Ty Knudson shows off the original, long-form registration for his 43-foot sailboat, Sundowner, which recently returned to Wrangell from an around-the-world trip. The U.S. Coast Guard no longer generates the older, foldout version of vessel registrations.
Whoever wrote the sage advice, “You can never go home,” never met Ty Knudson and his sailboat, the Sundowner.
Knudson, who registered the 43-foot boat in Wrangell in 1978, was a Wrangell resident until 1980. After working as a faller in the timber industry, he decided to take a trip to Hawai’i.
“After a tough winter here I went to the islands,” Knudson said. “And, I was just going to go for the winter and come back.”
Knudson didn’t return, though, and he embarked on a trip that would last more than 30 years and take him halfway around the world.
“I met my future wife there, in Hawai’i, and she didn’t want to come back here,” Knudson said. “She wanted to go to the South Pacific, so we spent seven years down there.”
Knudson, along with his wife Toni, would end up taking the vessel to the likes of Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, as well as the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and New Guinea over the past three decades.
Using an 80-horsepower Perkins engine, and the power of the wind, the journey back to Wrangell from Hawai’i took 24 days, Knudson said – and it wasn’t the easiest of trips, thanks to breakdowns and a ripped sail while underway.
“We had some fixing to do on the way,” he said. “The boat is getting old along with me. On the sixth day out we had a mainsail rip, and a spreader broke. After that, we had some bad fuel and it blew our injectors out, so we had to change those. Then we had autopilot problems and a jammed rudder, but we made it. We always make it.”
Knudson made the trip along with two of his nephews and his brother-in-law.
The boat’s 1978 registration is a rare breed as well, with Knudson possessing an original, full registry – a multi-page, foldout document quite unlike the modern registration used by the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Knudsons, who live on the big island of Hawai’i, will be making Wrangell their home during the spring and summer months from now, Ty added.
“The boat is going to be here permanently now,” he said. “We’ll be here during the warm months, and probably do our winters in Hawai’i.”
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