thisboatinglife
BY ANN DERMODY
Hollywood, Big Fish, And Baseball
With saltwater in her hair, makeup-free
skin, and comfortable clothing, Dixie Carter
sits on the captain’s chair, looking at the
photographer, her husband Hal Holbrook.
She never looked less Hollywood, or more
beautiful. The actress, who died at age 70
in April, had a whole other less-glamorous
and outdoorsy life, which most of her fans
knew little about, far from the smell of the
greasepaint and roar of the crowd. Besides
each other, Carter and Holbrook had a
third member in their marriage for whom
they shared a passion, their 42-foot sloop
Yankee Tar, the boat that had been there
since the beginning of their relationship.
On a personal level, 1980 was a big
year for Holbrook. Besides buying Yankee
Tar and meeting Carter, the acclaimed
actor and seasoned sailor, who’d found
global fame a few years earlier as Deep
Throat in “All The President’s Men,” had just
completed the adventure of a lifetime, the
single handed Transpac Yacht Race from
California to Hawaii, an accomplishment
that would stay with him forever.
“The experience of being out there on
my own, coping with the sea and myself,
is a memory which has never grown old,”
he’s said. “Its lessons have come back to
me again and again.” Lucky to arrive in
one piece after a final race night of 40- to
50-knot winds and angry 18-foot seas,
Yankee Tar had been slammed for several
days, and Holbrook was badly in need of
sleep. “I was desperate for even just a five-
minute nap. Before lying down, I forced
myself to climb up the companionway
hatch to take a look around. Before I
turned my head more than 90 degrees, a
big white light swept across me. It was the
Kilauea Light about 20 degrees off my port
bow! I’d been on course, but was closer
than I thought, and was heading right for
the rocks!” Holbrook eventually made it
safely into Hanalei, “wet and 20 pounds
lighter than when I left California.”
None of that deterred Dixie Carter,
a woman Holbrook described as making
“every adventure glamorous and [a] great
sport.” Carter was a well-established TV
actress when she arrived, as planned, at the
race end to meet Holbrook; he’d invited
her to “go cruising” for a couple of weeks.
She got off the plane, with a bottle of Dom
Perignon, only to be greeted by a rather
rangy-looking and exhausted Holbrook.
When he saw her, dressed to the nines,
he remembered thinking she’d never be
up for the boating life, but Carter took her
cramped digs and unkempt captain all in
stride and the pair went on to have many
adventures, taking Yankee Tar to Tahiti,
Samoa, and New Zealand, among other
places.
The couple’s shared love of the
sea was so ingrained in Yankee Tar that
they donated the boat to The Mariners’
Museum in Newport News, Virginia, in
2006. Not yet on view to the public, the
boat is being prepared as an exhibit in
tribute to the couple’s sense of adventure,
and to the love they had for each other and
In our new recurring series
on interesting people in boating,
we’ll feature several faces —
some famous, some not — who all
share one thing in common: a love
of boats and being on the water.
If you know of someone you’d
like to see included in a future
issue, a boater who’s also done
something extraordinary,
please e-mail your suggestions
to editor@BoatUS.com
That I am weary of words and people; sick
of the city, wanting the sea.”
Dixie Carter is best remembered for her
portrayal of Southerner Julia Sugarbaker in
the television comedy “Designing Women”
from 1986 to 1993. More recently she starred
in “Desperate Housewives” for which she
was nominated for an Emmy. Hal Holbrook,
who for the past 55 years has been considered
one of America’s great craftsmen on stage and
screen, was nominated for an Academy Award
for “Into The Wild” in 2008, but is perhaps
best known for his 2,000-plus one-man shows
playing Mark Twain, which he still performs,
at age 85, to great acclaim across the country.
This year happens to be the 100-year anniversary of Samuel Clemens’s (aka Mark Twain)
death; in tribute, read about how much boaters have in common with Twain’s masterpiece
Huckleberry Finn in “Great Books of the
Sea,” page 24.
Hal Holbrook and Dixie Carter at the 14th Annual
Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2008.
LEFT PHOTO COURTESY MARINER’S MUSEUM; RIGHT PHOTO PRPHOTOS.COM
for the boating life. The museum asked the
couple to leave their personal effects on
board after they delivered it, so charts, log
books, photographs, drawers stuffed with
clothes, a pair of Sperry Topsiders in the
closet, and cassette tapes of their music are
still in place on the boat. Bottles of spice sit
on the counter. A kettle rests on the stove.
Perhaps the most intimate of their belongings is a plaque they made that still hangs
in the boat, bearing a quote from Edna St.
Vincent Millay: “Searching my heart for its
true sorrow; this is the thing I find to be;
Darla Bardelli Casts
Toward A New Future
“In it to win it” is Darla Bardelli’s
favorite slogan. Whether she’s battling big
fish on the end of a line as a professional
angler, waging the fight of her life against
breast cancer, or presenting her “Outdoors
Arizona” weekly radio program, Bardelli
isn’t one to go quietly. In August 2007,
she discovered she had breast cancer, just
as her marriage was falling apart.
While going through six grueling
months of chemotherapy, followed by a
double mastectomy, and a further two
months of radiation, Bardelli was pleased
to find various programs to support her
