I grew up boating.

I went to Monhegan Island before I was born. My mother was worried that my brothers (5 and 6 years older than I) would fall off a cliff. On the way home, they stopped at a small island for a pee break (it was a small, open boat) and my mother got poison ivy! They were worried that I might catch it on my way into the world, but I was fine – just a little jaundice, which quickly passed.

We had a small sailboat a few years later, when we lived in Florida and California for a short time. I was always seasick on it and spent most of my time on that boat lying down in the cabin, getting worse by the minute.

We moved to Maine when I was five, and I’m glad to have called Maine home ever since. By that time my parents were divorced and I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents (and my mother and brothers) on their 34 foot houseboat, Holly Ann, which they kept in Boothbay Harbor. We had great times on the Holly Ann. The boat was a year older than I, and we enjoyed it for a great many years. I remember my brother Scott walking backwards off the aft deck through the open railing (he hated to swim), and my grandfather losing his teeth out of his pocket at Damariscove Island (I found them a month later, but that’s a story for another time). Driving a big boat when you’re five or six is a really empowering experience. My grandmother always said that one day I’d inherit the Holly Ann, and for many years I wanted to eventually. But my grandfather’s idea of maintenance was not one of the preventative type (and fixing the head usually involved a hammer of one sort or another), and the Holly Ann didn’t age gracefully. The steering was most problematic, but with two screws, who needs steering, right? Eventually, my grandfather took the Holly Ann out by himself in his later years and hit a rock. Last I knew, the Holly Ann was high and dry with a gaping hole in the stern.

After Sherrie and I were married, we had Sassafras, a Rhodes 19 (full keel), for a few years. We had some fun times on that little boat. But we never used it as much as we hoped, and it soon became a part of our past.

More recently, we got hooked on kayaking. We can throw the boats on the car and head out anywhere there’s a few inches of water (or even much more). And now that we have Forest (who’s now four), we stepped up to a big double (22 feet long, with a center cockpit that’s perfect for a little boy; it looks Big on our Subaru). We love to paddle the ocean, the rivers and the lakes – they all have something to offer. Our son did his first (and, so far, only) nose-dive out of the kayak last summer. We were on a local lake, so it wasn’t too cold. He didn’t make a sound, but he did look a bit shaken up. I grabbed the loop on his life jacket and hauled him right back aboard. He was a little chilly, but he made a fast recovery and still loves kayaking.

The idea for Omnautic LLC started to gel in my mind around 1999. I’d been kicking around a few ideas in my head for a while, but that was when things really started coming together. The hitch at that point was the monopoly that MapTech held on NOAA raster nautical charts. I contacted them about licensing their charts and the response was a flat-out “No” – not even a “Well, it’ll cost you a ba-zilllion dollars.” Just “No.” So I wrote a few letters to my representatives in Washington that didn’t seem to go anywhere. And finally, in the Fall of 2005 NOAA started releasing the charts directly (and for free!). I urge you to go and get them yourself for free directly from NOAA. Of course, there’s a lot of data there (a few gigabytes). If you’d like the charts without the hassle we offer them on DVD+/-R.

Omnautic LLC will be expanding this website extensively in the coming months. Please come back often to see what we’re doing.

Thanks and welcome to Omnautic LLC.

Kirk Holbrook
Founding Member

July 2007