Shortly after I first met Mary Therese Kubek last October, aboard her 1968 Alberg 30, I handed her a copy of Bernard Moitessier’s first book, Sailing to the Reefs. I explained the connection—that the names of the two boats featured in Moitessier’s famous memoir, Marie Therese, were the same as hers. I mentioned also that Moitessier, unfortunately, had wrecked both these boats.
I’m not sure Ms. Kubek appreciated the coincidence. But like Mr. Moitessier in the earliest phase of his career, it did seem she, had been given to her by Jake Hanna, a boatbuilder in Maine, whom she met online. Jake had hoped someday to fix up the boat himself, and it was still mostly a wreck when Mary Therese drove up from Jacksonville, Florida, to take possession of it. Left outside in the back of a boatyard, hatch open, poor hadn’t floated since the mid-1980s, and her keel had been split open by water freezing up in her bilge.
