A Life at Sea

By Robin Hammond

      There in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, was an abandoned sailboat.
     “It was an incredibly strange sight,” said Hopkins, who was on watch when he noticed the boat on the horizon. As is typical protocol for sailors, he attempted to radio the crew of the other vessel, but no one responded. Fearing the worst, he sent two members of his own crew aboard to investigate what could have gone wrong. What they found was very strange.
     “It looked like the people who owned the boat had left in a hurry, he said. Children’s toys were strewn about, expensive camera equipment and computers were still on board and there was a plethora of journals, books and letters. Upon further investigation, Hopkins discovered that the rudder had been broken off, and there was evidence that someone had been attempting to make a new one. Hopkins and his crew decided to take anything that looked valuable, which included electronic navigation equipment and scuba gear, along with the journals and letters, in hopes of locating the owner of the abandoned vessel and returning the goods to them.
     “I was very confident that we were going to get that stuff to them if they had survived,” he said.
     Luckily, among the papers, they were able to locate a phone number that connected them with Mia Brewer and her husband Scott, residents of Virginia and owners of the abandoned boat.
     “Jeremy took us so much by surprise,” Brewer said. “What he did was really, really nice of him.” Brewer explained the mystery. She, her husband and her son had been sailing when they hit something, which she believes was a whale, causing their rudder to break off. They were in the midst of trying to build a new rudder when they came across terrible weather. Luckily, a German freighter happened to be passing by, and offered to give them a ride to dry land. Unfortunately, they had no time to take any of their belongings with them. Leaving with the German ship, they were forced to watch as the little boat, their home for three months, disappeared into the distance.
     Brewer stated that after hearing from Hopkins she and her husband immediately sent a pilot to search for their vessel, but sadly, it had run aground on Rum Cay in the Bahamas and had been stripped and destroyed. Brewer took some comfort in knowing that people like Hopkins exist.
     “It was pretty unbelievable,” she said. “We’re really grateful to him.”
     Hopkins continued his journey up the East Coast of the United States, finally arriving in Annapolis April 27.
     Since that passage, he has settled back into running his business where he offers individualized sailing instruction, day and overnight charters and sailboat and motor yacht delivery services. Now living on a quiet, shady street in Fallston, Maryland, which he refers to as “the still hub of an ever-circling world” Hopkins has again settled for the moment. But that doesn’t mean he’s staying put. After all, sailing has offered him countless memories.
     For now, Hopkins is content to relax in his home, surrounded by pictures and charts to remind him of his oceanic adventures. He smiles when he looks through photographs taken on his many travels and laughs at the memories he has created. And although he sits still in a chair in his dining room as he leafs through the photos, the gleam in his eyes shows that his friend the ocean will soon call him for more travels, and hopefully, many more adventures.

This article was first published in the Harford County Aegis on June 14, 2002 and is reproduced here with the publisher’s permission. 

  
 

     Imagine you are on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Everywhere you turn there is water. Nothing greets you but a vast expanse of blue sea, spreading out for miles before meeting the sky at an uncomfortably distant horizon. No sounds exist except for waves slapping against the side of your vessel, beckoning you farther into the deep, dark ocean. It’s incredibly peaceful and absolutely terrifying at the same time.
     For Jeremy Hopkins, that’s just another day at the office.
     Captain Hopkins, a British transplant who calls Fallston, Maryland, home, recently completed his second trans-Atlantic journey via sailboat, beginning in Palma de Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the east coast of Spain in the western Mediterranean, and ending in Annapolis, Maryland. An earlier trip in 1988 took him on an 8,500-mile journey from Cape Town, South Africa to Havre de Grace, Maryland.
     That’s enough to make anyone kiss the ground they walk on, but Hopkins loved nearly every minute of both trips. Although he was hired to deliver both boats and was well paid for his travels, many wouldn’t hesitate to call him a little nutty for taking on such grueling work.
     “I’d have to agree with them,” said Hopkins with a hearty laugh. “You have to be a little crazy to do something like this.” All joking aside, few could have been better prepared for these journeys. After all, sailing is in this man’s blood.
     Born in 1948, Hopkins began sailing at the tender age of 8. Growing up, he spent more of his time on the water than on land. Although the rest of his family remained firmly terrestrial, Hopkins couldn’t keep himself out of the ocean. “My mother wouldn’t ever go on a boat with me,” he said. “But I love the natural elements of sailing. It’s something I can enjoy on many levels.”
     After 14 years of sailing the waters off Britain’s shores, Hopkins was bitten by the travel bug, and headed to Cape Town, South Africa, and a job as a sailing instructor at the Ocean Sailing Academy. Then, during a 1983 trip to New York, his love affair with the United States began.
     “I wasn’t intending to stay for too long,” he said of his stateside journey. “But I ended up staying for three years.”
     During those three years he saw more of the country than most Americans do. He canoed the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, skied in Colorado and met Havre de Grace for the first time. He took a job as a sailing instructor at the Havre de Grace Sailing School, which happened to be owned by a British couple. Hopkins, ever the adventurer, made the trip to Maryland from Colorado via Canada, where he and a friend spent their nights camping and their days driving.
     He laughingly described a near-disaster, when one evening, while cooking Hamburger Helper, he received a visit from a very hungry brown bear. “It was a hoot,” said Hopkins of the experience. “I was chased by the bear.”
    Luckily the bear was too slow, and Hopkins high-tailed it to Havre de Grace, where he spent the summer sailing the Chesapeake Bay. After that he decided it was time to head back to Cape Town.
     “I’d had this wonderful time in the U.S.,” he said. “Now it was time to go home.”
     Going home for Hopkins didn’t mean boarding a plane. That would be too easy. Instead he took a job delivering a charter boat to St Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. From there he hoped to sail to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. An international sailboat race was finishing there, and given that most of the participating yachts were from South Africa, Hopkins hoped to sail one of the race boats home for its’ owner.
     His plans changed, however, when the race was canceled, so Hopkins returned to the U.S., by delivering another sailboat from the Caribbean island of Antigua to Ft Lauderdale. He headed back north to Havre de Grace, where he taught sailing again, in the summer of 1985.

     Then, after another ski-season in Colorado, where he volunteered as an instructor at the Ski-School For The Blind in Vail, Hopkins finally said goodbye to head back to Cape Town in the fall of 1986.
     But Hopkins didn’t forget his time in the United States. “Words like fascinating and overwhelming come to mind,” he said of his travels across the country. So, in 1988, when he was asked to deliver a 38-foot sloop named Maya to Annapolis, Hopkins jumped at the opportunity.
     He assembled a crew of friends to accompany him on the journey. Two men, both with little sailing experience, and one woman, who had absolutely no sailing experience “Compatibility is absolutely the prime requirement,” he said of choosing a crew that lacked expertise. He explained that on such a long journey, the most essential element is to have people who can get along. “It’s a test on many levels,” he explained. After all, there’s rain, heat and cramped living quarters to deal with. Plus, living with anyone in a 38-foot x 12-foot living space for four months straight can be enough to destroy any friendship.
     Nevertheless, Hopkins and his crew set sail on Feb 2, 1988, They made many stops along the way in places like St Helena and Ascension (islands in the South Atlantic), Brazil and Suriname in South America, Granada, St Lucia, Dominica and the British & U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, and Ft Lauderdale, Florida, before arriving in Annapolis, Maryland on May 10, 1988.
     But the majority of their time was spent on the boat, with only each other, the sea and dolphins, flying fish and ocean birds for company. Captain Hopkins explained that being with anyone for such an extended period of time can become trying, but they found ways to make it work. Every evening the four of them would meet together in the cockpit for a “happy hour”, discussing the day’s events, examining what went well and what didn’t.
     “Obviously, you have a certain amount of expertise, so you plan on avoiding or minimizing the worst,” Hopkins said. “You do everything you can, and then it’s in God’s hands.”
     God, and nature, seemed to be on their side. The trip was fairly uneventful, by Hopkins’ standards, until they arrived in Havre de Grace. Hopkins was looking forward to seeing the friends he had met in his days working as a sailing instructor there. He had “dressed-ship” with signal flags and had “Rule Britannia” blasting out of the stereo set, as they sailed towards the harbor.
     Then, with 8,499.9 miles behind him, and the dock only 7 feet away, the Maya ran aground.
     “It was very funny,” said Hopkins with a huge grin. “A very embarrassing, and humbling, experience, but it was a hoot.” He was greeted with much laughter from his friends ashore, but the comical moment did little to sway him from deciding to stay in Havre de Grace permanently.
     Settling down, at least for the moment, he opened his own sailing school and charter company, and got comfortable in Havre de Grace. But for Jeremy Hopkins, comfort only lasts for so long when he is standing still. So, in January of this year, when he was approached by a Philadelphia businessman who wanted his boat brought from Palma de Mallorca to Annapolis, Hopkins didn’t hesitate to say yes. By this point, he had established a special relationship with the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
     Once again, he assembled a crew of two men and one woman, this time all U.S. citizens with some sailing experience, to accompany him on his journey.
     The four departed from Mallorca onboard the 45.5-foot center-cockpit sloop on January 11. They stopped along the way in Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, and the British Virgin Islands. Then, while sailing from Jost Van Dyke to Ft Lauderdale, Florida, this crew came across something that few sailors see in their lifetime.		  

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