His first sailboat was an 8-foot pram, 

 built from a kit when he was 1 1 . After teaching 

 himself to sail, he fashioned a mini-cannon for 

 the deck in a metalworking class and ruled the 

 waves of the nearby lake. 



At 16, he was crewing on charter sailboats 

 in the West Indies. 



His first Meka, a 22-foot sailboat, sank in 

 a storm while bound for the Tropics. A passing 

 freighter rescued Sinbad and crew. 



Sinbad built Meka II in his Dearborn 

 Heights, Mich., backyard, launching it in 

 1967. Meka is a Hopi word for stout, loyal 

 companion. And so the Meka II has been on 

 its many passages, far and wide, since Sinbad 

 steered it out of the Great Lakes into salt water. 

 Sail charters, sail training voyages and his 

 talents as a draftsman and boatbuilder have 

 kept the ship in gunpowder. 



RIQHT: Robin Walbridge is captain ofUMS 

 Bounty, which was built for the 1062 film Mutiny 

 on the Bounty. BOTTOM- The arrival of the tall 

 ships is expected to draw 200,000 visitors to 

 Carteret County this summer. 



woodwork 30 years ago. Sinbad knew he had 

 found his home port when he first dropped 

 anchor. 



"Nobody minded if I fired my cannons," he 

 says. In fact, a mock battle was a closing ritual 

 for the Beaufort Old Homes Tour. "We got to 

 shoot up the place." 



Gov. Mike Easley recently fortified 

 Sinbad's countenance with a "privateer's 

 commission," a long-running spoof that 



movies. The replica ship was built for the 1962 

 film. Mutiny on the Bounty, and shared top 

 billing with Marlon Brando. In the celluloid 

 account, Fletcher Christian — played by Brando 

 — led an oppressed crew in seizing control of 

 the English vessel from the tyrannical Capt. 

 Bligh. Maritime scholars contend that the real 

 1789 mutiny in the South Seas was a far more 

 complex configuration of human relationships. 

 The current Bounty shares the design 



As his boats got bigger, so did his 

 passion for pirating. He swapped Ross Andrew 

 Morphew for Horatio Sinbad as his legal name, 

 borrowing both parts of the new moniker from 

 fabled seamen, real and fictional. 



A boat owner asked him to travel 

 from Florida to North Carolina to do some 



began with governors past. The 

 proclamation grants him license 

 to pretend to plunder any ships 

 venturing near the seaport of 

 Beaufort during Americas' Sail. 



TALL SHIPS, BIG DREAMS 



Such a life was on the minds 

 of many who came aboard HMS Bounty 

 in Morehead City, says its captain, Robin 

 Walbridge. 



"I think everybody has a secret desire to 

 run away to sea," he says. "Everybody's read the 

 novels. Everybody's read about the buccaneers." 



In this case, many also have seen the 



of the original, except for its dimensions. 

 Bligh's Bounty, built in 1784, was about 85 

 feet long as opposed to the 1 1 8 feet necessary 

 to accommodate the cameras. The generous 

 headroom below decks also bespeaks movie 

 making. 



The ship's cinema career still flourishes 

 after four decades. It has been a seaworthy 

 setting for Johnny Depp's Pirates of the 

 Caribbean, a Spongebob Squarepants movie and 

 hundreds of documentaries. 



Some people are attracted by its celebrity 

 status, Walbridge says. However, he thinks 

 the mystique of the three-masted beauty — as 



Continued 



Coastwatch I Winter 2006 I www.ncseagrant.org 17 



