This week (January 21, 2026) the speaker at our Winter Wednesdays series is Captain Richard McCurdy. Captain McCurdy was born in Port Townsend, as was his father and father’s father. He had a childhood dream of sailing his own boat to the South Pacific and beyond. His father, who Richard characterizes as a “vicarious sailor,” told him that if he got an advanced degree, he would help Richard build a boat to take on this long voyage. So after getting a Masters’ degree in carbohydrate and polyphenolic chemistry he spent 1974-1976 finishing the bare hull of a Cape George sailboat. Durning that time he met a girl at the Town Tavern and in 1977 they departed and spent the next five years sailing around the world. Arriving back in Port Townsend in 1982 he realized he didn’t want to be engineer but work on the water. He signed on as the deckhand on a tug and over the next ten year worked his way up to captain. That experience gained him enough sea time and experience to apply to be a Puget Sound Pilot, which he became 1992, where he had a successful twenty five year career. As you can imagine he has a lot of stories. This talk will focus on his circumnavigation.