home

What’s in a name? When it comes to boats, quite a lot.

When TownDock.net talks with visiting sailors about their travels, their lives and their boats, we sooner or later ask about the boat’s name. And we’ve found in the past year that the stories behind the boat’s name can be as compelling — if not more so — than tales of heavy gusts and tall waves and dragging anchors. That was the case this past weekend, when a boat came through Oriental, with a name and a story for anyone who’s ever lost a friend.

The Great Harbour 47 trawler is the home of Christine and Mark Strom. And it’s named Alonzo’s Sea.

Christine and Mark say the boat is named for their friend, Alonzo Seay who had been the General Manager of Catalina/Morgan Sailboats in Florida. They’d met Alonzo and his wife in the early 1980’s in Cabbage Key, shortly after they moved to Florida from Connecticut.

When they met, Mark says, Alonzo had a 22-foot “African Queen-style boat “ complete with the “striped fringe top” that had been built for Disney. Alonzo trailered the boat to different parts of Florida every weekend, and Christine and Mark soon joined him, visiting far-flung towns, lakes and rivers off the beaten track. “He showed us,” says Mark, “ the Florida you couldn’t see from the Interstate.”

Christine says the two became ‘inseparable’.

“He was closer to me,” Mark says, “than a brother.” Besides boating together, Mark would occasionally accompany Alonzo on his work for Catalina. Sometimes he’d travel with him to the islands to make pre-hurricane season assessments on sailboats. A few years ago, he helped Alonzo rig the then-new Catalina 400 in the wee hours of the morning before the opening of the Miami Boat show. Then, without a motor, he says, Alonzo easily sailed it down the Miami River and in to the slip just as the show began.

And over the course of their fifteen year friendship, Alonzo often shared his dream . He wanted to one day sell his house and live and travel on a boat. And he wanted his friends to do the same.

“And then,” Mark says, “life played a cruel trick on him.”. A few years ago Lon went in to the hospital for some heart surgery, and as Mark puts it, “never came out.” Alonzo Seay was 53.

His friends and family gave him a fitting funeral. “We buried Lon’s ashes at sea,” Mark says. The Gulf of Mexico waters of Passagrille Pass near St. Petersburg Beach had been a favorite passage and Mark says that’s where most of the ashes went, along with a few shots. “We toasted him with his favorite, Appleton’s rum,” Mark says, adding that even a few years later, they lift a toast of Appletons when they pass through those waters.

But that’s not the end of the story, nor of Alonzo Seay’s ashes.

Alonzo’s death was a turning point for Mark Strom. Around the same time, his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke. “I decided life was too short. You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.” So, Mark and Christine decided to build a boat and carry on his dream.

Not only did they name the boat after him, Alonzo is also a part of it. Literally. When the Great Harbour 47 was being built, some of Alonzo’s ashes were mixed in to the fiberglass gelcoat.

The Stroms also collected several photographs from Alonzo’s life. Photos of his wife, his son, his dog, and of Alonzo and the crew at Catalina as the Catalina 400, the last project he worked on at Catalina, came off the production line. Those photographs and a self-portrait Lon sketched as a young man are also on board the boat, but the Stroms can’t show them. The photos and sketch are in a small packet sealed in to a bulkhead.

But as Mark says, “We don’t know where.”

Mark and Christine in the salon
Throughout the boat, there are turtles, which Christine says had been part of their friend’s family crest. Just about every compartment of the airy 1000 square foot living area has a sea turtle in one form or another — a sculpture on a table, a wood carving over the doorway that leads to the aft deck, an aquarium on the starboard side of the bridge where a few live turtles soar thru the water.

With all of that, their friend is figuratively — and literally — a part of their boat . As Mark says, “Alonzo is living his dream through us.”

It was also their friend and his passing that led the Stroms to choose the Great Harbour 47 as the boat to carry on that dream.

On the day Alonzo’s ashes were being cast upon the waters of Passagrille, Mark and Christine joined a few others on a Florida Bay Coaster, a steel trawler, for the ceremony. Somewhere along the way on that funeral journey, Mark says, the owner asked Christine to take the wheel. Mark says that in three decades of marriage he knew his wife didn’t like being at the controls of the fast boats he owned. But this one, with a top speed in the single digits was different and he says he knew then that he’d “ found a boat .. where she’d be comfortable.”

That led Mark and Christine to have a similar trawler made, this one out of fiberglass, by Great Harbour.

In the galley
Three years ago, the boat “Alonzo’s Sea” was christened. And just as their friend had dreamed of doing, the Stroms sold their home in Tampa and moved aboard the boat. This past February, Christine retired from her job at Verizon and the Stroms have started cruising. They are working their way north, and hope to spend the summer near Connecticut, on Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River.

On Memorial Day weekend, they pulled in to Oriental — one of two Great Harbour boats in town at the time, the other being a Great Harbour 37 which was at the TownDock and on Harborcam for a few days. They managed to take in the South Water/Hodges Street block party and BBQ, and commented about how the life in Oriental seemed like the small towns of western Florida where they had spent a lot of time.

One got the impression that Alonzo Seay would have enjoyed the visit. Come to think of it, he just might have.

Posted Thursday May 29, 2003 by Melinda Penkava

email this story | back to top