Pittsburgh’s Captain Barnacle Blain is trading the helm of a Cruisin’ Tiki hut for a small, self-renovated sailboat — and a steady job for a life of freedom.
With his 401(k) emptied, he’s setting out on a six-month journey of thousands of miles from the Three Rivers to the Florida Keys before making his way back north to Lake Erie, documenting the adventure along the way.
“I’m trusting the flow,” said the 49-year-old Oakmont resident and longtime Rhode Islander, born Blain Manol in Ellwood City. “The older I get, the more I can see the flow.”
In front of Manol and the fully rehabbed 19-foot 1982 O’Day Weekender, there stretches a twisting and branching solo journey of six months and thousands of miles. Christened “R-2 Detour,” the once-battered boat he’ll pilot in October was a gift from a friend who’d simply wanted it out of his mother’s yard.
“From here to Destin, Fla., it’s 1,237 miles and I have to go through 33 locks,” said Manol. “And then I’m going to hit the Intracoastal (Waterway), the Panhandle, and follow the Intracoastal all the way to the Florida Keys, spend the winter down the Keys and then come back up the East Coast in the spring and back into Lake Erie.”
“I’ll stop in Nashville. All these cool little places that are on the river, I’m gonna just check out. There’s islands to be explored, bays and coves. It’s endless. I’m Tom Sawyerin’ it, Huckleberry Finnin’ it.”
Behind Manol, however, is a lifetime of inspiration and skill.
The captain’s life has moved in concert with waterways ever since his father, Tom Manol, moved their family from Western Pennsylvania to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island to take a job as a submarine welder when Blain was 8. There, he said, everybody had a boat or a sailboat — and learning to operate them was a rite of passage for him and his friends.
“It’s just it’s a part of me. I’m a fish. I’m a fish out of water right now,” said Manol. “I’ve always been drawn to that lifestyle because I grew up and lived it. … It came natural to me. It was just the flow of the ocean.”
As he worked on his boat on a recent Wednesday morning, the memories came flooding back.
“(I remember) racing sailboats with my father, exploring the islands and the bay with my friends, surfing Narragansett Town Beach and Point Judith at the lighthouses. I used to do a lot of that. Skiing up north in the winter times and surfing in the summers,” he said. “I was two blocks from the beach, so we all had moorings and sailboats and some sort of boat to go out and play on all summer long.”
Manol returned to Pittsburgh just under 30 years ago to be closer to his family, who had moved back to the area. In 2010, at the age of 55, his father died from cancer.
Of sailing he said, “It was our thing.” And the trip they dreamed up had been an extension of that passion.
“My dad and I talked about it when I was growing up. My dad actually wanted to do it on a canoe to the Gulf, but that’s a little crazy,” he said. “(It’s the) adventure aspect of it, the freedom to disconnect, to be able to explore and take your time and have an adventure. Not a lot of people can do that or have the facilities to do that because everybody’s got a mortgage, everybody’s got kids. … It was a childhood dream of mine, and I don’t have anything holding me back, so why not?”
Lately, his father’s memory has been joined by thoughts of his uncle, who passed in August from a sudden heart attack.
“He taught me to sail,” said Manol. “He is a huge part of my story.”
Manol, who was a bosun in the Navy, a commercial captain and a onetime merchant mariner, got his “Barnacle” nickname from a friend because “You meet me, I always stick around … good or bad,” he added with a laugh.
But these days, Manol is utilizing the $21,000 he found in a long-forgotten 401(k) account and funds from working odd jobs in nature and charter fishing tours and booze cruises to keep moving instead.
For the past five years, he’s been collecting essential supplies, gear and nonperishable food while sporadically working to get the boat in sailing order.
“Boatwise — like the hull and the deck, all that stuff — I had to reinforce a lot of things. It’s from 1982, so it needed some love,” said Manol. “And I’m finally at the stage right now where I’m gonna install the electronics, the GPS. I’m putting a new engine on it. Everything’s brand new.
“It’s all coming together. It’s weird how life works like that. When it’s supposed to happen, it just happens,” he said.
He’ll live by that mantra on the water.
“I have no time frame. I have no plans at all whatsoever,” said Manol. “I’m just gonna let the journey take its own form. That’s the part of the adventure.”
In no small part, the wind and water will be his primary guides.
“The sailboat option is key, because fuel,” said Manol. “The wind is free, so when I have the chance to use the sails, I’m going to sail. When I have to use the engine, I’ll use the engine.”
Though he’ll start documenting his journey for social media with a GoPro on Captain Barnacle Blain’s Big Adventure beginning on Oct. 1, his idea of success is simple. He hopes to “get home without sinking” and maybe find a permanent captain job along the way he says he could do in retirement, “until I’m 100.”
He also hopes to share his exploits.
“I just want to film my adventure, be entertaining and see if people bite,” said Manol. “Share all my little run-ins with whatever I run into. All the people I’m going to meet are going to be very interesting, all the neat little places that nobody ever sees. Seeing the Appalachian Mountains from the river perspective all the way down is going to be interesting, all the different states and all the different people.”
On a recent weekday after wrapping up work on his boat, with just weeks left to go before hitting the rivers, he reflected on what that first night staring up at the stars in the early fall air might soon feel like.
“Absolute joy that I did it,” said Manol. “Because I’ve been talking about it for so long, everybody thinks I’m full of (it). And now it’s happening. It’s finally coming to fruition.”
Often, he said, his thoughts have drifted to his father.
“(He’d have an) ear-to-ear smile. He’d be so happy,” said Manol. “He’d be tickled pink that I actually did it and had the balls to do it.”
And Captain Barnacle Blain does have one plan solidified in his mind: to celebrate his 50th birthday in Key West.
“It’s a trip of a lifetime for me,” said Manol. “When I’m 80 years old, I’d kick myself … that I didn’t do it.”