‘Adventure Cat’: Over Three Decades of Charter Sailing on San Francisco Bay
“To me, it’s a love story,” said Pam Simonson, one of the founders of Adventure Cat Sailing Charters, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.
“I started sailing at a young age and fell in love with it. I liked the idea of being on the water — the wind in my hair and going fast. When I met Jay on one of our early dates, I said, ‘Let’s go sailing.'” Jay Gardner quickly fell for both Pam and sailing. Years later, after racing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, Jay remembers stepping ashore and thinking, “That’s so much fun. I wish there was a way to share that.”
An idea took shape over breakfast aboard Pam and Jay’s liveaboard boat Ingwe in the mid-1980s. Along with friend and future partner Hans Corfin, they began sketching out a business. With no commercially available boat that fit their vision or budget, the partners built their own. “I said something to the effect of, ‘We should build a big catamaran.’
“And Hans, bless him, made the mistake of saying, ‘Yeah, we ought to.’ He didn’t pooh-pooh the idea.” Retired naval officer and business professor Chris Christensen later helped the trio refine the concept into a workable business plan.
Financing proved far more difficult. Banks, the Small Business Administration and even California energy-efficiency loan programs all turned them down. Instead, Pam and Jay took out a second mortgage on their home and spent 10,000 man-hours over 17 months building Adventure Cat from scratch. Everything except the aluminum mast, backup diesel engines and propellers was built by the partners.
Jay said the partners decided early on to build the boat from scratch rather than convert an existing vessel, as few large domestically built catamarans existed at the time. They adapted a Kurt Hughes Sailing Designs cat already operating on Lake Tahoe, expediting USCG approval as a sister-ship design. A cardboard scale model helped refine the layout before Hughes finalized the plans.
The entire endeavor required tremendous faith. Nobody drew a salary. “The banks all said no. The state of California and their energy-efficiency loans said no. Everybody that we talked to said no. But Pam was the only one that said yes,” Jay said. For him, the business never stopped being a love story.