By Elaine Lembo
Slipping out before snow and ice could delay his departure, Captain Richard Arthur Martell Jr., 82, embarked on his final passage minutes before the winter solstice on December 21, 2025. Good bets are that his destination was the Caribbean Islands he knew and loved so well from decades as a charter and delivery skipper there. As he did for so many of his countless offshore voyages, he set out from Newport, Rhode Island, taking his last breaths in comfort at Newport Hospital, after a long and complicated illness.
Known for his bucking-the-system ways as much for his brilliant, beautiful blue eyes, Rick was a true renaissance man. He was a surfer who took to the waves with the rising legends of the North Shore of Honolulu, Hawaii, in the early 1960s. He was a serious offshore racer and United States Coast Guard-licensed yacht captain who logged hundreds of thousands of miles in conditions both calm and calamitous. He was a unique artist who took the time that art demands, focusing on clay work and oriental ceramics of the 15th century. He loved wood in all ways. He was a logger and a veneer broker, and an easy target for lost-cause rescues of beautifully designed wooden hulls in peril of rot. He logged and split his own wood for firing raku ceramics, proud that he didn’t have to pay someone to do what he easily could do for himself.
He was also the much-beloved sweetheart of his partner, Elaine Lembo, whom he met when he serendipitously sat next to her for Sunday breakfast at the Blue Benn Diner in Bennington, Vermont, in 1991. Their encounter and subsequent romance are featured in Sonny’s Blue Benn: Feeding the Soul of a Vermont Town, by Caitlin Randall and Peter Crabtree.
With Elaine, Rick owned and restored boats, and sailed offshore to the Caribbean, where they worked as charter yacht crew for several years up and down the island chain. Their base of operations while aboard the charter yacht Windward Haze was Nanny Cay Marina in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, a location that afforded them hijinks with many like-minded carefree souls and long-lasting friendships.
They loved exploring BVI and later, other anchorages in the Caribbean and all over the world, whether for Rick’s yacht clients or for Elaine when she was a staff editor at Cruising World magazine. The CW period of their lives, from 1998 to 2015, is cherished as among their best years together. Rick was also very supportive of Elaine when Sally Erdle, founding editor of the Caribbean Compass, retired and asked Elaine to succeed her as editor in chief of the magazine, a role Elaine has held for more than three years.
The CW period is also when Rick and Elaine owned the 1935 Crocker ketch Land’s End, the platform for many water-based adventures from Wickford, Rhode Island, to Friendship, Maine. On occasion they would sail Land’s End to Potter Cove on Prudence Island, in Narragansett Bay. Elaine was so smitten by Prudence and its community that it is no surprise that one day Rick found another wooden hulk in need of rescue, the Bow House, in the Homestead settlement not far from the ferry on the island’s eastern shore. One of the Bow House’s chief attractions was a shed that they converted to a studio so Rick could return to his clay and throw pots. The output of his Prudence Pottery artistic endeavor over the last eight years is prodigious and sought after by admirers and those familiar with the tea ceremony.
Rick was as devoted to liberal politics as he was to his unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit that brought him both constant companions in bars and boatyards and worried consternation to those who cared about his health. Yet throughout his eight decades, he seemed to defy the odds, smoking while he logged, sailed, and threw pots — and while refreshing himself with gin and tonics. Smoking may have also helped him survive two brutal years of ground combat as a U.S. Army infantryman with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1965-67. “Every day is a bonus” was his motto, and nothing and no one would deter him from his routine.
Born at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington, Vermont, August 24, 1943, Rick was the son of Richard and Mary Martell and brother to Linda, all of whom predeceased him. Rick was intensely proud of his father, who led a full career with the U.S. Navy as chief provisioning officer and chef to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. One of his father’s career highlights was his service as chief commissary steward in the Navy’s 1946 Antarctic expedition headed by Rear Admiral Richard F. Byrd. The Martell family lived in Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, Washington, D.C., and various communities in Rhode Island. Rick was a 1961 graduate of North Kingstown High School and attended his 50th class reunion.
You can see more of Rick’s pottery at https://www.facebook.com/rickmartellceramicvessels/
Share donations of remembrance with the Prudence Island Volunteer Fire Department:
PIVFD
PO Box 305
Prudence Island, RI 02872
Telephone: (401) 683-1100
Website: www.pivfd.org
