By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Ryan David Brown
From our September 2025 issue
Forty years ago, Jeff Aumuller sailed into Portland Harbor, and he’s lived aboard his boat ever since. In the spring and summer, he moors at Centerboard Yacht Club, in South Portland. When cold weather hits, he docks in a friend’s spot on Maine Wharf, on Commercial Street, or sails down the coast. Around him, the city skyline has become more congested, the boats sleeker and zippier. But Aumuller, a musician, isn’t interested in keeping pace. He wants little more than a deck to strum his guitar on and a tiny cabin to retire to at the end of the day. “I’m here until I die,” he says.
Aumuller has fulfilled a childhood dream of exploring the world by sailboat. “Some winters I’d take off for Bermuda, play music. It was the life I wanted and I led it,” he says.
At age 85, Aumuller still rows out to his mooring, but getting into the dinghy takes some doing. He starts off lying sideways along the edge of the dock, then swivels his legs, boom-like, over the belly of the boat before lowering himself slowly inside. A couple of years ago, he traded Grebe, the 40-foot wooden sailboat he had for five decades, for Tyn’Lyne, a 31-foot fiberglass sloop that’s easier to maintain. He calls it “a Clorox bottle.” “It’s a retirement boat,” Aumuller says with a shrug. “I don’t have to cross oceans anymore.”
Growing up on Long Island, in New York, Aumuller fantasized about seeing the world by boat. “I read every book on sailing,” he says. “I always had a dream of being able to take off on a sailboat.” In 1968, when he was in his 20s, he and a girlfriend road-tripped to Kennebunkport. They parked their Volkswagen bus on Colony Beach to camp for the night and awoke to see the great dome of the Atlantic sparkling between rocky ledges. “Epiphanies only come around once in a while and this was a monster,” Aumuller says. “Ever since then, I’ve had no inclination to live any other place.” He and his girlfriend settled in town and started a business making tote bags out of sailcloth scraps. (Decades later, their design inspired his daughter, Hannah Kubiak, to launch the well-known Sea Bags brand.) Aumuller sold his stake in the company in 1973 and used some of the proceeds to buy Grebe, which he sailed to Florida, the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Caribbean more than a dozen times over the years.
These days, he’s more of a homebody. Tyn’Lyne’s cramped cabin is furnished with a Jøtul woodstove with a cooktop, a bench that doubles as a bed, a composting toilet, and a narrow table where Aumuller uses his one cutting board and one knife to prepare food he cooks in his only skillet. For bathing, he relies on a sponge and bucket of water heated by the sun or on the stove. A berth tucked into the boat’s forepeak is packed with firewood and the guitars and banjos he uses to compose songs for his solo work and bluesy folk band, the Potato Pickers. Many tunes reflect the solitary life of a sailor, like “Men & Ships Rot in Port,” which has a bouncy guitar and maraca beat that belies melancholic lyrics:
Got to go to the islands,
got to go to sea.
Men and ships rot in port
and that’s what’s happening to me.
Aumuller has spent most of his time on the water alone. Women don’t tend to find his floating bachelor pad particularly romantic. And he stopped sailing with a crew after a friend sprained his ankle aboard Grebe while they were navigating a storm en route to St. Thomas. His most consistent companion has been a stray cat named Barge (after his habit of barging into conversations by climbing into visitors’ laps and biting their noses), who lived with Aumuller for 11 years. “He was wild but friendly, or friendly to the people he knew,” Aumuller said, sitting in the cool of Tyn’Lyne’s cabin last summer. “Once, we were sailing, just him and me. It was a beautiful, moonlit night and the sea was calm. Barge climbed the mast, pretty high, then jumped from the mast into the sail, slid down, and popped out to say hello.” Aumuller paused and wiped away tears. “I get emotional just thinking about it. What a guy.”
