How I Learned to Sail

I learned to sail when I was 12 years old. My dad taught me. We checked out a Flying Junior from the small fleet at the University of West Florida recreation department. Then, we went sailing on Escambia Bay. I had no clue what was happening, but I loved it.

Dad knew the basics. He’d sailed as a young man on lakes around southern Wisconsin. Inland scows were the popular class of sailboats there at the time. He didn’t pursue sailing much as an adult but wanted to expose us to it.

He insisted I study and take the written test to get my “Skipper 2” card from the university. Then, I could check out boats on my own. I did.

Soon after, he convinced me to join the local Sea Scouts. They had a base at the Pensacola Naval Air Station marina. We could use their Sunfish and 17’ O’Day Day Sailers for free. I took a lot of my friends sailing on those boats.

Once I started driving, our neighbors let me take their Hobie 14 beach cat, which they never used. It was light enough that I could tow it behind my Plymouth Valiant. I put a hitch on the car and was good to go. I sailed that boat all over the Gulf Coast.

If you can rig a boat, leave the dock, sail on all points of sail, return to the dock, and unrig the boat, you can call yourself a sailor. Not all boats, but at least one boat.

But owning a boat requires more than just sailing skills. It requires diagnostic troubleshooting and systems thinking. You’d need skills in gas and diesel engine maintenance, electrical systems, plumbing, HVAC, navigation, and piloting. Dad also saw to building these talents.

As teens, we kept our own clunker cars running. We changed the oil, replaced the brakes, and rotated the tires. Power steering went out? Go to the junkyard, buy a replacement pump, and swap it out. Tires worn out? Go to the tire store and buy some retreads. We had to submit weekly expense reports to get our gas and maintenance costs reimbursed.

He used his GI Bill to enroll in Heathkit’s correspondence courses. We built a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and, ultimately, a color television. My brother and I worked on a constant stream of electronics projects.

We were the first family in our neighborhood with a computer. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 4K of RAM. He later upgraded it to 16K. He helped me learn BASIC programming and write my first app—a checkbook register.

When he brought home a small ski boat, he insisted we all enroll in the US Power Squadron Safe Boating course. At the time, it was quite thorough. It was a series of night classes at the local community college. They covered road rules, safety, seamanship, and navigation. You had to pass the final exam to get the certificate. He said it would get us a discount on our boat insurance. But I think he knew it was stuff we should all know if we were going out on the water.

He loved to leave early on a Sunday and launch the boat in Santa Rosa Sound. Then, he would find a deserted beach on Fort Pickens. He’d set up his Coleman camp stove and cook a big breakfast for us while we goofed off in the sand and surf. The menu usually included fried canned sliced white potatoes, mushrooms, and scrambled eggs.

In 1977, he’d been teaching long enough to have earned a sabbatical. We spent three months towing our pop-up camper all around the US. It was our family of five in our green 1971 Ford Torino Station Wagon. Our dog, Fred, and, for part of the trip, one grandmother were there too. It was an epic voyage. If you have a vision of Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Vacation, you’ve got a sense of it.

In the months leading up to the trip, we kids had to research all the places we were going and what we wanted to see. We wrote them on index cards. The cards went into a box, sequenced to the route. AAA made maps and “Triptiks” for our proposed itinerary. He deemed the trip successful since we avoided motel stays altogether. We camped the entire time. And it was a huge success. It instilled in us a wanderlust that we all have to this day. It was forever known as “The ’77 trip.”

One summer during High School, he made it clear I needed to do something more productive with my life than hang out at the beach and drink beer with my buddies (which sounded pretty good to me). I worked as a camp counselor at the Spanish Trail Scout Reservation. Chet Hebert, the Camp Director, sent me to National Camping School. When I returned, I became the camp’s waterfront director. My team and I spent the summer teaching sailing in Optis. We also taught canoeing, rowing, lifesaving, and swimming. It was my first paid leadership job.

After college, I moved away, first to New Orleans and then to San Francisco. I always owned a boat, and whenever he and my mother visited, we’d go sailing.

He died last week at 88 of complications from pneumonia. I got to spend a few days with him a few weeks prior while he was still lucid. Dementia had robbed him of much of his situational awareness. But, he still wanted to know how our trip was going and how his grandkids were doing. He was quite aware that we were out here sailing in the South Pacific. It made him happy to know I was putting his life lessons to good use. He was proud of us.

Jerry Richard Yares, 1935 – 2024

Jerry Richard Yares was born and grew up in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. His parents were Hilda Benfer Yares and Jerry Joseph Yares. He also had a sister, Katherine Yares.

After high school, he enlisted in the Navy and served during the Korean War. He was a court reporter stationed at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu. And he had a shift as a DJ on the base radio station.

Before shipping out, he mustered at Fort Ord in Monterey, where he ran the base photo lab. He had many stories of “sandbagging” in the rear seat of a T-6 for his pilot buddies getting in their currency hours — always with a camera.

He loved to skin dive and spearfish. He learned it during his time in Hawaii. As a kid, I had his well-worn copy of “The Compleat Goggler” on my bookshelf. I remember his arbalete spear gun hanging in our garage. He got us started snorkeling around Pensacola Beach using the old gear he kept from his days in the Navy. I eventually got to shoot that spear gun.

After the Navy, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a master’s in accounting and passed the CPA exam.

He met my mother while both were on vacation in Daytona Beach. They married seven months later and moved to Madison and later Racine, where I was born.

He went to work at SC Johnson Wax in Racine, Wisconsin. He went not as an accountant but as a product manager and marketing executive. It was in the then-new field of consumer product marketing.

He rose through the ranks there for eleven years. During that time, he traveled a lot for business. He usually went to Chicago, New York, and LA. He went to oversee ad shoots and check the product supply chain in stores.

He loved great food. He would often return from his travels and remake for us at home a dish he’d eaten in a famous restaurant. Or, he’d bring live Maine lobsters home from Boston. He’d put them in the refrigerator crisper for my mother to find the next morning. Chicago trips were my favorite. He’d bring home a half-baked pizza from Pizzeria Due. He joked that his mother was a terrible cook (she was), and he seemed determined to break the cycle.

The SCJ headquarters in Racine is a famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building. Dad would take us there on weekends to pick up his mail, and sometimes sneak into the lab and make mouthwash. The lab chemists didn’t seem to mind.

While still at SCJ, he began teaching accounting as an adjunct professor at Carthage College. He did this part-time at night. He enjoyed it. Teaching suited him well.

Business travel and time away from family were wearing on him. The University of West Florida called. The College of Business was developing a new degree program. It combined accounting and computer science. Would he like to join the department and build the “Accounting Information Systems” program? He would. And we did—we all moved from Racine, Wisconsin, to Pensacola, Florida.

As a 10-year-old kid, you don’t think much of these things. You roll with it. One winter, you’re building snow forts in the front yard, the next, you’re boogie boarding in the Gulf of Mexico. Looking back now, I realize what a huge change that was for a man of his era. It takes tremendous courage to follow your own path when it isn’t what everyone expects of you.

During his time there, the AIS degree had the highest employment rate for graduates—higher than any other program. This led to him producing (and starring in) a TV series on the local PBS station called “Knowin’ Where You’re Goin‘.” In it, he and his colleague, Al Cowart, demystified finance for small business owners.

He retired as an accounting professor at the University of West Florida. With my mother, he moved to a small town in Tennessee. They’ve lived there since.

He was the smartest person I’ve ever known—a Mensa member with a genius IQ. He was a talented home chef, a collector, and a gifted researcher. He was also an avid photographer, traveler, and early adopter of new ideas and technology. A father’s role is in service to his family. In that way, he was always teaching, ensuring we would walk an easier path and enjoy a better life.

He influenced my life on many levels and, by extension, my kid’s lives. When Pam and I shared our plans with him in late 2022, he loved the idea. “You’ve worked hard, and you’ve earned it. Good for you,” he said.

I think about him every day out here. I wish he could have joined us and seen it for himself. He would have loved it.