A Blue Boat on Brown Water

If you peer off the north side of the Lake Street Bridge this time of year, you’ll often spot a dark blue, double-masted sailboat anchored on the Mississippi. For most of the past seventeen years, Captain John V. Caola has sailed from points south—Key West, Miami, and the Bahamas—to beat the heat and visit his family (which now includes eight grandchildren) in the Twin Cities.

He is turning into a seasonal sight himself. Sporting a blue Hawaiian shirt, Panama hat, and a salt-and-pepper beard, Caola resembles a slimmed-down Hemingway, a guy who at first strikes you as just the kind of carefree and footloose soul you would imagine choosing to live out his retirement on a sailboat. Talk to him for a while, though, and you soon discover a surprisingly conscientious and meticulous individual, one who reels off the details and specs of his thirty-three-foot boat—which, he informs me, is really a motorsailer rather than a sailboat—and the routes he has sailed.

Since the end of January, Caola and his friend Monique, a newcomer to the live-aboard life, have sailed or motored 2,400 statute miles. They began in Miami, sailed north on the Atlantic, and traversed the width of Florida via the Okeechobee waterway. On the Gulf coast, they followed a route of commercial waterways and open sea that eventually brought them to Mobile, Alabama, where they began an inland journey up the Mobile, Tombigbee, Tennessee, and Ohio rivers. And then, at Cairo, Illinois, they embarked on old muddy itself—the Mississippi River.

The early days of fall are an ideal time to be on the upper Mississippi, Caola says. Even in a dry year like this one, the view of the changing leaves is spectacular from the river, as is the setting sun reflecting off the steel skin of the Weisman Museum, a short sail up the river. Soon Caola and Monique will turn the MS Beluga around and sail back south, this time down the entire length of the Mississippi to New Orleans.

Over the years, Caola has been pleased to see the water quality and boating facilities on the Mississippi improve. Although the boat traffic has also increased, the river is still a remarkable refuge. “It is amazing,” he says, as we gaze up at the busy bridge from the west bank of the river, “that you can be right in the heart of the hustle and bustle of a big city and down here it is all peace and quiet.”
—Dan Gilchrist