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Page PAGE * MERGEFORMAT 190
Page PAGE * MERGEFORMAT 190
Forty years of chartering with students and the general public has given the author endless sea stories. The original business plan, and he uses that phrase loosely, was to create a sailing marine biology school aboard an oceangoing sailboat. Pete Seeger had successfully carried school children up and down the Hudson River on Pete's vessel, Clearwater. The author had spent a short time on his vessel as a teacher and troubadour. It seemed possible that this educational platform would work in the Caribbean, with a specialty in reef ecology.
After acquiring a seagoing sailing vessel, chronicled in the book Fortunella, and the requisite educational contacts, he began carrying college and high school students on island and reef adventures in the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. The college and high school vacation periods were easy to fill with educational charters. The summer days left him at the dock with no real income except the occasional drug smuggler passerby coaxing him to sail to South America and ferry back illicit cargo. This spare time led him to start chartering to the local reef, off Key West, with passengers interested in underwater safaris. He equipped his clients with snorkels and flippers and introduced them to the "underwater world of Captain Ron."
The term ecotourism did not exist in the 1970s. Over the next forty years, he carried over forty-five thousand students and day passengers. That is not a lot of people if you carry fifty people per trip, but it is a lot when you only carry four to six people per trip.
The following short stories are a snippet of the many high adventures that occurred onboard the sailing vessel Good Fortune.
