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At the time Gauthier
took ownership, the mooring was rented to a tenant whose boat, a 65-foot
Malahide North Sea Polar Bear Class trawler named Ursa Major, was
being refitted in a nearby yard. The tenant left for California, planning
to return in the fall to take Ursa Major to California. Gauthier
volunteered to oversee the work and made arrangements for the boat to
be moved from the yard to her mooring. During the course of the summer,
her sister Cami Cash, who had minimal marine experience, moved onboard
to help workmen finish the project.
Fast-forward to 1997.
Ursa was still under renovation on Lake Union when the tenant fell
ill and ended up in the ICU, unable to make payments on the boat. Repossession
ensued, and the tenant, now Gauthier’s close friend, was too sick
to handle the subsequent legal battle. So, to get Ursa Major back,
Gauthier agreed to buy Ursa on the condition that the tenant would
buy it back from her when he fully recovered. Only he never fully recovered,
and suddenly the beautiful moorage she’d fallen in love with that
glorious Sunday seemed like a mistake of gargantuan proportions. “I
legally took hold of the Ursa Major in 1997,” Gauthier told
me, “but I didn’t emotionally accept her until 1999. It was
too big for my needs, and I didn’t really have the ability to pay
for it. It was tough.”
Gauthier established
January 1, 1999 as a “drop-dead date,” at which time she’d
decide to either sell the Ursa Major and cut her losses or keep
her and put her into charter. “That New Year’s Eve was a real
struggle for me. On the one hand, it was my sister’s home still,
and I didn’t want to leave her homeless. On the other hand, I had
absolutely no idea how to operate a charter business and didn’t want
to go broke in the process.”
That same night, she
happened upon a book entitled The Hidden Coast: Kayaking from Alaska to
Mexico. She flipped through the first chapter about Alaska’s Prince
William Sound and, as she says, “realized I was too old for this
kind of sleep-with-the-bears, adventure kayaking, but thought I could
do it with a support boat.” Her decision was made: She’d turn
Ursa Major into a charter yacht, to fulfill her own dream of adventure
kayaking. She says, “Today, when I think of my boat, I think of a
kayak; the Ursa’s just a really big kayak. Kayaking is still part
of my dream, and Ursa helps me achieve that dream by taking me to places
I can explore by kayak.”
Gauthier spent the summer
of 1999 overseeing the seemingly endless refit work and testing while
Cash found work as a crew member onboard Ursa’s sistership, the 60-foot
Malahide Explorer. Ursa’s first charter season was the summer
of 2000. Cash brought the experience she gained aboard Explorer and served
as crew, Gauthier took care of the “business end of things”
and hired a captain. Gauthier recalls, “Being the new kid on the
block and with the southeast Alaska cruising grounds so inundated by the
cruise ship industry,” Ursa had only five charters that summer.
Next page >
Part
3: “The history was out there, in different minds, in bits
and pieces, we just had to find it.” > Page 1,
2, 3, 4
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