We recently re-discovered the picture above in one of our albums. It has a date written on the back of October 23, 1980. That's the day that Doug Crowe launched his new Blackwatch for the first time at Lake Meredith in the Texas Panhandle. I was invited to show up and help rig the boat and get her launched. Only thing was, when I got to the ramp, about 10 people were already "heppin" (that's what we call a surfeit of "help" in Texas)! A bit much for an 18' boat. So instead, I went walking the marina docks, seeing what other trouble I could get into. That was to be one of the most fateful walks of my life.
As I got toward the end of one dock, my friend Jay Jones, the other guy in the picture, was motoring out of the marina in his Ranger 26. There was quite a crowd onboard, and of course catching my eye were a couple of young women in bikinis (must have been a warm October). That was incentive enough, when Jay started yelling for me to jump aboard and swung close to the dock, to run down the dock and take a flying leap onto the boat.
As soon as I got aboard and got a closer look, it was obvious the bikini-clad sweeties were about 15 years old. Uh-oh. But there were a couple of older girls about Jay's and my age, both of them were kinda cute, and for some reason, the short-haired one really caught my eye. Their story was: Susan had gotten her friend Deb, the cute short-haired one, out of bed the previous Saturday to look at furniture, only to find that Jay had recently moved his sailboat shop into the location of a former furniture store. So they chatted with Jay, lied, and said of course they knew how to sail. Jay suspected the lie, but hey, they were cute girls, so the invitation was extended and here they were, heading out for a sail.
So we sailed, chatted, and eventually came back to dock, released the 15-year-old girls and their male friend, and the four of us, Jay, Susan, Deb and I, headed back out. As we literally sailed into the sunset, it got cooler, we paired off, and the girls snuggled up close. Kinda romantic, huh? By the time we headed back to the dock, it already felt like I had known this girl Debbie all my life, and I knew there was something special between us. Jay and Susan hit it off well enough to have a few dates, but it never really sparked between them. Deb and I had many dates (one of which was a frostbite regatta on Dave Autry's Blackwatch) and were married five months later.
Epilogue: The only somewhat sad thing about this was, in March the next year, Debbie got a new job away off in Beaumont. That left me with a hard decision; I loved working at Bluewater Boatworks but didn't really want a long-distance relationship. There's something pretty cool about being able to say "I'm a boatbuilder," especially when the boats are something as special as the Blackwatch, and the Bluewater crew were a great bunch of guys. But when Deb eventually asked if I would go with her, love won out, and I replied, "not as your boyfriend, only as your husband." So we got married at the Justice of Peace on a Wednesday night; on Thursday morning a lot of the guys from Bluewater Boatworks took off work (thanks, Dave!) and made short work of loading the U-Haul, and we started our grand adventure of marriage by moving clear across the state of Texas. Tough to say goodbye, and a part of me definitely wishes I could have had stuck it out with Bluewater Boatworks to its eventual end, but 26 years later, not a decision I've ever regretted. I might have never had the choice, though, without the indirect role of a pretty little sailboat called a Blackwatch.
