Series on Sailing Has ‘Who’s Who’ of Adventurers

For 13 years, Walt Gleckler’s “Sailing Adventure” lecture series at Orange Coast College has been drawing crowds. A look at the roster of speakers, both past and present, will tell you why--it reads like a “Who’s Who” of the bold and adventurous.

This year’s series, which begins Jan. 13, is no exception. Gleckler has even managed to book Tania Aebi, who as a feisty New York teen-ager sailed more than 27,000 miles around the world alone in a 26-foot boat. Aebi, now 22, will speak Feb. 3 in the final session of the 4-week program.

Other speakers will be writer John Rains, who has logged 200,000 sea miles (Jan. 13); John Rousmaniere, author of 12 books on seamanship (Jan. 20), and John Neal and Barbara Marrett, who have spent 10 years cruising the Pacific (Jan. 27). All lectures will begin at 8 p.m. in OCC’s Robert B. Moore Theatre, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa.

“We’ve had some of the top names in the boating world,” said Gleckler, a former OCC music teacher and longtime boater. “But I had no idea what we were doing when we started the series.”

The series began with a program by Gleckler himself. He had just returned from a yearlong sailing sabbatical that took him to the South Pacific, where he collected examples of ethnic music.

After he returned to Orange County, he began to receive requests to talk about the sailing trip. He made his first presentation, along with a panel of other speakers, in 1975.

Gleckler soon learned that there were a lot of people in Orange County who had a big interest in boating. Those early programs were presented in a 350-seat lecture hall and drew capacity crowds. So in 1979 Gleckler moved the series to the 1,200-seat Robert B. Moore Theatre, where it has continued to draw sellout audiences.

Along the way, Gleckler stepped down from the stage and began coordinating the series. Over the years, almost everyone who is known in the boating world has appeared in Gleckler’s series.

“The program is designed for the armchair sailor and dreamer as well as for the sailor who actually wants to cruise in his own boat,” Gleckler says.

As for the appeal of the series, Gleckler says: “I think (cruising in a small boat) is a dream that many people have. You can get off the treadmill and live a dream--either vicariously through our speakers or in fact by going and doing it yourself.”

Among the series’ most popular speakers are former Orange County sailors Lin and Larry Pardey, who built a 24-foot, engine-less sailboat in a Costa Mesa storage yard in 1968 and spent 7 years sailing the boat around the world. The Pardeys, who now live in New Zealand, “epitomize the dream,” Gleckler said. “They always attract a sellout crowd.”

But Gleckler believes that one of this year’s speakers, Tania Aebi, represents another kind of dream. “She’s a young sailor, a sailor who started early on in life and learned as she went along,” he said.

Aebi, a rebellious student who wanted to be a writer but did not want to attend college, made a deal with her father: If he would use the college tuition money to buy her a small boat, she would sail the boat around the world, writing about her voyage as she went along.

In 1985, the 19-year-old Aebi set sail from New York to Bermuda on the 650-mile first leg of her voyage. The trip was beset by foul weather, navigation errors and mechanical failures, but Aebi did not quit. By the time the voyage ended in November, 1987, she had mastered celestial navigation, piloting and mechanics. And she had survived intense loneliness, violent storms, a capsize and a collision at sea.

As a result of her voyage, Aebi, who wrote many stories about her trip for a national boating magazine, has become a “hot property” on the lecture circuit and comes complete with a New York booking agent.

Although the series will continue to sign up big names such as Aebi, Gleckler says that recently he has begun to try to sell the series itself, rather than the name of an individual lecturer.

“That’s because we have found that a lot of really experienced people and good lecturers may not be known to the public,” he said. “Maybe they never wrote a book or became famous.”

Gleckler cites as an example Ed and Ellen Zacko, two musicians from Manhattan who completed an extensive voyage through the Caribbean, the Bahamas and across the Atlantic to Spain and Portugal.

“Here was a couple no one had ever heard of,” he said. “Yet they had put together a program complete with beautiful slides and original music they had written and recorded themselves.”

John Neal and Barbara Marrett, who appear on the third program in this year’s series, represent another example of lesser-known speakers who have managed to put their years of cruising experience into a polished, professional-quality show, Gleckler said.

The couple, who live in Friday Harbor, Wash., have spent 10 years sailing more than 100,000 miles to such places as Pitcairn Island, the Galapagos, Easter Island, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Tahiti and Samoa.

The ideal program, according to Gleckler, is part travelogue, part adventure and part how-to-go-cruising and includes a generous sampling of color slides taken along the way.

The exception, he says, was the program by adventurer Tristan Jones, a crusty Welsh seafarer who has spent more than 50 years cruising the world in small boats.

Jones brought only a dozen slides, Gleckler recalls.

“They were terrible slides,” he said. “Besides that he was tired and he was irritable. He had recently lost a leg (which had been amputated above the knee as a result of lingering World War II wounds) and was in pain.

“But when he stepped out on that stage, he had the audience in the palm of his hand. He is a great storyteller, and he ended up presenting one of the best programs we’ve had.”

Ticket prices for this year’s programs are $7 in advance, $8 at the door for individual lectures. The entire series costs $26 in advance, $28 at the door. (Call ahead to make sure seating is available.) For information, call (714) 432-5527.