Some old men hope for a comfortable chair and three square meals a day; some, like King Lear, hope to crawl unburdened towards death. Van Vollmer and his twin, Carl, have a grander plan.
The brothers, who are 85 and have worked for most of their lives as building contractors in Brooklyn, plan to sail away on a wooden, three-masted ship crewed by hipsters, crossing oceans, washing up on remote islands and investigating sunken Spanish galleons, until the day they die. When that time comes, they have instructed their would-be shipmates that they want to be thrown off the side of the boat “to swim with the fishes for eternity”.
The twins, who live on a power boat moored on City Island in the Bronx, have spent recent weeks assembling a crew. “Brooklyn Sea Captain seeking crew!” said the posters taped to doors and walls in Brooklyn this month. They wanted a mechanic, a deck hand, a cook, a nutritionist and an aquaponic gardener, capable of growing vegetables above fish tanks, and other skilled professionals, who could join them aboard the Peacemaker, “a 158ft, three-masted barquentine on the adventure of a lifetime”.
The ship would depart at the end of this month, sailing to Florida and then on via the Panama Canal to Hawaii, Australia and via the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean.
There were a few loose ends to be tied up, the main one being the boat, which is owned by a religious sect called the Twelve Tribes. The sect says it bought the boat from Frank Walker, an industrialist, who had commissioned it to be made from tropical hardwoods in Brazil in the 1980s. It is for sale for $3 million.
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“Mr Vollmer has looked through the ship and has expressed an interest to buy it,” Lee Phillips, one of the ship’s captains, said yesterday, speaking from aboard the Peacemaker, which is moored off the coast of Georgia. “He hasn’t taken it any further than that yet.”
Van Vollmer told a Brooklyn reporter for the Patch news site that the money would come from a friend named Felix, a man in his sixties who also wants to sail off into the sunset. Felix was said to be one of 20 brokers involved in a $4 billion deal involving Venezuelan bonds. Once the deal came through, they would buy the Peacemaker, he said.
“I never thought I’d be able to do something like this,” Van Vollmer admitted. “But when my buddy said, ‘I got the money to buy the boat,’ that’s when I started dreaming.”
One of his would-be crew told the news site that Mr Vollmer was an able sailor: he was chiefly concerned about the twins’ desire for a sea burial.
“Van kind of brings it up and he’s like, ‘I want to teach you everything I know so when you dump me into the sea you can take over.’ I’m hoping that’s just some kind of expression. It’s not something I really want to think about.”
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Last night Van Vollmer discussed his plans at great length. Once the ship is bought, he will spend six weeks making alterations to the vessel in Fort Lauderdale before setting sail, around Cuba, through the Panama Canal to Guatemala, and on to Hawaii.
But what about his health, should he really be embarking on this trip at his age? “Me and my brother have no health problems,” he said. “I have a sinus problem, but at sea it goes away. As soon as I go under the Verrazano Bridge [which spans the entrance to New York Harbour] my nose opens up and I can breathe.”
June Raymond, 85, Van Vollmer’s childhood friend and sometime girlfriend, a widow who he has described as being the love of his life, said that she hoped to sail through the Panama Canal with him, but is reluctant to remain on board for the Pacific crossing. “I get sea-sick,” she said.
She hopes to meet him in far-flung ports. She said he lived a bachelor’s life, while she had a house in Atlanta, Georgia, five grandchildren and ten great grandchildren. “I don’t feel I can be away for a long time. He wants to just live on the boat until the time comes.”