Finding Never Land

We had been looking online for a quality bluewater sailboat for about three years, and had traveled to see a few of them. Finding one at the right price and in the right condition is easier said than done. In October of 2025 we went to Annapolis, Maryland for the annual Sailboat Show, and while we were there we looked at two boats we had seen listed on YachtWorld. Both were disappointing.

That night back at the hotel, Nina got on YachtWorld again and pulled up a boat I had already rejected, one so full of clutter you couldn't get a good look at it. She had seen the listing weeks before and said, "that's the boat." I said no way, because to me it just looked like a mess. But it was a 1983 Hans Christian 39 Pilothouse Cutter up in Peekskill, New York. We both loved the pilothouse, the bronze and the teak, the canoe stern and the full keel, and the fact that it was built to cross oceans.

It took two disappointing boats in one day to get me to listen to her.

The broker called us on the way home from the show, and we pulled off the highway somewhere in Pennsylvania to take the call. We put a down payment on the boat over the phone, with the understanding that we would come back with a surveyor before anything was final. We finished the drive home, slept one night, and turned around for another seven and a half hours to meet the broker, the surveyor and Never Land for the first time.

Although the surveyor found some things that will need to be attended to, she appraised Never Land at over two and a half times what we paid. We shook hands and signed the paperwork.

Never Land had belonged to Jerry, and before him to Joel, who sailed the boat across the Atlantic to the Azores and the Mediterranean with Jerry as one of his crew. Jerry inherited it after Joel's passing and had it for about twenty years. He put it in the water every year, but it rarely left the dock. He was well liked at the Peekskill Yacht Club and known as a pack rat. When he passed away, his daughter put the boat up for sale.

We went back to Peekskill to clear out the clutter and to spend some more time getting to know the boat. I found an old wallet in the nav station with $177 in it, and I thought, well, that's cool. Then Nina found a canister hidden under a bottom drawer with about $1,100 in it. Holy crap. Then she found another one, and then another, for a total of $2,461.

We used that money to pay for winter storage and shrink wrapping at Peekskill, since we were going to have to leave the boat there until spring.

We returned in May of 2026 to get Never Land out of Peekskill. PYC couldn't remove the mast for us, and railroad tracks blocked the only route a flatbed semi could use to get in, so the boat had to go back in the water and move to a yard that could accommodate a truck. Because of the six foot draft, all of it had to happen at high tide, which made the whole thing an ordeal.

The engine wouldn't start, so TowBoatUS towed us to King Marine to have the mast taken down, and then to Viking Boatyard for the haul-out. The tide had gone out again, so we had to wait for the next day's high tide to pull the boat out, and we spent our first night sleeping aboard at the dock to keep an eye on things in case it started sinking. Late that night I got up from the berth, stepped out of the companionway, and sat on the forward deck of my boat in the warm evening air. Peace, or contentment. Skipper of my own bluewater sailboat, very much at home.

Never Land survived the night and was hauled out the next day, and then sat for eight weeks on the hard at Viking. We came back in July to prepare the boat for the truck home. We had to remove the railing at the bowsprit and around the stern, and even the old solar panels on the roof of the pilothouse, for height clearance. It still ended up measuring 13'6", right at the limit before escorts and re-routing are required.

Then it was about five hundred road miles from the Hudson River to a boat yard in Ohio. Never Land made the trip safely, and the crew there put the boat in the building where the refit will be done.

Never Land is one of only nine Hans Christian 39 Pilothouses ever built. The boat draws attention everywhere it goes, and people want to know the story. This will be a long journey, and the refit alone covers a lot of ground. Bowsprit and rig. Ground tackle. Electrical and plumbing, top to bottom. Teak, inside and out. All of it between here and the Atlantic.

We're telling it here, starting with the refit and going on to wherever Never Land takes us.