A Father, Son and a Custom Boat

“It was almost standing waves, and we were hobby horsing. The bow was going whoosh, and we were going nowhere,” says Kevin Starnes, 62. He’s describing a scene from an early spring cruise in the San Juan Islands on his 38-foot double-ender Arningali, which is what the Inuit called a rare female narwhal with a tusk. Sitting with his wife Sally, 55, in the boat’s cherry-wood-trimmed salon that’s lavishly decorated with whimsical art from around the globe, he speaks in a quiet voice while outside the wind howls through the rig. “We couldn’t get back, because it would swirl us around and down into the rocks.” 

Kevin recalls what it felt like to buck the roiling waters of Cattle Pass between the southern tips of San Juan and Lopez islands, where obstacles like Deadman Island and Mummy Rock could rip apart Arningali’s massive fiberglass hull. It felt like a descent into the Maelstrom as described by Edgar Allan Poe, a dicey moment that would either become a memory to be shared with grandkids, or a Mayday call.

Kevin, who’d been in tight spots before, but never as a skipper of his own yacht, clipped into the jacklines and got down on hands and knees to crawl forward and set the stays’l that helped the boat power through the mess. Meanwhile, his new wife Sally took the tiller to steer the boat with a measure of poise rare for a novice sailor. Did she train to keep her composure in chaos? “I teach kindergarten, so yes,” she says.

Fighting a 30-knot blow and a lively foul tide to prepare for a big cruising adventure had been in the cards since Starnes hatched the plan to build a boat with his father Ned more than four decades ago. “We had this dream of sailing around the world,” Starnes said in a radio interview on KPTZ. The father and son, who were lake sailors in southern Oregon and occasionally chartered bare boats in exotic venues, followed a path not unlike David and Daniel Hayes, who built a small boat for a trip around Cape Horn, a sea story chronicled in book My Old Man and the Sea.

Ned, a veterinarian, planned to go cruising in retirement and hoped his son would join him along the way. They weren’t shy about getting their hands dirty. They bought a raw hull to finish themselves, as was common in the 1970s and 1980s. “Joe Breskin of Seven Seas Boatworks in Port Townsend, Washington, had a tiny ad with a line drawing of an Orca 38, and that’s what hooked us,” Kevin told the radio station. “So, we came up and were hooked on his shop and the menagerie of everything in there. Besides boats, there were pianos and speakers and kayaks and people buzzing around. It was just amazing.”

The younger Starnes, who liked to busy himself with architectural drawings, started to sketch things for their boat as a high school student, “putting a house inside an egg,” he says.  A few years later, in 1982, Breskin laid up their Orca 38, which turned out to be the last model of its kind—a long keeled double-ender inspired by William Atkins’ designs. It was constructed with fiberglass, polyester resin and Klegecell PVC foam. Kevin, who was now in veterinary school, would go home during college breaks and help his father make parts for the interior, including cabinets, drawers and louvered doors while “dreaming about this or dreaming about that and designing [things] for the boat,” he says.

Life was good, until it dropped a bomb in 1986, when Ned was diagnosed with amelanotic melanoma, a form of skin cancer that killed the 57-year-old within a few months, around the time Kevin graduated veterinary school. Before he died, Ned was sure his son would run the clinic, but also wanted their sailing dream to survive. “He said, ‘one thing I would ask you, is to finish the boat’,” Kevin recalls. 

The intent was there, of course, but it was a tall order for a 23-year-old who had a life to live, a business to run, a family to raise and a big, empty hull calling from a warehouse in Port Townsend, 500 miles away. Breskin generously allowed him to keep the boat there until he managed to get his head around the magnitude of honoring his father’s last wish. “I sat in this hull, an empty 38-foot boat with no deck and the lights were shining down. It was glowing red, almost like being in the womb,” he reminisced on air. “It was like I was being held by this boat. And I was thinking of my dad who’d just passed away, and the gravity of all the stuff I had to do to fill up this empty womb.”  

Eventually he trucked the empty hull to southern Oregon to work on it in his yard. Neighbors jokingly called him Noah for building a boat hours away from the ocean, but his children and their friends loved it. “It was a family thing and a jungle gym,” Kevin says. “They’re running down the companionway, over obstacles and tools, out of the front hatch and they’re swinging off the bow, crazy stuff.”

Work progressed slowly until life intervened again in 2009. This time it was him who was diagnosed with a meningeal tumor that had to be surgically removed, but the procedure did not go well. “I was in a coma and had a near-death experience, but I came back,” he said in the radio interview. He credits the support of his family for staying out of Davey Jones’ locker, but that’s not all. “I can go into light, so to speak, but I had more to do. That’s why I felt this boat kind of saved me. It’s for my family, but it’s also for my honor, because I started it.” 

Kevin felt he had no time to lose if he was to go sailing with family as his father had envisioned. In 2019, he sent the boat back to Port Townsend, to Cape George Marine Works, to get it finished, less than a quarter mile down the road from where it was built. For decades this yard built Cape George cutters but now specializes in refits and over-the-top custom builds. It launched Arningali in 2023, and the boat defies imagination. She is a traditional cruising vessel built to safety standards that would have done Slocum proud. She features a narwhal bowsprit that Starnes carved himself, massive deck hardware like a bronze windlass from Poland, and the “tower of power,” an imposing stainless steel construct that rises above the pinched stern for generating renewable energy from wind and solar. 

In the cherry wood interior, Arningali is a museum of mementos and a collection of items from all points of the compass. Scrimshaw art of narwhals on two swordfish bills decorate a deck beam. Several megalodon teeth hang over the navigation desk, hinting at the consequences of a botched course plot. On the forward bulkhead, an oval mirror reflects the light of wax candle sconces, and a bronze dolphin wrapped around a trident—once a good-luck charm on a Venetian wedding gondola—accessorizes the wood stove. 

A Maltese dolphin door knocker serves as a handhold and a varnished mahogany mermaid statue from Indonesia supports the salon table, visible through a porthole in the tabletop. In the forward cabin, an ornate hippocampus (Latin for seahorse, and the brain’s area that handles long-term memories, spatial processing and navigation) guards the V-berth. 

The yard crew needed a delicate touch to complete the work that Kevin had started. “It was evolutionary. He approached us with some fundamental questions to make sure we could complete his dream [boat],” says Todd
Uecker, co-owner of CGMW. 

“The boat was fundamentally built, and [Kevin] had established the level of detail, so we filled in the blanks.” Yard and owner established a feedback loop that included all the specialists who worked on plumbing, wiring, finish carpentry, rigging and a complete new electric propulsion system with repurposed Tesla batteries and a 30-KW Elco electric motor. It replaced the Sabb inboard diesel, because as a side effect of the tumor removal, Starnes became intolerant of fuel smells. 

Around sunset, the wind abated some while Kevin and Sally took a philosophical view of their Cattle Pass adventure that was followed by a Coast Guard boarding on the bumpy ride home. 

“Self-reliance is something that people miss nowadays, because we don’t have to [depend] on ourselves,” Sally says. “It brings self-confidence and pride and that makes me feel really good.”

 “It humbled the hell out of me,” says Kevin. “I’ve got to be careful, because I’m responsible for Sally now, not just my boat and myself. But I was able to do it, I didn’t get panicked, and that also gave me some pride. Pride and humility go together. It’s exciting, I’m feeling like I’m alive again.”

If dad was listening from Fiddler’s Green, he’d be proud. 

June 2025