WOBURN — Some folks get to live their dreams, and Woburn resident and former city councilor Stephen Braese, 45, is living his dreams through racing sailboats on lakes and oceans.

His latest adventure of being the skipper aboard a 59' sloop was just the latest advenure...but that's getting ahead of the story.

Braese, who is now a member of the Woburn Board of Appeals, said he started sailing at age 11 on Horn Pond when, in 1972, his father Russell Braese purchased an O'Day 17-foot day sailor. The first time out, his father fell off the pier, said Braese, and the sailboat started to drift away with him and his 8-year old brother in the boat. His dad swam to the boat and retrieved it.

"I was pretty nervous" when first starting to sail, said Braese, because the boat would heel (lean away from the wind). However, Braese observed of sailing, "You either love it or not," and he started racing out of the Lake Quannapowitt Yacht Club in Wakefield, which had a strong youth racing program.

By age 14, said Braese, he had won the Massachusetts State Junior Championship Gallagher Trophy while competing against 17 year old sailors.

"My dad was my pit crew," quipped Braese, adding that his dad kept fixing everything his son broke on their sailboat while racing.

At Roger Williams College, Braese continued racing and won the distinction of Honorable All American, which meant he was one of the top 20 (lake and bay) racing skippers in the U.S.

Braese noted that this honor is now handed out by two organizations working together: U.S. Sailing and the Inter Collegiate Sailing Association.

After college, Braese dreamed of becoming a professional sailor, and hung around Newport, R.I., doing a lot of crewing. However, he started to figure he'd rather own a racing sailboat than just be crew, and after a year his father told him it was time to get a job.

Braese went into real estate, and after having been in the business for 25 years, Braese observes, "Real estate has been good to me." Braese praised his father Russell Braese, saying his dad was his "mentor in sailing and in the business world."

Braese's wife Bonnie shared his interest in sailing. For their honeymoon, they camped out and raced their O'Day DS 17 on Lake Canandaigua (one of the Finger Lakes in New York). After ten days of racing, they had won the race, garnering the title of North American champions. Then, said Braese, they went to Bermuda for five days of "R & R."

Bonnie was his crew from 1982 to 1992. However, then they had 2 children, and that ended Bonnie's being crew. The children are Elizabeth, now a junior at Woburn High School, and Jonathan, now in the eighth grade at St. Charles School.

But Braese's, who lives in West Woburn, still had a passion for racing, so he recruited a teenager, Rob Morris, then 16, to crew for him and proceeded to win the North American championship again in 1997. Morris, now 25, is a Delta Airlines pilot.

By winning the North American Championships, Braese and his crews were able to sail in the Champion of Champion races. In 1987, Braese and his wife sailed in that race and came in sixth out of 38 racers. In 1997, Braese and his crewman Morris again raced in the Champion of Champions race and came in fourth out of 40 vessels.

Ocean calling...

All that racing was on lakes, said Braese, and he longed to do some ocean racing. At age 23, he had applied for a mooring at Marblehead Harbor, and at age 38, he got a call saying a mooring was available. He immediately bought a 38 foot sloop.

While doing local ocean sailing, Braese started dreaming of doing something big like an ocean crossing. However, facing 30 foot and even bigger waves was daunting, so Braese put that dream on a back burner and started thinking about one day doing some long-distance ocean racing.

Doing ocean racing on large sailboats in local races gave Braese the opportunity to meet people who were sailing on long-voyages that tracked way out into blue water over many days at a time.

In 2002, Braese sailed in the Corinthian 200 overnight race. In the summer of 2005, Braese had the opportunity to join three other experienced sailors on an eight-day, 850-mile voyage from St. John in the Virgin Islands to Bermuda. Braese said his task on the sail was to be watch captain and navigator.

They sailed on a blue-water sailing vessel, a Hinkley 59-foot S'Wester sloop. This Hinkley, said Braese, "laughs at 35 knot winds." Such blue water sailing vessels, observed Brease, have short masts and carry less sail and are carefully built to handle high winds and large waves, unlike your coastal racer or coastal cruising sailboat.

There is danger built into the ocean sailing experience, said Braese, but he added, "you get used to it." Braese said he was "blessed to have a wife who lets me do these crazy things."

Some of the dangers include crashing into huge cargo containers that have fallen off a ship and that can float about eight to ten feet below the surface. Another danger is being run over by a freighter.

Their sailboat carried a radar reflector, but said Braese, if you see a ship and it is on a converging course doing 15 knots and you are sailing at 5 knots, you've got only 15 minutes to verify a converging course and change it before the vessels collide.

So part of the watch captain's job is to scan the horizon 360 degrees and check the radar every fifteen minutes. Braese said they crossed paths with three freighters on the Bermuda trip.

Braese observed that after three days at sea, the vessel was beyond helicopter range, so if something went wrong, it could be days before a passing ship might change course to rescue anyone. And way out at sea, they saw a group of very large sharks eating something. Braese said this made him think about having to be in the water a long time if the vessel sank and the life boat failed.

There were some heavy seas and squalls during the Bermuda sail, said Braese, but the weather was mostly pretty good. At sea, they settled down into a routine of 4 hour watches. Braese said he felt great after one watch and skipped his four hours of sleep. But his next four hour watch was an awful experience trying to stay awake. And he couldn't ask one of the others to cover for him, because they had to sleep!

Distress calls

During the Bermuda cruise, a French sailing vessel sent a distress signal, so Braese's captain changed course slightly to investigate. Braese noted that they did not sail right up to the distressed vessel for fear they could be pirates sending a phony distress call. So they kept in touch with the vessel and shadowed it until that vessel's captain said they could get underway. (The problem on the French vessel was with the engine, and apparently the folks on that boat were not very experienced sailors.)

Braese noted that the law of the sea does not require you to lend physical assistance but does require that, on behalf of the distressed vessel, you contact an international distress center maintained by the Navy at Annapolis, Maryland.

Later in the summer of 2005, Braese had the opportunity to help race a Swan 45 from Marblehead to Halifax.

Being away out on the ocean, said Braese, "You feel sort of like Christopher Columbus." However, he added that he couldn't imagine how mariners withstood ocean sailing in the 1700s. For starters, at least, said Brease, "we ate well - every evening a good meal - pot roast and chicken."

Braese, who currently owns a 38 foot sloop, a Rhodes-19, his son's Optimist plus a motorboat, claims he has never been seasick - ever! Anyone who has fought against turning green in a sailing vessel being tossed up and down by a following sea must admire Braese's constitution.

Sailing has gotten into the blood of Braese's kids too. His son Jonathan raced his Optimist (single mast, gaff rigged dinghy) in the 2005 Junior Olympics for that class. And his daughter Elizabeth has sailed on family cruises.

Braese is already planning his next adventure: he is putting together a team to do a five to six day race from Marion, Massachusetts to Bermuda. For that, he will use an acquaintance's Swan 45-foot vessel.

His next milestone, said Braese, is to sail across either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. He said that would take about three weeks, and he said he will try to get on a boat doing that sail next spring.

Braese said he would also like to sail around either the Cape of Good Hope on the tip of Africa or Cape Horn on the tip of South America. Braese said that he would be then entitled to wear a little gold stud earring. Braese laughed and said, "I can imagine what my clients would think of that!"

Braese then mused that when he and his wife retire, they might buy a 50-foot sailing vessel and cruise around the world. He said he has some friends who have done that. They sold their house, bought a condominium and a boat, and then sailed around the world for three years. They would occasionally take a break from the sailing and fly back to the condo, said Braese, before resuming their around the world tour. After the tour, said Braese, his friends sold their boat and bought a house.