The adventurer Patsy Bolling tells Kate Lardy how vessels of every shape and size have defined her life and fueled her passions.
I have had a wonderful, adventurous life, doing all things exciting: sailing, racing cars and flying airplanes. I thought I was bulletproof. My father was a captain, and I grew up on sailing ships out of Nova Scotia. The schooner barque The City of New York was my playground for my first nine years. When I was 11, my family moved to the Bahamas, where my father chartered out his 24.4-metre boat. My first boat was a 4.9-metre Abaco dinghy named TIPKY, which stood for "This is Patsy Kenedy’s yacht."
As a teenager, I started to bum rides on race boats. I raced on Yankee Girl, Ticonderoga, Jubilee, Solution… My first paid crew work was on Ted Turner’s American Eagle, which we raced around the world. I was paid $50 a week and the captain got $100. It was hard to get that out of him at the time; he hadn’t yet become Mr CNN.
I then met my husband, Bill Bolling, or actually re-met him. He had been a diver for the Thunderball movie and the Flipper series, which used my dad’s Coast Guard cutter for production. Over the years we rebuilt 13 boats together. Bill’s philosophy was "Let’s look for a white elephant." There aren’t very many Desco trawlers that are yachts. You don’t see many Puritans or Pez Espadas (a 23.8-metre Mathis-Trumpy motor sailer.) I was the negative between Bill and me. I would say, "Oh no, we can’t do this – this is impossible." And he would say, "Oh, honey, look at this, we can do something with it." I don’t know where his imagination came from, but for him, everything was beautiful.
The cream of the crop was Puritan. We heard through the jungle telegraph that a 31.4-metre Alden schooner was dying in Miami. It was a rust bucket with nothing working. We took her to Fort Lauderdale and rebuilt her with 10 to 14 people; 21,000 working hours later, we sailed away. We were in Newport for the Rolls-Royce Owners’ Club annual meet with the owner of America, Presley Blake, and we put out an invitation to race. Unbelievably, we beat America because they couldn’t get their gollywobbler down at the leeward mark.
We had Jaru the longest, a beautiful 22.9-metre Trumpy motor yacht with a lot of varnish. When we sold her, we tried to live ashore on Marathon in the Keys. We both learned to fly and bought a Cessna 185 with floats, but we weren’t quite ready to drop the anchor, so to speak. We then bought the biggie, Albert, a 36.6-metre Icelandic Coast Guard gunboat. She was up the New River in Fort Lauderdale in great disrepair. Everything was written in Icelandic. We finally found an Icelander who understood it and got her going. We brought her to Key West for the rebuild, then took her to the Fourth of July festivities for the Statue of Liberty’s rededication in 1986. We had 40 people aboard, and everybody had to bring a bottle or a case of champagne. That was our fun time. We ended up taking her to Costa Rica and ran dive expeditions from Punta Arenas to Cocos Island.
We moved ashore after Albert, first to Marathon, then to a log cabin on 14 acres in New Smyrna Beach. Bill passed in 2013, and I sold everything in 2017.
Since then, I’ve been racing with Puritan on an almost yearly basis. I’m probably the luckiest person in the world. They tell me that when the boat goes for sale, I’m being sold with it in the forepeak.
First published in the October 2025 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.