How My Grandfather's Sailing Legacy Finally Found Me
They say the sea doesn't give up her secrets easily, perhaps the same is true for the legacies we carry within us, waiting to be discovered when we're finally ready to receive them.
Here are some old photos I found online at the Navy Seal Museum of my grandfather, George Webster taken sometime in the 1940s. He was one of the original Navy Seals - a Frogman specializing in underwater warfare.
At some point he had a large anchor tattooed on his forearm that would later blur into a bluish smudged reminder of his younger days where I imagine he stood strong on the deck of a naval vessel feeling that the ocean was his home.
In his old age, he carried himself with a quiet dignity that seemed to come from knowing exactly who he was after a long and well lived life of adventure and meaning.
I was five or six when I sailed with him on his boat, 'The Walkabout,' a classic Choey Lee 36, from the Port of Los Angeles to Catalina Island. I was too young and too busy being a city kid to notice much more than being on a boat was kinda fun.
My parents, brother, and I were quintessential city folk. We'd make the very occasional 15-minute drive to visit my grandpa’s boat in San Pedro. But the marina always felt like a different world - one that belonged to Grandpa George, not to us.
The sailing life was his story, not our thing. Or so I thought.
Life has a way of hiding our inheritances in plain sight, waiting for the right moment to reveal them.
When I met my husband, I had no idea I was meeting the person who would help me uncover my own sea-calling. His dream of living on a sailboat initially seemed like just that - his dream.
I nodded along with his plans, played the supportive partner, but maintained what I thought was a realistic distance from the fantasy that might come if we retired one day.
Even as we rebuilt our 1980 Challenger 7.4 together, I still felt adjacent to this sailing life - an enthusiastic spectator and occasional helping hand but not really part of the story.
Then came our first three-day trip on Lake Huron. We needed to get our 28' Challenger around Manitoulin Island from it's drop in point of Gore Bay to our home marina in Providence Bay.
Now, don’t mistake the Great Lakes for gentle inland waters. Lake Huron has a notorious reputation among sailors. She's vast and temperamental, more like an inland sea than a lake.
With depths reaching over 750 feet and a surface area larger than some countries, she creates her own weather patterns and can transform from glass to fury in moments.
Our trip was a baptism by freshwater!
Huron showed us every mood she had - from mirror-calm mornings to sudden windstorms that had us gripping the scrawny tiller with white knuckles as waves crashed over the bow.
In those three days, I learned more about seamanship (and myself) than years of watching sailing Youtube channels, numerous sailing certifications and months of boat rebuilding taught me.
It was equal parts terror and exhilaration.
It was the kind of experience that stripped away every comfortable illusion I built about who I was and what I was capable of.
On the last morning, watching the sun rise over calm waters after a day of very challenging conditions, something cracked open inside me.
I found myself crying. Like the ugly, honest kind of crying that comes when you finally surrender to a truth your soul has known all along.
This was a first for me.
At that moment, my grandfather's legacy didn't feel like a distant family story anymore. It felt like a birthright finally claimed... if I may be so dramatic.
The sea-calling wasn't just his. It had been waiting patiently in my blood all along.
Now, the hubs and I stand on the cusp of our own liveaboard journey, searching for the right boat to become our home very close to Nassau (where my grandfather is pictured in the group above).
I, strangely, often think about my grandpa's tattoo. It’s become a kind of totem that represents how what starts as a sharp, clear marking of identity can soften and blur with time, yet carry even more meaning in its altered state.
How resistance to our true path doesn't negate its pull, but rather shapes the story of our eventual surrender to it.
The marina no longer feels like a different world. It feels like home. At least home for now until we get the next call to adventure.
As we navigate the complex reality of transitioning to life aboard, I find myself fueled by both the confidence of Grandpa George's life on the water and the softened edges of my own winding path to answer this call.
They say the sea doesn't give up her secrets easily.
Perhaps the same is true for the legacies we carry within us, waiting to be discovered when we're finally ready to receive them.
I wish my grandpa could see that his life at sea was a beacon, patiently lighting the way home for me.
I think I'll always be a city girl at heart, but I no longer feel like a stranger to the water world. I'm learning to embrace this inheritance, understanding that sometimes our truest path is the one that's been waiting in our blood all along, its meaning only deepening with time.
