Spike grew up next to Newfound Lake in New Hampshire where he spent his summers swimming and boating.  His first love was a 6' dingy named "Sally L," the sort of lightweight rowboat that even a five year old could manage.  Each summer Sally L would transport Spike to all the bays and rocky headlands and swampy river inlets at his end of the lake.  It was the sort of exploration and adventure that any child would love, and when a few years later Spike read "Swallows and Amazons" by John Crowe Ransome it fixed in his mind the idea that little in life could be more exciting than simply "messing around in boats."  Eventually, Sally L perished in the aftermath of a hurricane that swept up the eastern seaboard and stung the region.  The next day, Spike and his dad discovered the bones of the hull undulating like flotsam on a rocky shore some distance down the lake and Spike knew even then that the end of an era had come to pass.

    A few years later, Spike's dad purchased a 13' Penn Yann Swift and outfitted it with a 90 horsepower Mercury outboard, a tall, black, sinister looking machine that would drive the fragile hull at unheard of speeds.  This little outfit was able to run circles around any boat on the lake--including the gleaming mahogany Chris Craft kept in a boathouse down near The Ledges.  With its lustrous finish, upholstered interior, and throaty inboard, the Chris Craft was a symbol of affluence and entitlement that deserved to be outrun.  The little Penn Yann was superior, Spike thought, but he never could get over the deep, rumbling sound of that inboard exhaust.  The poor man's rocket was stupendously overpowered; the weight of the big outboard prohibited any sort of sudden stop since the trailing wake would climb aboard over the transom.  Also, the nearly flat bottom of the hull, and its lightweight construction, meant that chop and waves had to be handled with special care.  Still, she was fast whenever the surface was smooth.

    As a graduate student in Hawaii, Spike became obsessed with the idea of building a sailboat to live aboard, learning to sail, and undertaking a voyage around the world.  He read extensively--as any good academic would do--and eventually opted to build a Wharram designed Polynesian catamaran for the venture.  Since neither wife nor children were particularly taken with the plan, he found himself scaling back his grand scheme and building a smaller Wharram day cruiser instead.  He undertook this three year building project in their living room, and when it was finished he launched at the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor, next to Waikiki and Diamond Head.  The little ship was named Rima and she served him well, even venturing to cross the notorious Molokai Channel a couple times.

    When Spike left Hawaii he ended up in Alberta, and that is not good boating country.  The Big Idea did not die, but it suffered from a lack of visual stimuli--just as a plant might do in constant shade.  In 1984, however, a turn of events opened up a sailing possibility that might have revived the original vision.  Separated from his family, Spike moved to Utah and began teaching skiing at Deer Valley.  During his first season there he met a woman who had entered into a marriage of convenience with a Kiwi sailboat captain named Alan Jouning.  Alan was looking for crew to help him with a boat he was going to be taking over in New Zealand.  Spike ended up working for him as the mate on White Eagle, an 84' motor sailer that was undergoing a refit in Aukland and then setting off for Tahiti.  Spike worked on White Eagle for six months, making the 11-day passage to Tahiti, scuba diving in the Tuamotus, stopping over in the Cook Islands, and tarrying in Vava'u, the northern islands of Tonga.  The stopover at Rarotonga was particularly sentimental for there on the reef was lodged the derelict hull of Yankee, the boat that Irving and Electra  Johnson had used to sail around the world seven times.  As a youth, Spike had read their National Geographic articles and dreamed of global cruising.

    Spike could have stayed permanently with White Eagle but decided to return to Utah for the next winter season, and with that decision the dream of sailing around the world went into a state of dormancy.  Ten years later the vision was resurrected, but in a modified form because of the lack of nearby oceans.  Sailing around in circles on lakes and in protected waters held little appeal, so eventually the idea of building a power boat of some kind began to take root.  Why couldn't such a boat--if properly designed and well constructed--travel most anywhere except across large stretches of open ocean?  With that idea in mind, a boat design was selected and construction was begun.  Five years later, when Kobuk finally was finished, Spike was back in the boating business.

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