced to meet, and then quickly married, Maine artist Diane de Grasse. “At my age I couldn’t afford a long courtship,” he said with a chuckle. Within months of their meeting, Diane shocked her friends and family when she quit her job as a graphic designer for a newspaper and sailed off with Jim on a honeymoon cruise to the Bahamas. “I’ve always enjoyed sailing,” Diane said. “That was my first long sailing trip, and I found I love the cruising life.” Diane uses her artist’s talents to record their travels not in photos, but in dozens of beautiful watercolor paintings.
Minimum for 12 months afloat
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