Tulip: The Sailboat Scott Lived On (and Barely Sailed)

Written by Scotty (AI assistant), based on Scott Eaton's experiences, philosophy, and own words.

Years before he owned a boat, Scott Eaton had a weekend habit. He would get up early, jump on his bike, ride the Strand down to Redondo Beach Marina, and roam the docks looking at sailboats. He would say to himself, "When you get $2,000 a month income, clear, you can buy a boat, Scott."

"And I did," he says.

Her name was Tulip, a 38-foot sloop. For a few winters in the late 1980s, she was Scott's home.

A Winter Escape with a Mast

By his late 40s, Scott had built a life in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He loved the mountains. He did not love the winters. He bought Tulip, in his words, "primarily as a winter retreat from Jackson Hole's incessant bitter cold."

The idea came from a sailor friend with a much bigger boat, the kind of man who rounded up his buddies for trips down the Mexican coast. He invited Scott aboard. "I thought, wow, this is a cool way to live," Scott says. A marina has "kind of quietude in the middle of a large city, in the rigging that's gently banging up above, you know, and the smell of the boat, the teak wood [...] and all that kind of stuff."

There was a bigger dream, too. Scott knew a Jackson Hole couple who had sailed the world, and he fantasized that he might do the same. He did his homework. He read how-to-sail books. He read the sailing adventurers: actor Sterling Hayden's 1963 memoir Wanderer, and Dove, the true story of Robin Lee Graham, who left California at 16 and sailed alone around the world in a 24-foot sloop.

Then he bought his boat, for $80,000.

Pure Terror on the First Sail

Tulip's first trip with Scott aboard was supposed to be simple. His sailor friend agreed to pilot her down the coast from Marina del Rey to her new slip at Redondo Beach Marina. Scott jokes that he was "a superb sailor." He was the crew.

More than halfway down the coast, about half a mile out, with no lifeboat on board, Scott noticed the engine compartment filling with water. "Panic struck that my new $80,000 investment was about to potentially sink."

"Holy mackerel, [...] this thing's filling up with water," he told his friend.

His friend stayed calm and gave orders. Scott worked the bilge pump and bailed with a bucket, trying to stay ahead of the rising water. In his head, he already knew how this ended. "With Scott's luck, you know, I could buy a pet rock and it wouldn't work, right? And I can see me sitting on a $80,000 boat, sitting down on the shore under the water, the mast sticking up, me drenched, sitting on shore."

They made it to the Redondo slip and pumped her out. Days later they found the cause. The toilet's outlet hose had no one-way valve, so every time the boat rocked side to side, it siphoned seawater into the engine compartment.

Scott's summary of the repair is short: "I got it fixed." His summary of the trip, in his 40s biography, is shorter: "Pure terror on my 1st sail."

Lessons, a Sextant, and an Old Salt

Scott tried to catch up. He took lessons. Looking back, he says, they "seemed like taking motorcycle lessons from Evel Knievel," way beyond his skill level. He bought a sextant, the old instrument sailors used to find their position by the sun and stars. He tried to learn it. He "didn't (couldn't?) figure it out."

Help from the docks was no better. Later that first winter, a self-professed "old salt" in a captain's hat offered to show Scott how to back safely out of his slip and over to the toilet pump-out station. The man promptly drove Tulip's bow into another boat, leaving visible damage.

Scott's verdict: "A swarthy look & a captain's hat and Poof, you are an old salt sailor. Hmmmm."

A Floating Apartment

So Tulip mostly stayed put. That turned out fine. As a place to live, she was everything Scott wanted.

He took care of her himself. He "diligently labored over its teak wood and fiberglass decking." Below deck, she reminded him of the RV vans he would later live in: "highly efficient, well designed, and cozily small."

Redondo Beach became his winter home base. He stepped off the boat onto a bike path that ran all the way to Santa Monica, with restaurants and nightlife along the way. When he wanted to see more of the Southwest, he took his old Suburban and came back to the boat.

Decades later, it is the nights he remembers best. "I can still remember sleeping at night and hearing the rigging banging lightly in a slight breeze & seagull's occasional raucous, laughing cry."

"Incredible lifestyle," he says.

Diluting a Fear

Tulip also pushed Scott toward something he had sworn off.

He had always thought scuba diving was "the dumbest thing other than [...] parachuting without a parachute." Then he bought a boat to sail over to Catalina Island, "where guess what everybody does. They go scuba diving."

"I said, well, Scott at least gotta go find out about this." He visited the dive shops. He read the literature. He signed up for several weeks of lessons, including an open-ocean dive. By the end, he could go out in the ocean with a buddy and dive.

Then came the trip itself. Scott was honest about his chances of getting Tulip to Catalina alone. "I'd have been found somewhere off the coast of Japan." Instead he made "one glorious safe trip" from Redondo to Catalina with another sailor aboard, and finally got his dive.

The lessons, he says, "dispelled my lifelong fear." Not every trace of it. He can still recall a flash of panic when his foot felt caught in the kelp forest he was swimming through. His two-word report: "Easily managed."

That scuba class, Scott says, "taught me that 'knowledge & skills' can dramatically reduce fear even of the foolhardy." It became one of the core ideas in his travel writing. He calls it the dilution of fear through knowledge and skills, and it is the backbone of his advice on travel fear versus safety knowledge and skills.

Just a Hole in the Water

For all the good nights aboard, a problem was growing. "While a wonderful lifestyle," Scott says, "I felt trapped in or near the Redondo Beach Marina."

Around then, he bought a ratty old Ford van conversion from his sailor friend for $1,500. Shortly after, a huge Pacific storm hit the marina. It ripped about 30 feet off the end of the marina's three-story hotel and destroyed or damaged several boats. Tulip came through fine. The road in did not. It was so badly gouged out that the marina's access was closed for four weeks while it was rebuilt.

Scott did not wait around. "No sense hanging around here," he decided. He took his "crummy van" and drove across the southern United States to Florida to visit his sister and see the Everglades.

"I gotta sell this boat," Scott decided, "because it's just a hole in the water and it restricts me. It was a great life, but I'm restricted to the beach."

Money settled it. When Scott decided to become a high school teacher, the boat became, in his words, "too great a financial 'hole in the water that you pour money into.'" He sold Tulip "at a great loss."

The rusty van stayed. At some point Scott bought a pile of UPS-brown spray cans and painted the whole thing, figuring it would "cleverly be hidden in the forest" when he parked overnight. By his own account, it "almost looked worse than it did before." It was the first of many vans, and the start of what Scott calls his freedom machine. He tells the money side of trading a boat for a van in The 'Poor' Millionaire FIT Traveler.

Scott still remembers Tulip the same way. "Beautiful boat, beautiful boat."