Rembering Lloyd Roberts

Well, Lloyd has left us. Fair winds and black ice forever and all that…

He has left us a lot in other ways. Of course, he left us the book, “Think Ice” which is required reading for anyone interested in sailing on the hard stuff. I refer to my signed copy all the time. I treasure it even more now that Lloyd has passed. So many gems in there…

In the section where Jeff Kent was describing the amount of work and time that goes into being good at this Lloyd added in brackets the words “Jeff lives iceboating.” Said a lot about Jeff but also spoke volumes about what your attitude has to be if you want to get on the podium. Doing it half-assed won’t get you there.

He left us piles of CIBC newsletters, literally cut and pasted and xerox-ed and mailed out on this stuff we used back in the day called “paper.” I have all of mine filed away and grab one at random now and then and marvel at the guy’s dedication to the sport and putting it out there. His writing style was classic.

I was lucky to be living in Maine from about 1998-2001. I got to meet Lloyd and get to know him a bit and he was the coolest cat out there. Smart, fast, eager to share every detail he could about building and sailing any kind of iceboat, especially DNs. He knew a lot about a lot but wasn’t obnoxious about it. I was thrilled to show him my first boat and he graciously took it for a lap around Chiki and gave me a thumbs up on getting it. That gave me some confidence!

My favorite story about Lloyd and iceboating is this one… I had been living in Maine for three years, working on a big sailboat and getting pretty bored and burned out on it. I was the mate, the captain wasn’t going anywhere, I was never going to get a promotion or a raise or anything… The good news was I’d started sailing DNs in 1999, just ripping around on whatever lake was good that week and wondering how to get into the racing aspect of it. I was hooked big time and that was keeping me going.

Then there was a turn of events that literally changed my life. First, my plank broke. I had no idea how to build one so I emailed Lloyd and asked for advice on building a new one. It was one of the first emails I ever sent, in fact. Second, I got fired from my boat job the next morning because of my “performance, absenteeism, and attitude.” I guess that pretty much covered it although I thought my performance was good enough, my absenteeism was only in winter when there was ice, and my attitude was, I’ll admit, reeeaaaallllly bad.

Anyway the captain gave me the news at about 8 AM that morning. By 10 AM my “retirement party” was in full swing, which means my neighbor Jules and I, along with the second mate who had come by, had polished off a bottle of wine or three that I’d pilfered from the boat and had several puffs of this stuff called Carrabassett Valley Kind Bud. I was, in a word, tanked. We all cope with adversity in different ways!

In the middle of all this the phone rings and it’s Lloyd. I had the stereo cranked (Little Feat’s “Waiting For Colombus”) and I was kind of abrupt in explaining that I couldn’t hear him and wasn’t in any condition to discuss much. Did I mention that I was hammered? The festivities raged into the late evening.

The next day as the fog lifted and I was putting the fragmented memories of the day before together I remembered that Lloyd had called I and I’d been less than polite. Oh shit. So I emailed him, apologized and explained that I’d been fired and was kind of in shock and very drunk, and asked if he was still willing to help me put a new plank together.

His response was priceless and spoke volumes. “Hello James, no need to apologize. Don’t sweat the job; the happiest, sailing-est iceboaters are the ones who don’t put too much of a priority on things like work. Call me when you sober up and I’ll tell you how to build a plank.”

There was a lot of wisdom and perspective in those few words! I really took them to heart. And he did tell me how to put a plank together, and it is in use to this very day.

And that is the biggest thing he left me, the lesson to keep your priorities in order. Thank you Lloyd for that and everything else. You set an amazing example for us all.

James “T” Thieler DN US 5224