Hal White is a very happy man now that Selina King is back in his life!

The Southampton man was overcome with emotion when he found her a few years in Florida...neglected and not in good physical condition.

No, she isn’t a long ago girlfriend or an estranged daughter, but a 36-foot sailboat that has become the love of his life. Next to his wife Ruth of course!

“She’s my second woman,” 75-year-old Captain White says without guilt.

“Boats have been my life.”

To understand his passion for an aging wooden boat that its last owner no longer wanted, one must understand what Captain White has been through with Selina King, who was already 25 years old when he purchased her in 1962.

He first spotted her in a magazine and decided she would be his. He got his ‘feet wet’ with two other small boats when, in his words, “I was still light in the pants, not even in my teens”.

Hooked on boats after spending lots of time on the water with his childhood friend Francis Munroe, the young Hal White went searching for his dream boat in his late 20s. He found what he was looking for in a yachting magazine.

“I was driving a cab and looking for a boat, but I couldn’t afford one,” he admitted. Not prepared to let the minor cash-flow detail deter him from his dream, he kept looking anyway.

“There was a couple from the United States (Sally and Horace Bradt) who I would pick up every year and do things for. Before they went back home from one of their trips, I was telling them about a boat that was in a British yachting magazine, Yachting Monthly or Yachting World.

“I showed them a picture and they asked how much the boat was. I think it was something like ?3,500 and they gave me the money and told me to go and buy the boat and to pay us back when you can...no interest.”

It was the canoe stern (pointed) on Selina that caught Captain White’s attention.

“I just picked up and headed for England and went to the broker and found the boat,” he still remembers.

‘I never forgot him asking me what I did for a living and I said I drive a cab and he said ‘oh, we can’t have that’, so he put ‘gentleman’ next to occupation on the form.

Capt. White saw a grown man cry the day he met Commander Blewett, Selina King’s owner.

‘He knew Selina was going but he was tangled up with feelings,” he said.

“He turned away and went over to the fireplace. His wife came up to me and said ‘he’s just a little overwrought’. He was in bad shape, because he was so attached to this boat.

“Nobody knows any better than I do what he was going through. I had the same feeling after I had sold her and when I found her again.”

Capt. White purchased Selina King in 1962 and kept her for about ten years while doing charters on her in Bermuda. She was built in 1937 for Arthur Ransome, an Englishman who wrote children’s books. Ransome named her after one of the builders’ relatives.

The more charters Capt. White did, the more he saw a need for a bigger boat. Selina King was about to have a new owner.

“I sold her to do weekly charters and needed a bigger boat,” he explained.

“Everytime I got somebody in the cab I tried to talk them into chartering Selina...half days, nights and sometimes staying on board. I started living on a boat steadily as soon as l got Selina.

“I sold Selina because I wanted to start doing weekly charters to the Caribbean and she was too small,” he explained.

Capt. White stepped up to a 62-footer called Ivory Gull, which he nicknamed Tin Boat because of her steel hull.

He ran charters every winter in the Caribbean for about 20 years on Tin Boat which was later replaced by Night Wind, which he built in Dockyard.

“I started to get to the point where going to the Caribbean was no longer any fun, because of the different kinds of people I was getting,” he stated.

‘My bride said it was a shame to have the boat sitting out there with all the machinery and all you do is sail around the harbour. She said you ought to sell it (Night Wind), which I did.

“I then asked her ‘what do you want me to do, sit back and wait to die?’, and she said ‘it’s too bad you can’t find Selina and that got me stirred up again and I started hunting for Selina.

“I sold her to a New Zealander and he took her south and at the time he was after a catamaran,” Capt. White explained.

“He found the catamaran that he wanted so he sold Selina to a Bermuda couple, who brought her back to Bermuda. She went through about six hands rather quickly.”

After a series of phone calls over a period of months, Capt. White finally located Selina in the Caribbean in mid-1990s.

“I spent about $500 looking for her and finally found her,” said Capt. White, though he wasn’t able to get her back right away.

“A mate of mine, Scotty Madeiros, knew the guy who owned her quite a while back and said maybe the guy still has her.

“He gave me the phone number and I called the guy in Coconut Grove, Florida and he said he just sold her. He got the phone number of that guy who lived close to Coconut Grove and he didn’t want to sell. I kept calling him about every week asking him if he had changed his mind.

“Once he tried to take the mast off the boat and broke it. He called me and said I better come and look at the boat. I called a friend in Florida and asked him to look at her.

“He went and took a look at her and called me and said ‘Hal, stay away from it, she’s a liability’. She was just barely floating and the only thing that was keeping her afloat was the sun, a bilge pump, a battery and solar panel.

“The battery kept the boat pumping night-time when the sun wasn’t shining, the solar panel was putting juice into the battery so that it could run nigh-ttime and that’s what kept the boat afloat.”

Added Capt. White: “When I saw her, she was laying alongside the dock at Jones’ Boatyard and when I climbed down onto her I thought of Commander Blewett walking over to the fireplace. That’s what she can do to you!”

Capt. White is happy to have Selina back in his life, even though it cost him lots more to purchase her and repair her than what he paid for her 40 years ago.

“He said to me ‘you’ve got the means Hal, I don’t’, because I kept persisting on getting her,” he said of the conversation with the former owner.

“I brought her back to Bermuda in July 1998 after over a year of working on her.”

Selina King was damaged by two hurricanes in the years she was in Florida and also survived hurricanes here in Bermuda, once getting banged up on the rocks. She suffered some damage this April when she ended up on the rocks at Spectacle Island in Jew’s Bay after being stolen from her mooring by a man intent on taking her out to sea.

Selina King was one of five boats the thief stole that day, causing an estimated total $5,000 in damages to the crafts.

“It was Good Friday morning when a friend called me up and said, ‘Hal, did you give anybody permission to use your boat’? I said no, and he said ‘somebody is going out of the bay on your boat’,” Capt. White explained.

“I was on the phone and looking out on the bay and could see the mast going.”

Marine Police were called and the culprit was caught, but not before Selina King ran aground on the rocks of one of the Islands in the bay, just a short distance from her mooring.

“He got it out of Jew’s Bay but hadn’t turned the fuel on,” he explained.

“She was running on fumes and when the fumes went she quit. Then he tried to put the sails up. The wind was out of the northeast and it blew her up on the rocks.

“She was facing northeast when she ran up on the rocks and the guy jumped off and ran. When I got to the boat she had turned around and was facing back to her mooring.

“How she turned around (180 degrees) I don’t know.”

Marine Police helped Capt. White get the boat off the rocks. After some repair work was done to her stem at Mill’s Creek, Selina King is now back at her mooring, none the worst for her latest adventure.