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.
“The depth sounder is an old Seafarer,” he says, “It’s hilarious. A great conversation starter.”
Charlie got married, became a father, and recently retired after 25 years at Darling’s Boat Works, a boat restoration company specializing in classic sailing yachts. It’s no wonder that to this day White Seal’s gelcoat and varnish still shine, the bronze patina green as emerald.
But White Seal doesn’t look that good from being hoarded in a boat shed. She has always been sailed, from Charlie’s initial crossing to the Bahamas one month after buying the boat to his honeymoon cruise, from the trips south with his young family to his every-other-year post-retirement cruising. Not to mention sailing every season on his home waters of Lake Champlain.
“My daughter said I might as well go cruising again while I’m still in halfway decent shape,” he says. The best part? His now-adult daughter Mary, his wife Meg, his siblings, nieces, nephews, vagabonds, stragglers, and strays alike all join him on different legs of his trips.
While hauling the boat more winters than not certainly hasn’t hurt in keeping White Seal shipshape, Charlie has put in his 10,000 hours. He replaced the original Atomic 4 gas inboard engine with a Yanmar diesel, he’s re-rigged time and time again, added new sails several times over (many of which he made himself during his days working at a small loft called Vermont Sailing Partners), refreshed the gelcoat, added a new stove/oven, ports, lifelines, and at his daughter’s pressing, a Pelagic autopilot she bought for the boat.
Only the best for White Seal. Next, Charlie wants to add a dodger.
“I can’t believe I’ve suffered for 40 years without a dodger,” Charlie says. His daughter also demands refrigeration. “She doesn’t want to live in the stone age anymore.”
Like father, like daughter. And Charlie couldn’t be more proud.
At this rate, White Seal will well outlive us all, and Charlie’s next of kin is due to inherit the vessel. But Charlie doesn’t even have grey hair and turned 70 on Christmas 2023. So Mary will be commandeering the boat well before that. She plans to take over as captain with her boyfriend as first mate when they quit their jobs next year and leave for an extended cruise. Charlie is keen to bid White Seal bon voyage and be the one to join on legs of the trip for a change. He’s also willing to sell the boat to her for one dollar whenever she wants to take over ownership.
“I never had a desire for another boat,” Charlie says. “When there’s something indefinable about a boat, something that really resonates, you’re reluctant to give that up.”
Unless it’s to his daughter.
April 2024