Lyn and Larry Pardy sailed half way around the world in something like a 24 sailboat. When I get around blow hards who talk about not needing thrusters if you know how to drive your boat with just the engine. I say: "Look any woosie can drive a boat with an engine. Lyn and Larry Pardy went half way round the world without an engine. You want to blow your own horn, get rid of your engine."
Here's something written up by Lyn memorializing Larry after his death. I will put a link to it at the bottom if you'd like to read the whole article.
"Larry was a man who kept every promise he made, and a doer who knew how to dream. On our first date in Newport Beach, California, two days after we met, he took me to see his keel timber, the first piece of the boat he was building. He sat me down on the loft floor saying, “You are in the cockpit.” Then he walked along the 30-foot long, full-sized drawing of the boat plans, stopping to point out where a coachroof would someday sit, where the mast would be, then the bow. He extended his arm forward and, with a faraway look in his eye stated, “And then there will be a seven-foot-long bowsprit to point towards the horizon.”
“That was a wonderful day, almost like an adventure,” I said as I prepared to leave and head back to my home near the edge of the California desert, 100 miles to the north.
“Stick with me baby and you’ll go a long way,” he replied.
He definitely lived up to his promise.
When we’d been living together for about three months (I moved in with him a week after that second date), Larry was working three days a week on the boat, and four as skipper on a 20-ton charter ketch. I was working as a computer tech five days a week and a boat-builders’ apprentice—Larry’s—two days. One of his mates came by, who’d sailed as engineer on the 85-foot schooner, Double Eagle while Larry was first mate and the late Bob Sloan the skipper during a four-month charter trip to Hawaii for a movie shoot. The two men began recalling stories of their voyage. “Did Larry ever tell you he was dating a movie actress and she almost convinced him to come back to Hollywood with her because she had arranged for him to get some acting work?” Ken went on to tell me how Larry had dated Diana Hyland for a while. (Diana soon became John Travolta’s partner.) Later that night I asked Larry why he hadn’t taken her up on her offer. “I didn’t want to pretend to do things. I wanted to actually do them,” was his succinct reply.
Where other men might be ego driven, Larry wasn’t. Math and geometry are easy for me. Not for Larry, who took an extra year to graduate from high school. One day he was trying to line out the topside planking of the boat we were building. I asked him what he was doing. He explained how hard it was to get the right spacing so the lines would look fair and handsome. I thought about it for a few minutes and suggested a mathematical solution. “Let’s try it,” he said. A few months later I happened to be inside the boat shop cutting wood plugs when one of Larry’s mentors came by to check our progress. “Nice job of lining out,” Roy Wildman said. Larry didn’t hesitate: “Lin showed me how to do it.”
Larry was the master of quips. One day when I was trying to drive four-inch nails into my very first wood-working project, a set of saw horses, I threw the hammer half way across the boatyard in frustration. He calmly picked it up and said, “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.” That became the motto that underlay our lives together.
Larry had very high expectations of himself and encouraged the same in me, while at the same time being very careful not to dent my self-esteem. After three-and-a-half years of working together we finally set off on our first ocean passage on the boat we’d built, the 24-foot Seraffyn. The second day out, a hundred miles south of San Diego, I became horridly seasick. I was laying on the cabin sole, bucket nearby, feeling sure I’d ruined both our dreams. He set the windvane, came down below and sat on the floor stroking my hair. “Remember, Lord Admiral Nelson got deathly seasick every time he went to sea,” he said."
https://www.sail-world.com/news/231449/Tribute-to-Larry-Pardey-Memories-from-Lin-Pardey
