Our Life Afloat A Marina Woman Describes Her Water-Born Family Affair April 2006

by Nancy Heinesen with Lars Heinesen
Photos by Russell Byrne

Twenty-five years ago I got together with Lars Heinesen, who had been born in Denmark with a life-long love of the sea. Lars served for a while with the Danish Merchant Marine, but didn’t like spending all his time aboard a ship. He complains that he never really got to see much of the world except for waves. Lars had a dream that was completely disassociated from his Danish roots. Like many people in Denmark, he dreamed of palm trees, sunlit sandy beaches, and warm water. In other words, Lars was longing for a place where conditions were just the opposite of the ones afforded by the climate of Denmark.

Chasing the Sun
Lars lived for a while in Hawaii but discovered that he couldn’t afford the Aloha lifestyle, so he moved to San Francisco. That’s where he had the good luck to meet me. I was a San Francisco native, an Army brat who had grown up in the beautiful Presidio. I was a secretary at Crocker Bank where Lars was doing a remodeling job. When Crocker Bank sold out to the Bank of America we were both laid off and moved to LA where we got into a really tiring 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. job cycle. However, Lars started teaching me about sailing so we were spending some time on the water and began to get a premonition that we could do something finer with our lives than continue to run in the rat race that we both felt our lives had become.

We finally gathered enough courage to quit that life, sell the house and cars, and chase our dreams to the Caribbean. We bought an incredibly beautiful 46-foot Islander Freeport Ketch that we named Delphina. That boat was a real treasure, and we worked hard to keep it in impeccable shape. We picked up a third crew member – a friendly little 12 pound Schipperke named Osita. These dogs were originally bred to guard the canal boats in Holland, and Osita was perfectly at home in our watery world.

We cruised until we spent all our money and then started a term-charter boat business out of St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. People would sail with us for a week or two. Lars played multiple roles, including skipper, dive master, and head maintenance man. I was the chef, cabin person, and cruise director. If the clients wanted to learn to sail, we both could be instructors. I’m a gourmet cook and prepared dishes like Crunchy Tomato Croustades and Caribbean Swordfish with Mango Nutmeg Rice.

Cruising was the favorite part of my life. We went to Guatemala, Costa Rica, and sailed through the Panama Canal more times than I can remember. Our most favorite place in the world turned out to be Cartagena, Colombia. The place isn’t at all like the impression given in Romancing the Stone. We spent the hurricane season every summer kicking back in that wonderful place. The people of Cartagena are friendly, kind, and genuine. We went through three hurricanes aboard our boat and never considered leaving it for safety ashore. The boat was our home and our life. Everything we had was on board that thing. We couldn’t allow it to sink or break loose from its moorings and go drifting away.

The world has a way of finally catching up to people even in Paradise. My mom was getting older, and her mom turned 100. Plus, we found that we were using all our resources just to maintain our sailboat in top condition. Also, following that third hurricane I told my husband, “I quit! I’m not going to do that again.” We had a passage from St. Thomas to Cartagena that turned out to be a really nasty run and I told Lars, “I’m not going to do that again either.” It was time to go to work.

We decided that if our lives couldn’t center around a boat, at least they could include boats. My girlfriend’s husband owned three marinas and wanted us to take them off her hands. I was ready to make the move. So in one stroke we became owners of the Holland Riverside Marina in Knightsen, Cruiser Haven in Brentwood, and Glen Cove Marina in Vallejo.

Creating Beauty and Style
My friend is a wonderful person, but the marinas they sold us were decrepit and in many places were actually falling apart. Nevertheless, we could clearly see wonderful potential through all the blight and decay. Our years of cruising had developed in us a very specific idea of what we wanted in marinas, and we could see that the marinas had everything we wanted. We created a company to manage the marinas, and gave it the perky name Friendly Harbors because we could imagine the sunny, friendly places that the marinas could become. And now we’re seeing our ideas coming to reality.

I reserved my greatest passion for our restrooms. The bathrooms were foul, decaying porta potties when we got here. When I saw those I told Lars, “The first thing I’m going to do is blow up those potties! I’m not going to go there myself.” Now we have real restrooms with flowers on the walls of the women’s room — ivy and sweet peas, with a white picket fence. The men’s room walls have pictures of flying fish, bugs, and fishing poles. We posted signs on the river “Clean, public restrooms.” Some fishermen are saying that their wives will come fishing with them now because of our bathrooms. We’ve learned that some wives are now telling their husbands, “We have to go by those beautiful bathrooms at Holland Riverside one more time.”

Our marina is a real family affair. It has 586 slips, plus guest docking. When we bought the place it was basically lacking vegetation. Since then I have planted hundreds of trees. In 2005 I planted 55 trees during the month of February alone. We planted bushes and flowers on the levee. The place is really beginning to bloom.

Unlike some marinas, we like people bringing their kids to Holland Riverside. We have the only free swimming area on the Delta that we know of that’s open to the public. We have a sandy beach on a little inlet with a bottom that’s really sandy because Lars hauled in 150 tons of sand. We wanted Caribbean white sand at least for the top layers. Kids have a great time digging holes on the beach and making sand castles.  We have a wading area for the little ones, and a deeper area for the older children that has floating toys. One of us is always keeping an eye on the swimming area. We always make sure that some adults are watching and that marginal swimmers have their life vests on.

A Floating Home and a Lighthouse
We live at our Holland Riverside Marina. Even though we don’t live on a boat any more, we are still afloat because the marina came complete with a floating home. Like the other parts of the facility, the home was in a state of ghastly disrepair. I was in South Carolina when Lars first looked at the place. He deliberately didn’t take many pictures. We transformed the floating building into a showcase home, with lovely spaces, a covered veranda, and a picture-postcard view of our marina.

Cruiser Haven in Brentwood sits on the Old River and is somewhat isolated from heavily trafficked areas. It affords a quiet place for people to retreat from the noisy world. Hal Schell, the famous Delta writer, called Cruiser Haven a “quaint cozy location,” and so it is. The popularity of the place is creeping up again as people learn of the work that we’ve done.

Our Glenn Cove Marina in Vallejo has an actual lighthouse. After the Coast Guard removed the light from service, it was moved to our marina. We fixed it up and added an actual light. It is one of only three such lighthouses remaining in the Bay Area. One of the others is at the St. Francis Yacht Club and the third one is the site of a bread and breakfast on the Twin Brothers Island at the southern entrance to San Pablo Bay.

The lighthouse was about the only structure in the Glenn Cove Marina when we bought it. The only other notable feature was a mudslide that the developer of a nearby housing tract had created which filled in the marina. We sued the insurance company to take out the mud. We put in new docks, and brought the marina up to a high standard. We are maintaining a Caribbean feel in the place using a lot of oranges and reds. We put new offices on the ground floor of the lighthouse and have opened the Galley Café, a coffee and tea house. It took three years to get everything finished.

Three marinas is a lot of work for two people. We couldn’t do it by ourselves. Friends who were in the charter boat business are helping us manage the Glen Cove site. They live on the top two floors of the lighthouse.

By the way, we learned last year that the Delphina unfortunately sprang a leak off the coast of Trinidad and sank to the bottom of the ocean. It is a sad thing for the world to lose something that beautiful.

Life is good! The Delta is a great place with a lot of wonderful people. One thing we miss around here, of course, is being able to stand up to our waist off a sandy beach and seeing our feet through sparkling clear water. There isn't much snorkeling around here, or many opportunities for running our toes through perfectly white sand. We compensate by doing a lot of traveling. Last October, for example, we spent a few weeks in the Caribbean lounging around on the San Blas Archipelago. This April we plan to spend a couple weeks sailing in the blue waters and past the white sandy beaches of the tropical glories of Belize. Last winter we spent a month back in our Cartagena paradise.

In spite of our winter get-aways, we’re maintaining our marinas as a 12-month operation. Fishermen come by here during the winter and this place really turns into an intimate family affair.

We’ve lived a life full of adventure and beauty. If we were given the ability to go back and change the past, Lars and I have said that we wouldn’t change a thing. Lars and I never talk about retirement. What would we do if we retired? We’re living the dream Lars had from the beginning. What kind of life could we possibly live that would be better than our present life afloat? We can’t imagine!