Memories of one of the nicest people

Posted 5/26/15

To the Editor:

I enjoyed reading about Freddy and his Columbia 26. What a character and what a resourceful man.

My second sailboat was a Columbia 26. The gentleman who introduced me to the …

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Memories of one of the nicest people

Posted

To the Editor:

I enjoyed reading about Freddy and his Columbia 26. What a character and what a resourceful man.

My second sailboat was a Columbia 26. The gentleman who introduced me to the boat was Charlie Dickenson who was a boat broker at the time (1983). The boat was named Kahlua like the beverage and was even painted brown with the type of the name mimicking the Kahlua script on the bottle.

I have been fortunate to have five sailboats and the 26 was my favorite. I know it wouldn’t be on the cover of “Boat Beautiful” but I love the looks of it. For a 26 it had a decent amount of room down below even though I had to mimic a little Quasimodo when standing up. But mostly I loved the boat because of the way it sailed. To make an automobile analogy it reminded me of one of my MGA’s: it handled really well and responded to the tiller immediately. It was a great light weather boat. Which seemed to be a hallmark of the Bill Trippe designed boats. I had two other Trippe boats. A Coronado 30 and a Coronado 35. I liked them all and were all good light weather boats.  If for whatever reason I wanted to get back in sailing I might very well consider another Columbia 26. By the way, I ended up buying a boat from Charlie. However, I didn’t get to work with him directly as I worked with his wife Mary and nephew John Dickenson as Charlie had passed and they wanted to sell his boat. He was going to tidy up the 35 but obviously didn’t get a chance. Charlie was one of the nicest people I have ever met.

John Roberts

Warwick

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