Welcome to the chamber: Sailing Daze

I’ve been a business owner for 14 years and a sailor for 25 years. I’ve lived in Brainerd since 1990 but Walker is kind of my summer home. I have my 100-ton Coast Guard Master Captains license and have captained a 72 ft paddle wheeler, a 65 ft dinner cruise boat and a 42 ft sailboat out of Duluth. I have sailed from Duluth to New York city and down the east coast. I love being on the water. There seemed to be an opportunity on the lake at the present time for a sailing charter service and I wanted to do my own thing rather than run someone else’s vessel. I was looking for a unique, classic and larger sailboat to put on Leech Lake for charters so that if there were 30 sailboats boats on the water this one would stand out and make people want to go out for a ride.  Being a ketch (two masts) and over 45 feet long, this sailboat does stand out with its maroon colors. It also is able to get through the narrows most of the year due to its shallow draft. Knota Lotta, a 1984 Irwin with many improvements and having been very well maintained through the years was trucked to Walker from Texas in the fall of 2018 and didn’t see the water until this spring. She sits at a dock at Shores of Leech where the bulk of the sailing community of the lake resides. Knota Lotta is a long-range cruiser designed for waters much larger than Leech lake, but she looks mighty pretty on Leech.