# The Charter Years

URL: https://www.grahamnicholson.com/chapters/the-charter-years

Last updated: 2026-10-08T15:58:16.638Z

The room he built runs on other people's voices. The boat runs on his hands. And the boats go back further than anything else in this story — further than the guitar.

## Before he could drive one, he had to swim

His family summered at **Moosalamoo**, in **Salisbury, Vermont**. If he wanted to take the boat out on **Lake Dunmore**, he had to prove he could swim **out to the raft** first. The family boat was a rowboat with a **7.5-horse Scott Atwater** on the back.

When he was **twelve**, the family bought a **31-foot Elco cabin cruiser** named ***Sumerun*** and docked her at the **Amityville Yacht Club**. He learned to run her. His own boat was rather smaller: an **8-foot Penn Yan** with a **1.5-horse air-cooled outboard**. The **move to Connecticut in 1955** changed the family boat again, to a **16-foot ski boat** with a **55-horsepower Chrysler outboard**.

In **1973**, while he was still a serving Plainville police officer, he took a **22-foot Penn Yan** around the **Great Northern Route** — about a thousand miles of river, lake and lock. That story is in [The Badge](/chapters/the-badge), because that is where it happened.

## 1976: it becomes the job

When he left the department, **Jack and Maureen Roberts** asked him to move their **85-foot motor-sailer, the *Lady Maureen*, to Palm Beach, Florida**.

He took her down, and **stayed in Florida long enough to pass the test for 100-Ton Merchant Marine Captain**. Then he was hired as **captain of the *Jungle Queen***, the **500-passenger** tour boat.

Five hundred people. It is the same job he would do for the rest of his life in three different costumes: fill a room with strangers, take responsibility for all of them, and give them a night.

## Lady of the Sea

He sold the Penn Yan and bought a **30-foot Sportcraft**, and named her **LADY OF THE SEA**. He had her **documented** and took **six-pack charters** — six paying passengers at a time — which required a **25-ton Merchant Marine licence**.

**About 1977** he sold the Sportcraft and bought a **32-foot Trojan**, and documented her too.

Then a run of smaller, faster boats: a **17-foot speedboat**, traded for a **19-foot speedboat with a 350-horsepower Corvette engine**. He took **Bonnie** — his girlfriend then — from Connecticut to **New York City** in it, navigating with **a handheld compass and nothing else**. After that a **24-foot pontoon** at the cottage he had just bought on **Highland Lake**, later traded for a **22-foot Bennington** with a **70-horsepower Yamaha**.

## "Could we really afford that?"

Then he picked up a copy of ***Soundings***.

Listed in it was a **1981 Hatteras Motor Yacht**, already documented for charter service. **Fifty-six feet**, lying at **Saybrook Point Marina** in **Old Saybrook**. Her owner and captain was **Frank Rogers**.

Bonnie and Graham went down and inspected her. Walking away afterwards, Bonnie asked the question anyone would have asked: *could we really afford that?*

The closing was in **May**. Her name was **REALESCAPE**, and she is the boat in these photographs. He ran her as **Real Escape Yacht Charters** out of **Stamford**, owner-operator, for **roughly twelve to fourteen years** — carrying **up to fifty people** — and he **retested and earned his 200-ton licence**, four gold stripes at the cuff.

The work was not pleasure cruising. **Famous people. Fundraisers. Burials at sea. Weddings. The New York City fireworks. A winter in Myrtle Beach. Connecticut River cruises. Charters in the Hamptons. A season in Stamford. A charter for United States Coast Guard graduates.** And, in his own words, countless more.

## The same job, on water

It is worth noticing how little the job actually changed.

He spent forty years putting a microphone in a stranger's hand and giving them three minutes in front of a room. On the water he took fifty strangers out into Long Island Sound and gave them an evening. Same instinct — build the room, then get out of the way of the people in it. *There are no strangers, just friends you haven't met* reads differently once you know he printed it on a dance hall and then went and did it on a boat.

Bonnie was aboard too, in crew whites with epaulettes on the shoulders, standing beside him in the wheelhouse while he wore the peaked cap.

## Coming in

The day came when he decided to **retire from the charter business**, and he sold REALESCAPE to a charter operation working out of **Jersey City, New Jersey**.

There was one more boat after her, and it is a small joke of an ending for a man who held a 200-ton ticket: a **Seadoo Switch**, driven by a water jet, kept at the **Middletown Yacht Club**. He sold it a year later.

**Still to settle:** the year he bought REALESCAPE and the year he came ashore — he gives the month, May, but not the year. And the order of the three licences: he passed for **100 tons** in Florida after 1976, says the *Lady of the Sea* six-pack work needed **25 tons**, and retested for **200 tons** in the REALESCAPE years. A 25-ton ticket after a 100-ton one would be a step down, so one of those sits somewhere else in the order. We have not guessed at it.