Boats and Their People: A Very Beautiful (Ling Ling) Bond
Josh Fody and Jessie Wilde each came to their shared dream of living aboard full time from different places. Josh nurtured the notion of buying a boat and sailing south during his years aboard an aircraft carrier in the Navy. Jessie first tasted the idea when her grandfather built a trimaran in his backyard but suffered a stroke before he ever got to sail it. The idea grew when she met an artist who had lived on a boat for 28 years and raised her daughter on board.
Josh Fody takes in the twilight underway.
Photo courtesy of Jessie Wilde
When Josh and Jessie first started to talk seriously about looking for their sailboat, it was Jessie who pitched the seemingly wild idea: “What if we lived on the boat?” Blissfully clueless, as Jessie proclaimed them to be, they started looking for an older boat they could afford with good bones, proven offshore capability, and the comfort and feel of home.
“She’s a real piece of work,” their broker told them when they first saw Ling Ling, a 1979 Kelly-Peterson 44, on the hard in Virginia in 2015. The KP 44 was designed by Doug Peterson, who had made his name with racing boats that dominated the IOR class in the 1970s, starting with the game-changing one-tonner Ganbare. He brought the same swift capabilities to the cruising boat he designed for Jack Kelly Yachts; the first KP 44 was launched in 1976, and 200 were built.
Ling Ling’s salon during the refit.
Photo courtesy of Jessie Wilde
With its protected center cockpit, low profile, graceful sheer, and long fin keel, the cutter-rigged Kelly-Peterson 44s are known for their seaworthiness and for turning out the miles on a passage. To Jessie and Josh, the warm teak interior spoke home, and the boat seemed to be the perfect compromise between speed, stability, and comfort. True to her name, which means “very beautiful” in Mandarin, Ling Ling—even from her jack stands in the weeds—called like a siren to Josh and Jessie.
“We just…fell in love. With the boat, the goal, the intoxicating craziness of it,” Jessie says. At first blush, she needed a new deck, new overhead, new cushions, new stove, hatches, and so much more. “We were clueless,” Jessie laughs, referring to the daunting time and expense that lay ahead. But they were also instantly committed. And when they learned that the boat’s previous owner was the very artist Jessie had met years earlier, it seemed like too much karma to be true.
Ling Ling’s salon after the refit.
Photo courtesy of Jessie Wilde
They bought Ling Ling in 2015, brought her from Deltaville to Hampton, Virginia, and settled into the reality of bringing her back to cruising form. A handful of photos reveal Jessie with rust-red bottom paint caked on her jeans, plastic shavings in her hair, Josh in his greasy do-rag, dirty fingernails, Tyvex suits, jigsaws, epoxy, crossed legs on cardboard eating out of bags from 7-Eleven. A smattering of itchy memories. But the dust, time, and expense proved well worth it.
The labor-of-love refit took five years and entailed, among other things, replacing the engine, sails, and rigging. The decks needed to be recored and refinished. They repaired blisters in the keel, replaced all the deck hardware, and painted the cockpit, mast, and deck. They replaced the propeller shaft and prop, upgraded the battery bank to lithium, and installed a dinghy arch with solar panels and a wind generator. They replaced and relocated the windlass, installed a whole new anchoring system, replaced all the through-hulls, and removed, refinished, repaired, and reinstalled all 14 bronze portlights. Oh, and dropped, cut open, and rebuilt the rudder.
Somewhere during the hundreds of climbs up the ladder to her dusty decks, the dance parties in the cockpit after another project completed, and the perfectly tuned whistle Josh maintained while they both doggedly spent years sanding, painting, cleaning, and restoring her, Jessie found a soul mate in Ling Ling. She and Josh now live aboard the majority of the time while both working remotely for NASA—he as an engineer, she as a video producer and writer—and they have cruised their Kelly-Peterson up and down the East Coast, from Marathon, Florida, to Maine.
Last year they sailed for the first time to the jewel-toned waters of the Bahamas, finally fulfilling Jessie’s grandfather’s teal and turquoise dream. Watching his trimaran decay into a heap of plywood in the backyard had been “a lesson for us,” Jessie says. “Live while you can” is the motto by which she and Josh both approach life.
The bond they have forged with Ling Ling has enabled them to be true to that ethos—the fiery woman who wanted to experience and share the whole world, the born seaman seeking the adventure and wisdom only blue water can bring, and a beautiful old boat who simply needed them to offer time, love, and courage so she could take them all back out to sea.
October 2024
