Cynthia Wommack visits the hull of her new TT35, still in the mold at the Great Harbour factory in Gainesville, Florida. Inset: A completed TT35 sister-ship.

She Bought Herself a TT35 for Her 70th 

Meet Cynthia Wommack. She’s a lifelong sailor who just turned 70. For her birthday, she bought herself a TT35 from Great Harbour. She says it’s the perfect liveaboard for her and can hardly wait for delivery.

“I’ve always owned sailboats. I learned on sunfish when I was young gal, and I went all the way up through racing in Chicago. My last sailboat purchase was a Catalina 42,” Wommack says. She loved that boat and lived aboard her at a marina in Southwest Florida.

Epiphany came one day while on a daysail with friends. Hit by a blow, she went forward and willed her septuagenarian limbs to douse sail. “Then I realized that I just could not handle it anymore—70 years old—most of the people around me didn’t want to sail, just motor around.”

It’s not a new story. Sailor feels the strains of age but wants to continue their cruising lifestyle. Wommack didn’t make the leap from sail to the TT35 directly, however. She sold the Catalina and bought a 2000 Carver 374 twin-diesel, a decision she began to regret almost immediately. She says the only thing she’ll miss about her Carver is the flybridge. “It wasn’t in very good shape when I bought it. Now that it’s all fixed up, I’ve put it up for sale.”

Wommack had realized that most of the boating she would be doing going forward involved what the sailing crowd calls “gunkholing.” So she’d sit aboard her Carver and search the Internet. “This part of Florida is skinny water, so I typed in ‘shallow-draft trawler,’ and TT35 popped up in the search. The more reading I did about it, the more I liked it,” she says.

Her marina had hosted rendezvous for some of the other popular trailerable brands, such as Ranger Tug and Rosborough. “Every time I got into one of those boats I got claustrophobic. Even on the Albins the overhead so seemed so low inside,” she says. (And this after a life on sailboats!)

Still the notion of a trailerable, floating home refused to die. The idea that you could pull your home out of the water and tuck it into someone’s barn before the arrival of a hurricane has tremendous appeal to anyone who has spent the past couple decades in Florida. Another advantage of the TT35 is that you can use one as a camper as you travel by highway. Wommack is already making plans.

“I’ve reserved a campground spot to watch an eclipse in Texas in 2024, and the campground is on the lake, so I want to experience the eclipse on the boat on the lake,” she says.

But Wommack’s decision-making kept coming back to the TT35’s 18-inch draft, the ability to nudge the bow onto a sugar-sand beach for an afternoon of family merriment. She’s even having a power pole installed on the stern. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, that’s a push-button anchoring system used by fly fishermen to effectively spear their flats boats to the bottom.
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At this writing, the hull of her boat still resides inside the mold. Stay tuned as we follow the progress of Cynthia Wommack’s boat to its completion.

If you're interested in buying Wommack's Carver, you can view the listing here.

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