Sandy Fowler

There is very little I can say to do justice to the life of my father, so I’ll be brief.

After his family, who all know the depth of his love, he loved the sea best.

He loved to race sail boats. He was competitive, and he loved to win. But even more he loved the companionship of the shared endeavor.

He was never garrulous about his feelings, but the fact that he would return time and again to the wet, cold, miserable, nauseous experience ocean racing can often be is ample evidence of how he felt about his carefully chosen shipmates. He knew the strength of the bonds that a shared struggle can forge.

And always he was the mildest of skippers, always forbearing of those of us with less strength, less ability, weaker stomachs. Though he loved to describe himself as ‘overbearing in victory, surly in defeat’, he was, in fact, anything but.

He also loved to cruise, and spent much more time at that than at racing. But whether racing or cruising, whenever he was on a boat under way, he glowed. He glowed with the pure joy of just being there.

I was lucky to have been able to sail thousands of miles with him, basking in that glow. Certainly, it kindled a fire in my own heart - a love of the sea that was one of his greatest gifts to me.

Another even greater gift he gave me was his love of laughter. He laughed with abandon. His grandson, AJ, recently reminded us how he would give himself so totally to laughter that he would often have to remove his glasses and wipe the tears from his eyes.

My wife remembers an early experience of his humor: we were staying at Sandy’s house with our newborn daughter. On seeing her, some visitor to the house exclaimed a little too obviously for Sandy, “Look, it’s a baby.” Sandy replied, “No, it’s really an actor we hired to impersonate a baby.”

Everyone who knew Sandy has such memories. I think the best way to honor those memories is to carry his humor and joy out of this church today and into the world.