COSTA MESA, Calif. — Like the other old men at this Orange County boatyard, where the hulls of peeling sloops and half-made cutters rot on their wooden posts, Karl Markvart can’t be certain he’ll live long enough to reach the water.
Again and again, he’s watched the boat builders around him lose their race to the sea, their unfinished vessels hauled off to the junkyard to make room for another boat, another mad dreamer.
At 69, Markvart knows it’s dangerous to dwell on the size of the task before him, all the work that remains on the 32-foot Dreadnought cutter that is now his home and that he expects, with luck, will one day be his tomb.
He’s one of the few regulars at the Boatyard Storage, which sits two miles from the nearest harbor. Piece by piece, Markvart has been building his cutter since buying the fiberglass shell for $9,000 34 years ago, but the boat has been with him — shimmering in his imagination — for nearly twice that long.
As a boy in Prague who’d never seen the sea, he found an adventure book in his tiny neighborhood library. It told of two kids who slip their parents and brave the wild oceans on a sailboat named Little Cloud. The accompanying illustration showed a boat with a single mast, three sails, and a stern nearly identical to the bow. He memorized the picture and the names of the parts.
Long after he forgot the book’s name, it scudded through his dreams, that magical boat, begging to be built. “From 10 years old,” says Markvart, whose English is broken, “I had a sailboat back of my head.”
Since then, he’s sailed in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean and the Pacific, but never on his own craft.
Behind the boatyard’s barbed wire fence, set back from a nondescript industrial area of Costa Mesa, Markvart’s boat is inching toward completion.
Every morning, he descends his boat’s deck to his workstation below, where the ground is littered with fine metal scraps and shavings. There, using surplus metal foraged from machine shops, he builds the boat’s hundreds of metal fittings, including the complicated stainless-steel blocks that will adjust the sails. He cuts the metal sheets with a hacksaw, drills them in a 25-year-old press, smooths them and stamps them with his initials.
“When you are an old man in rough seas, alone, you have to have everything well-made,” says Markvart, a stout, round-faced man with thinning white hair, a slight stoop and an ironworker’s thick, strong hands. “You cannot go to the store and buy fittings like I’m making. It’s junk, and high price tag.”
Markvart, a retired aerospace engineer, makes his $320 rent at the boatyard with Social Security and a little savings. In the boat’s galley, he cooks cheap, simple meals of potatoes or pilaf, and a boatyard neighbor lets him visit his nearby house for a shower when he needs one. While others work from blueprints, Markvart’s finished boat exists only in his head. He’s already completed many of the big jobs, like laying 7,000 pounds of lead and rebar ballast into the keel.
“It’s like building Mount Rushmore,” Markvart says. “It takes a lifetime to finish it.”
The circulation in his left leg is bad, but if his strength keeps up, Markvart figures he can launch in three years. He’ll head to San Francisco Bay, to Oregon, then up to Alaska and British Columbia, and then who knows? He’ll make salmon fillets, adjust his sails, listen to the BBC on his shortwave, and try to stay awake through the night, to steer clear of the big boats that can’t see him.
Though he has a gregarious manner, his social links are fewer by the year. Most of his friends and relatives are dead. “I had cell phone for two months, and I had to ask someone just to call me to see if it works,” he says. “I see these other guys, and they’re retired, and they have wives. They can’t do what they want. I’m free.”
When he was married himself, to a woman 18 years his junior, he was able to devote just two hours to his boat on Sundays. She thought the boat stupid. The marriage lasted seven years.
“Once I leave this yard and get on water, I plan to stay on water. And if something happens on high seas, so what? It’s much better than to die in traffic accident, or under surgeon’s knife,” he says. “If something happens like heart attack and boat is not finished, I don’t need it anymore.” He laughs. “It’s easy to die for a man who has lot of things to do and has to do it on little money.”
On this gravel lot, the ocean breeze blows past ranks of sailboats and speedboats new and old, past water-ready beauties bright with paint and woebegone craft whose owners pay the rent every year but never come.
With 110 rental slots and a long waiting list, it’s one of the few do-it-yourself boatyards in Southern California.
Manager Maria Chan says sailboats are overwhelmingly a male obsession, and from what she’s seen, a frequent cause of divorce. “Either the husband has to give up the boat or has to give up the wife,” she says.
She remembers a man in his 80s who came regularly to visit his 50-foot sailboat but lacked the strength or the will to build out the bare hull. For years, she says, “he just sat on the boat dreaming and didn’t do anything.” A couple years ago, he died alone at home, and she had his boat hauled to the junkyard.
Then, one morning last year, she opened up the boatyard to find another old boat builder stiff at his workstation, his TV running. He’d been dead a couple days, and no one had missed him.
“All these loner people,” she says. “No wife, no children.”
Markvart is in that category. She gives him 50-50 odds of making the water.
She’s less optimistic about Larry Myers, an 81-year-old widower who arrives every morning to work on his 44-foot ketch. He’s hanging on heroically at a workstation not far from Markvart, taking his stand against time. He recently installed Burmese teak on the deck, strip by strip, despite a World War II mortar wound in the shoulder.
Myers, who has seen enough of the globe to suit him — including North Africa and Italy during the war — is in no rush. “I hope I launch at 90. Better yet, I hope I launch at 95,” says Myers.
Markvart knows it’s perilous to think too much about the day he’s aiming for, when he finally lowers his boat into the Pacific. He knows it’s smarter to focus on one task at a time. But when the day comes, Markvart doubts anybody will show up to see him off, because he hasn’t spent a lifetime collecting friends, which is one of the reasons it will be easy to leave.
He will not bother breaking a champagne bottle, since he thinks of the ritual as a rich man’s theatrics, and he’s not building the perfect boat only to risk chipping it pointlessly. He will just motor out of the harbor and into the open ocean. His final plot executed, his final escape launched, he will angle his sails and point his boat north. It won’t be a dramatic sight, just a stooped, smiling old man with strong hands, and a little time left, giving himself over to a boy’s picture and the wind.
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