Boats and Their People: An Undefinable Something

The year is 1966, in the heart of Orange County, California, when White Seal is laid up in fiberglass, by hand, at the Jansen Marine Yacht Yard. Fresh off the production line at the height of a booming marine industry, the boat’s gelcoat and varnish shine under the Costa Mesa sun. The company is performance sailboat builder’s Cal Yachts. The boat is Cal 36 hull No. 27, designed by Bill Lapworth—the slightly smaller sister ship to the venerable Cal 40, the cutting-edge ocean race boat of the era. With its spade rudder and relatively light construction, the design is nothing short of revolutionary.

Three thousand miles across the country, Charlie Langworthy is 13 years old and skipping rocks on the shores of Shelburne Shipyard in Vermont’s Champlain Valley. The long winter has finally thawed, and Charlie is working for his father’s Lake Champlain charter business for an obscenely low wage. Despite the labor rights violations, Charlie laps it all up.

Charlie’s father, who was integral in establishing Lake Champlain as a sailing center, founded Lake Champlain’s very first charter business on the Burlington, Vermont, waterfront with a 19-foot daysailer. He would go on to own several boats for charter between 1963 and 1975, at which point Charlie, at 22, demanded to be paid an equal amount to the mate his father hired from a classified ad placed in the back of a sailing magazine.

Fast forward to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1984. It’s been almost a decade since Charlie’s father sold off the last piece of the charter business, a 41-foot schooner that Charlie himself captained down to this very port. That time, he’d delivered his father’s boat to the south Florida city to sell. This time, he was there to buy a boat of his own.

Charlie had been squirreling away his earnings from boat deliveries, boat repair and maintenance jobs, sailmaking, and a very short stint in receiving at the IBM headquarters where he learned how to invest what humble earnings he had into the stock market for nearly a decade. He cashed in.

White Seal was the first boat he saw. Charlie liked the lineage; he knew Cal Yachts and the Bill Lapworth design. He made an offer, and the boat was his. Forty years later, White Seal still is.

While some things never change, like the old-style depth sounder with a spinning disk that lights up at different depths, Charlie has made continuous upgrades to the vessel over the last four decades.