Return to Blue Water, by Pam Rorke Levy. Nomad Press, Norwich, Vermont. 225 pages. $75
By Tad Richards
A coffee-table book is designed to look beautiful and imposing on a coffee table. You or a visitor can open it to any page, really, and enjoy the big beautiful color photographs of cheetahs or polo players or Mar-a-lago or, in this case, sailboats, in particular a lovingly restored classic 52-foot wooden yawl that stands out in a crowd or by itself on the water.
Return to Blue Water confounds those expectations by containing quite a lot of text, and making it clear that the author expects you to hold the big heavy book on your lap and read it all the way through. The good news is, it’s worth the effort.
Pam Rorke Levy gives us not just one absorbing narrative but two. Alternating chapters tell us the history of the dream that became Dorade, and the two young men who dreamed it in 1929 and made it a reality in 1930 as the stock market and then the country’s economy went crashing around them. Olin Stephens was 21 when he drew up the design for new kind of racing yacht, light, sharp-ended and yawl-rigged, and his teenage younger brother, Rod, oversaw the construction because who else would take on such a harebrained scheme?
The story of two young men with a dream is compelling, but it pales next to the book’s main story, of two middle aged people meeting in the wake of foundered dreams. Pam Rorke Levy was a successful documentary filmmaker whose life, and sense of herself, had been shattered by a brutal rape. Matt Brooks was an unmoored eccentric whose already chaotic life had been further upended by a painful divorce. It would have been hard to imagine two more unlikely people getting together — in fact, it was hard for Pam to imagine. But somehow they stuck, and somehow their whirlwind blew them in the direction of buying and restoring what had once been a beautiful boat, although none but the two of them thought that it could be again. “At first I thought we were saving a beautiful old boat,” Levy would come to write about the experience. “Looking back on it now, I know that Dorade saved us.”
Much of the story of a mismatched/perfectly matched couple and their quixotic love affair with a boat thought long past its prime was played out in the Caribbean, and Dorade’s reemergence into the racing world limelight after a dormant half-century came at the 2012 Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta, the first test of their lovingly restored classic.
Antigua’s marina awed Levy at first with “superyachts, motorboats that could pass as ocean liners, and sailboats with masts that rose 200 feet off the deck,” alongside a “bizarre mix of vessels. 9-foot rowboats parked alongside 90-foot motor cruisers. Many were in various stages of disintegration after thousands of miles at sea … home to self-styled castaways, young and old, who had taken whatever savings they had and headed off to sea …[they] shared an uncanny family resemblance, sporting the same bleached hair and beards, salt-blistered skin, and hands rough as sandpaper.”
At the yacht club itself, they were confronted with their competition: “finely tuned vessels, driven and maintained by professional crews who spent much of the day lounging in the shoreside snack bar chatting up local waitresses, while local boatwrights … stripped down the teak and mahogany brightwork and laid down coat after coat of varnish.” Levy’s first impression of the boats themselves: “Bigger than Dorade, schooners with soaring masts and hulls twice the length of ours … we were dwarfed by what seemed like oceangoing behemoths, some dating back to the late 1800s … [They] seemed to be playing in a different league from our little boat, with its tarnished bronze work and spartan furnishings.” But Dorade came in first in its class on the first day of racing.
The second day was a different story, with the roughest seas Levy and Brooks had encountered, which the bigger boats could handle, while the new sailors felt as though they’d mounted a roller coaster with waves crashing over them. They realized they were out of the competition, and went to their first awards ceremony more than a little dejected. Then came the final award of the night. Levy listened as the announcer said,
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw her. I was just a boy, but I thought she was the most beautiful boat I’d ever seen.” His face softened at the memory … It gives me great pleasure to announce the winner of this year’s Concours d’Élégance … what many of us consider the first modern racing yacht … she’s as lovely as she is invincible … Dorade.”
Dorade didn’t win that day, but her blue water miracle was soon enough to come. If the waters around Antigua had been rough, how could the little boat be expected to handle the Pacific Ocean? But the by-then hardened crew took her to the July 2013 Transpacific Race from Long Beach, California to Hawaii, and brought her in for a corrected-time first place finish.
Dorade’s peak performance under the Stephens brothers had been the 1931 Transatlantic race from Newport to England. Levy and Brooks entered the same race in 2015, with the announced goal of beating not only the current competition but the ghosts of the Stephens — although the course would be 150 miles longer than the route the Stephens took in 1931. Through rough seas that proved too much for many of the boats that started, Dorade finished a close second … but a full day ahead of the Stephens.
Matt and Pam married in January 2019. In December of that year she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Their life with Dorade had taught her to overcome fears that had paralyzed her for much of her life, and they determined to defy those fears for as long as she had left.
Pam Rorke Levy died on January 4, 2024. She left behind a completed manuscript. With the firm editorial guidance of Elaine Lembo and the determination of Matt Brooks, the book came to fruition and was published in 2025 by Nomad Press. Dorade’s story is a miracle on blue water, and Levy’s book is a witness to history. Not to mention an improbable and engrossing love story.
Buy the book from bluewaterweb.com/product/return-to-blue-water.
