26 tons of love will soon be sailing

Backyard builder started 29 years ago

By Booyeon Lee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

April 28, 2005

FRED GREAVES
Leland Parsons (in white at right) walked down Claire Drive in Poway
ahead of the schooner he started in his back yard 29 years ago. The
sailboat is to get its first taste of the water Monday in Mission Bay.

POWAY – For 29 years, neighbors and friends have watched Leland Parsons build his dream in his back yard. Yesterday, they gathered on his lawn as he completed it.

The schooner Frank Edmund – 57 feet tall, 16 feet wide and 65 feet long – was painstakingly moved from Parsons' home in a south Poway neighborhood.

The 26-ton sailboat will sit in a neighbor's yard, down a hill near Garden Road, while Parsons and his family load 150 blocks of lead ballast into the bottom of the hull over the weekend.

On Monday, San Diego Boat Movers will haul it to Mission Bay, where it will touch the water for the first time. In September, Parsons and his wife, Cecily, plan to set sail on a five-year journey around the world.

The schooner, named after Cecily's father, is a product of Leland Parsons' lifelong love affair with sailing. His dream was to sail the world with his wife and his eight children in a boat he built with his own hands.

He began the project thinking he would complete it in five years, but life intervened.

The sailboat became a family pastime and his children grew up building it.

Yesterday, neighbors took down their fences and let the boat, perched on a trailer, glide through their yards. When construction started, the Parsonses' home was one of the few in the neighborhood.

The couple's grandchildren ran after it while Cecily Parsons looked on teary-eyed. "It's beautiful," she said.

The schooner has eight sails and about 3,000 square feet of canvas in all. The hull is made of seven layers of plywood and four layers of fiberglass; 18 portholes provide light to the interior.

In the bow are two private cabins, each with a bunk bed, and a shared shower and toilet.

The interior is lavish, with a red-tiled bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub, a full kitchen and a dinette area with a rosewood, walnut and teak dining table built on gimbals so it stays level as the boat rocks.

The Parsonses' daughter, Ashley Brown, 32, was a toddler when the first truckload of lumber arrived in their back yard.

"Letting the boat go feels like my whole life is being uprooted," Brown said yesterday. "I know that it's this incredible dream that should be completed. But something in me says, 'Don't go.' "

The Parsons home was bustling with family members and neighbors waiting for nearly four hours as San Diego Boat Movers used jacks to slowly lift the Frank Edmund onto the trailer.

The move was complicated by the homes that have grown up around the boat, so the company enlisted Gil Gresoro, a retired 38-year veteran boat mover, to supervise the operation.

"Getting out of here is a challenge," Gresoro said. "You just never know what's under the ground."

Don Mancini, 42, a former neighbor, was 12 when he first climbed Parsons' fence with his brother to offer their services to help build what they called "Noah's Ark."

"I'd hear Leland pounding on the boat, and we'd come running," said Mancini, who came from Temecula to lend a hand yesterday.

Mancini said he worked on the boat nearly every day until he was 18 and moved from his mother's home. He said he owes Leland Parsons, a professional builder, for steering him to the same career.

Others came for motivation. Bo Siedenburg said he has been attempting to refurbish a 26-foot powerboat in his back yard for more than a decade.

"It's pretty much a flowerpot in my back yard now," Siedenburg said. "I came to get inspired."

While Cecily Parsons and the couple's children talked on about what the day means to the family, Leland Parsons appeared preoccupied, rushing to and fro preparing the schooner for the move.

"I'm OK as long as I don't talk about it," said Parsons, his eyes brimming with tears.

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