Del Viento Genealogy By MichaelSouth Pender Island, BC

Second Wind looking good 35 years ago.
Our job is to keep her seaworthy and
attractive for future cruising generations.

That picture to the right is Del Viento under sail in the Strait of Georgia—just about where we are now—when I was 10-years-old. It was 1978 and the guy at the helm is then-owner Mark Miller, who bought Del Viento new from a Puget Sound dealer shortly after she was shipped over from Japan. Of course, she wasn’t Del Viento then; for the 9 years or so that Mark owned her, she was Second Wind.
 

Unfortunately, Mark passed away in 2010, only months after we bought Del Viento. We never had a chance to meet. The picture is actually a picture of a picture that Mark’s widow, Judy, shared with us. She lives in the San Juans and we visited with her the other day. She brought several pictures and stories from that first chapter in Del Viento’s history. It was fun having her aboard and letting her touch and see the boat she once sailed a lot—about 30 years ago. “I talked to one of my sons yesterday, told him you’d contacted me. ‘You’re going to see the Fuji?!’ he said. All of my kids had good times on this boat.”

Judy at the helm of
Del Viento, 2013.

I found a bunch of old papers aboard after we bought Del Viento and started piecing names and dates together. On an expired documentation certificate, I found the names of the second owners, David and Dona Martinson. Online, I found a phone number for a hospital in Hawaii where Dona maybe worked. I left a message. About a week later, David called me and told me everything he knew about the boat. He said they owned Second Wind for about eight years, that they bought her from someone named Miller. He thought Miller may have been a Boeing executive.

I later googled MILLER BOEING SAILING and found the obituary for Mark Miller, former president of Boeing Aerospace. It said he loved sailing. From this I found an address for Judy and sent her a letter. She got back to me via email.

David also told me they sold Second Wind in December 1994 to a couple from Texas. This matched up with the paperwork I found that showed our boat was Texas Swan for a spell. But Robert and Michaela Swan only owned Texas Swan for 13 months, never moved her from the Pacific Northwest, never even physically changed the name on her hull.

So she was still Second Wind when Merritt and Jennifer Fallis bought her in January 1996 (the year Windy and I took off on our first voyage, aboard the first Del Viento). They cruised her extensively throughout the PNW with their daughter Tori. They renamed her Dream Catcher. About seven years after they bought her, they pointed Dream Catcher’s bow south for the first time and sailed her down to Mexico. And when their cruising time was over, they left her on the hard in San Carlos, at the top of the Sea of Cortez. It’s a dry, desert place—a good spot for leaving anything.

In 2008, Merritt’s brother Terry and his wife, Terry, drove down to San Carlos, launched Dream Catcher, and cruised her for over a year. By the end of 2009, they were done and everyone agreed it was time to sell. They listed Dream Catcher with a Puerto Vallarta broker.

By early summer 2010, she was ours. We named her Del Viento and slowly brought her north to the Strait of Georgia.

--MR

* My friend, Diane Selkirk of Ceilydh, wrote an article featuring much of this story. It appeared in Pacific Yachting a couple months back.

In the two years we've been actively cruising her, we've been
also refitting her. She's better than new in a lot of ways, and
getting better every day.