Living the Wet Life

Old members of Dartmouth's sailing team don't drift away. They just find other boats. Geoff Rand '85 and Anne Grimes '86, married in 1992, were both four-year members of Dartmouth's sailing team, "usually in opposing boats," says Grimes. Now he maintains the boats at the Boston Sailing Center while she serves as deputy director of the USS Constitution Museum.

But Grimes almost missed her boat. As the tour narrator during the USS Constitution's first sail in 116 years on July 21,1997, Grimes was wrapping up an interview with National Public Radio on the shore of Marblehead, Mass., when she saw the crew raise the ship's gangway. As she raced back, the gangway closed. Grimes, not missing a beat, climbed aboard "Old Ironsides" through a gunport.

Rand also has had his share of ocean adventures. He spent one early morning a few summers ago staked out on a sandbar in Boston Harbor waiting for the tide to rise after a member of the Boston Sailing Center ran a 40-foot sailboat aground.

At home along the Ipswich River in Ipswich, Mass., they manage a smaller fleet, including kayaks and canoes, for paddling around the marshes. "You look at the world a lot differently when it's wet," Rand says. "Once you get used to that, it's hard to go somewhere else."

Rand and Grimes paddle at home along the Ipswich River.