Overland Sailing and Other Adventures with Jay and Jane Stormer - An Introduction

In the months ahead, we will be featuring the recent adventures of Jay and Jane Stormer, long-time residents of the Texas gulf coast who recently moved their summer base of operations to Maine. It's a nautical odyssey that's sure to spark the imagination of any avid sailor, and may also provide a few useful insights of the sort one is happy to have without actually going through the experiences which made them possible!

But before the tales begin, a little background on the adventurers is in order.

Both came from the Northeast corner of the country, Jane from New Hampshire and Jay from northern New York State. Both trace their love of the water to early childhood experiences. Coming from an inland town, Jane didn't have many opportunities to enjoy the sea growing up, but did learn to sail on a lake in an outrigger canoe with her father. As a boy, Jay helped his father build a wooden boat, and spent a lot of time in his teenage years on his uncle's trawler yacht, a Matthews.

Jay and Jane met in college when he was a student in one of her father's classes. The day they met, she decided she would marry him. She didn't tell him this immediately, of course, but Jay must have come to a similar conclusion because within three weeks they were engaged.

Marriage followed, and immediately after that it was off to the Navy for Jay, followed by graduate school and eventually a teaching career. And somewhere in these early years they discovered their mutual love of sailing, racing a Thistle dinghy while living in Georgia.

White Tailed Tropicbird, considered the national bird of Bermuda, appears on their postage stamps and coins. It spends most of its life at sea coming ashore only to nest in Bermuda, the Bahamas and the Caribbean islands. (Peterson, 1947)

Their introduction to "Cruising" proper started in the 1970s when they discovered the joys of having friends with a boat, in this case a Swan 42 in need of a navigator for several Bahamas cruises

They eventually moved to the Houston area in 1983, arriving just ahead of Hurricane Alicia, and Jay took up his post as professor of geology at Rice University.

Continuing their tradition of developing benevolent friends with nautical connections, they were given free use of a Catalina 27. This was fun while it lasted, of course. But when their friends decided to sell the Catalina in 1986, Jane and Jay finally bought one of their own: a Pearson 365 with the optimistic name of "Tropicbird"

Jay and Jane lived aboard from 1989 through 2003 and in that time made two cruises to the Bahamas, each about a year's duration. They also had a short break ashore in Pensacola.

Which brings us to the point where they began to consider making a move to Maine. They rediscovered New England during a meeting of the Society of Accredited Marine Surveyors (SAMS) in Portland, and a week-long tour of the coast by car.

S/V TROPICBIRD at anchor in Quahog Bay, Harpswell, ME

While the thought of being in Maine was pleasing, their enthusiasm was somewhat muted by the prospect of the long trip at 4 knots from Galveston via Key West to Maine by sea. Jay had been following the saga of the Bayou Baby, which involved trucking the boat to the Great Lakes.

Then one day, just in passing, Tony Smythe of Higgins, Smythe and Hood commented to Jane about having had a boat trucked to Maine for a summer. The proverbial light-bulb went on and discussions began about the feasibility of moving Tropicbird to her new home in Maine by road.

The series will begin with the start of the 2007 cruise, which included some three months on the water, a visit from their grandson and only two days tied to a dock. Later in the series, Jay will share some details of the actual preparation and trip to Maine and will reveal some of the mysteries of decommissioning and recommissioning. We hope you'll join us for this grand adventure!