Boat finally gets moving

After five years of hard work, Charlie Brown said Thursday he felt "like a kid at Christmas."

Brown watched Thursday as his schooner the Vera Cruz left the Mound House boatyard where it was built to crawl at the leisurely pace of 25 mph toward California on the back of a trailer.

"I apologize to all the people who will be snarled in traffic through California and Nevada," Brown said. "But I'll be out of the way in three or four days.

"It's kind of a good feeling to see her on hard pavement," he added. "A lot of people have been out here. They've come to see a crazy man move a boat."

No one who braved Thursday's frigid morning temperatures was calling Brown crazy. They had cameras out snapping pictures of the boat while its owners waited for Nevada Highway Patrol clearance to leave Kit Kat Drive.

"I love sailing. I wish I was going with him," Dave Griffith said.

"This boat means so much to Charlie," friend Ron Pelger said. "This is really in his heart. It's his baby. I'm here to wish him well and see him off."

Surrounded by snow-covered mountains, the Vera Cruz continued to look out of place in its Nevada home. Even movers with San Diego Boat Movers had to agree that while moving a boat the size of the Vera Cruz wasn't unusual for them, moving it from the Nevada desert was.

"This is pretty unusual," mover Tom Dickson said. "We've done a lot of backyard moves, but this ..."

The Vera Cruz is a replica of an 1898 Burgess Rhodes-designed bug-eye (gaff) brigantine schooner. In other words, the boat is a two-masted version of the old pirate sailing ships seen in the movies. Such shallow-draft ships were typically used in shallow coastal waters in the East Coast's fishing industry.

It took more than a week for Bob Payne of RJ Welding to create the special, 58-wheel trailer on which the 106-foot-long, 20-foot-wide boat will travel to San Diego.

"I've never built anything like this before," Payne said. "We put it together from a sketch. It's been a fun job."

Brown has worked around sea craft for most of his life. A Florida native, he started in 1995 building the boat, which will eventually be used for chartered sailing trips in the Sea of Cortez. Brown operates a boat charter company called Rocky Point Charters based in Rocky Point, Mexico.

The logistics of moving something as large as the Vera Cruz have delayed moving the boat since the beginning of October. However, Brown is convinced that if something is going to happen to the Vera Cruz, "it will happen out there" in the ocean, not on the road.

The ship was supposed to leave from San Francisco, but with the advent of winter weather the ship is being sent instead to San Diego, where it will leave Mission Bay for the Sea of Cortez and its home port of Puerto Penasco, Mexico. The schooner will be sent to California via Highway 50 to Fallon and then south down Highway 95 and State Route 359 to California.

It will take three to four days to get the boat to San Diego. As for getting the boat into the water, Brown said he is playing it by ear, but may have to wait until after Thanksgiving. The crew of the Vera Cruz will be joined by a film documentary crew sometime in December.

Brown said his partner in Mexico, Rick Barnes, saw pictures on the company's Web site of the boat covered in snow. He called Brown to remind him of the sunshine and 85-degree weather in Mexico.

"Pretty soon we'll be there and can call back and say, 'Are you people still cold?'" Brown joked.

For more on the Vera Cruz, head to the Web at www.rockypointcharters.com.