Escapes
A U G U ST 2 0 2 0
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IF YOU
COULD
BE ANYONE, BE YOU. AND BE
A
S A I L O R , T O O . //
ALL ABOARD
W
CHANGING WINDS
Sailing for Everyone
AN ANCIENT RITE, MADE ACCESSIBLE TO ALL
Story by Christie Matherne Hall • Photos by Emily Kask
After restoring a fifty-foot ketch-rigged sailboat and transporting it via towboat escort on a six-day journey across the Intracoastal Waterway, David Lewis was ready to launch his inclusivity-conscious sailing charter company, All Aboard NOLA last spring. With the rise of COVID-19 though, the company waited until the summer to begin operations, and is now offering private excursions. 48
A U G 2 0 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
“A
s a civilization, we’ve basically d o n e . . . everything we’ve ever done, by sailing,” said David Lewis, founder of the Pontchartrain’s newest sailing charter company, All Aboard NOLA. With a mission to provide a sailing experience and–– eventually––sailing instruction to everyone, Lewis hopes to reach people who might have never been in the right room to receive a sailing invitation. He thinks sailing should be in everyone’s bucket—not just people who run in certain circles or have the money to buy a boat, or kids who go to certain schools, or people of certain races or genders, or heterosexuals. If someone hasn’t ever been invited to sail, for whatever reason, through All Aboard NOLA, he wants to invite them. After twelve months of restoring the Mai Tai Two, his fifty-foot ketchrigged sailboat, Lewis’s dream really started taking shape in January of this year, with more renovations always underway. But first, the Mai Tai Two had an important voyage to make, from Patterson, Louisiana—where she had been languishing for nearly a quarter century—to her new home on Lake Pontchartrain, via the Intracoastal Waterway. Restoring an old sailboat, however beautiful and fulfilling, is an enormous effort. Lewis is a former gunner’s mate of the U.S. Navy, so he is what he calls a “boat person.” But the past year has taught him that no one can restore a fifty-foot, dual-masted sailboat on their own. Sanding baked-on varnish from the impossibly tall masts, repairing a squirrel-eaten sail the size of a living room, and siphoning wayward oil from a coolant tank required the help of anyone and everyone Lewis could find, experienced or not, willing to lend a hand–-including his fiance Laura Sanders and crewmate Mark Lucas. To make the voyage from Patterson, Lewis would once again need all the help he could get. The route involved a five-mile Mississippi River crossing, which would be especially dangerous in January’s high water. “The river is high,” Lewis explained. “But there’s no reason I can see to put it off, and every reason to
