Sailing Comes Naturally

by Scott Murray, SEA Yachting Magazine

 

 

The dude has taken 50,000 people
sailing. 50,000. Really. So guess what?
He’s learned how to deal with people
on boats and how to sail boats.

So who’s the dude, it’s Captain Tim
McMahon of Gulf Charters, who surprise,
surprise, hails from a sailing family, and has
been around boats all his life. His paternal
grandfather was the chief engineer for the
Alaska Steamship Company, and he navigated the waters up from Seattle through the Northwest Passage into Alaska. In his spare
time he was devoted to a 150-ft steam-powered
car ferry he had converted into a party boat
called the Virginia V.

Tim’s dad caught the sailing bug too,
possessing a steam-powered dory, with a
wood-fired steam engine in the Puget Sound
area. His dad even built a crib for Tim in the
bow of that boat, where he used to sit in his
sailor’s suit. When Tim was 4, his family up
and moved to Maine and that’s where he
became familiar with the boat he grew up with,
a 19-ft O’Day sailing yacht.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tim spent some teenage summers
working on a fishing boat, and eventually
meandered to Arizona, where he fell in love
with and married a Japanese exchange student
named Naomi, who had been studying at the
University of Arizona. He had an epiphany
while doing desert landscaping in Tucson. To
hear Tim tell it, he was standing in the back of a
pick-up truck in a dump unloading a truckload
of prickly pear cactus when a voice said there
must be a better way.

So off to Hawaii the couple
fled, where Tim quickly fell in love with the
ocean again, and against his better judgment
bought Houhere – which now sits off the coast of
Koh Samui. She’s a 42ft New Zealand-built
Kauri, which was constructed in 1939.

 

He later cruised the Pacific in her for seven years. When
he bought her, she needed a lot of work, so he set
out to make some cash, so he could refit her and
live out his dream of circumnavigating the world
with his wife, Naomi. (Tim still says that Houhere
is the most beautiful boat he’s ever sailed, but
remember he’s a timber-boat person).
Houhere is actually a famous boat in
New Zealand; she’s a heavy weather offshore
sailing boat, which was built by its designer
Arthur Robb for the Auckland-Tasmania Race.

 

Tim says, “There’s no room down below, she
was designed to sail wet; give her the worst
conditions imaginable and that’s when she’s
happy.” There’s even a whole chapter of her in
the book, Little Ships written by Ronald Carter
and published in 1948. The wood with which
she’s built is called Kauri timber, and this is
among the best boat-building timber in the
world, but unfortunately the Kauri forests were
depleted during WW11. Kauri only grows in
northern New Zealand and is the second tallest
tree in the world, the first being the Sequoya, but
it takes forever to grow.

 

 

Tim attended the Pacific Maritime Academy and
earned his Merchant Marine ticket, allowing him to drive
commercial boats. Then at 23, he became the lead captain
for JADA Yacht Charters, a company which owned three
classic timber yachts. One of the boats was called Teragram,
which is Margaret spelled backwards. The boat was built
for Margaret Hilton in 1910. (Teragram’s unfortunate
demise is a whole other story).

Timwas in charge of hiring all the crew and
skippers for the other two boats (if you couldn’t tie a
bowline, you were quickly thanked for applying and
shown the door). He did day trips from Keehi Lagoon to
Waikiki Beach daily, seven miles each way, twice a day
with all three boats. As Tim recalls, “This is where I got my
sailing experience -it  was in and out every day, rain or
shine, no excuses, 50 people standing on the dock, there
was no such thing as “We can’t go’”.

Tim was prone to showmanship early in his sailing
life. Here’s an example of what he used to tell his passengers
on those tours in Hawaii: “Good Morning, Ladies &
Gentlemen, this is Captain Tim; I'll be your captain today.
Before, we get underway; there are a few things we have to go
over. First of all, I'd like to draw your attention to these lines
going round the boat, these are called life lines, which are
designed to give you safety and balance as you walk around
the boat. They are not, however, designed to take your full
body weight. If you forget what I just said, and you lean
against them and they break, would you be kind enough to
yell out your name as you go over the side, that way, we can
take you off the ship’s manifest as the Coast Guard likes us
to return with the same numbers we go out with.”

 

This went on for seven years. Houhere was moored
nearby in Keehi Lagoon, and on days off Tim & Naomi
would take her out sailing. The original intention was just
do some day sailing, but then they realized that she could
take anything they threw ather. This was cinched when he
took her on a trip up to Homer, Alaska, confirming that she
was indeed a great offshore boat.

While in Hawaii, Tim started doing deliveries,
which at age 23 was a pretty cool thing to do. He returned
many boats from the 2750-mile Trans-pac Race, whose crew
had sailed downwind from California to Hawaii and didn’t
want to make the return voyage, which was a lot tougher as
you had to sail from Honolulu, take a left around Diamond
Head and head north 1,000 miles before you could even
think of approaching California, which you did at around
40N where the westerlies filled in. Then you took arightand
closed for the west coast, as Tim recalls.

Tim also did deliveries to Guam &
Fiji, stopping in places along the way like
Midway & Johnson Atoll, a chemical burning
facility.

Tim and Naomi did a complete
restoration of Houhere, stripping her bare and
refurbishing her. The only thing they didn’t
change was the engine. Naomi was very hands
on with the restoration, doing all the canvas
work, and helping with the varnishing. Then
when Tim turned 30, he and Naomi set out on
a two-year circumnavigation of the world.

All their friends were skeptical of the voyage except
for Ben Thompson, who lived on his boat Ala
Wai next to Tim in Keehi Lagoon and helped
him design the interior of Houhere. The day
before Tim left, Ben congratulated him for
living his dream, saying he was one in a million
to do so. That’s been the basis of his life ever
since.

The couple’s two-year circumnavigation ended up being a seven-year sojourn in
the Pacific, including a year spent in Saipan.
They were waylaid easily, every time they
would go somewhere, someone
would say “Have you been
there?” and so they meandered –
A LOT!!

 

 

 

For example, when they
got to Tonga, they had charts for
the middle group of islands,
Nieafu, and planned to spend a
month there. But the couple
ended up sailing there for 4
months, visiting the north and
south group as well – which they
didn’t originally have charts for.

The philosophy quickly
changed from “Hey, we’ve got to run around
the world to we don’t know when we will be
back here, and so what’s the point in rushing
through it.” And as time went on it became
less important for them to hurry back to the
lives they had led before. The longer they
stayed out on the ocean, the more self reliant
they became. Naomi became a great crew and
what ever the weather or sea conditions never
failed to get the meals prepared. She pulled
her weight and was a great sailing companion.

Alas, when Tim planned the trip from
Hawaii, he hadn’t bought any charts past
Thailand, so they had planned to stop here
and recharge the couple’s batteries. The trip
has taken them from Hawaii across the Pacific
to Fiji, Japan, the Philippines around the
Straits of Malacca to Phuket. Unfortunately,
their relationship didn’t last, and Naomi left
Tim in Phuket, where he went on to skipper
Seraph for Mark Horwood and then Phil
Harper, before becoming a partner and the
head of Gulf Charters Sailing School.
What a life.