News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Rob Clarke.
Growing up in La Grande, Oregon, Rob Clarke was a long way from the ocean. Somehow, though, he conceived a great love for the sea and a fascination with sailing.
He didn’t get much closer to the big blue water when he came to Sisters as a pioneer paramedic with the Black Butte Ranch Rural Fire Protection District from 1986 to 1991. Yet the move was a big step toward where he is now — poised to sail with one companion from Newport, Oregon to Hawaii in his hand-built sailboat.
Clarke visited his old stomping grounds in Sisters last week on his way to pick up the boat where it is docked in Port Townsend, Washington. He moved it there after spending a decade building it and racing other sailboats near Sarasota, Florida.
After leaving Sisters to pursue his ocean-going dream, he bought a boat that had been badly damaged in a 1992 storm.
“I completely gutted the boat and rebuilt it for blue water sailing,” he said. “I built it out of spare parts. I wheeled and dealed and traded.”
He ended up with a 28-foot sloop with an eight-foot beam and six feet of draft. He named it “Paddle to the Sea” after a children’s book he read over and over from the time he was in first grade. He’s not sure whether the book sparked his fascination with sailing or simply stoked the fire, but the book remains a treasured keepsake.
He will sail with a retired firefighter from Salem named Larry Pallus.
Pallus is “quite a mathematician,” Clarke said. “I need someone who’s brain does numbers real well.”
Clarke is a wood sculptor by trade, having learned in Sisters under the tutelage of Skip Armstrong. He plans to do small sculpture to fill his cash requirements in Hawaii, where he’ll stay for a couple of years. Then he plans to sail on to the Marshall Islands.
Clarke acknowledges that he is fulfilling an adventure that many dream of but never undertake. He said he learned as a paramedic not to defer dreams and plans. He saw too many people at Black Butte Ranch who had waited all their lives for retirement, then “they’d have a heart attack or something would stop them from doing what they wanted to do.
“People can do anything they want to do or be anything they want to be,” Clarke said.
The most outrageous things are possible — even a boy from the Oregon outback becoming a boat builder and a blue water sailor.
Clarke departs from Newport on July 14. He has promised to update The Nugget on his sailing adventures.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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