Utopia featured in National Geographic
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It is an article that would forever change Door County Wisconsin.
Before March of '69, the majority of Americans had never heard of it. That changed! There was a Door County BEFORE and then there was a Door County AFTER this article was published in the March 1969 issue of the National Geographic. The article featured many great aspects of Door County and literally put it on the map as a tourist destination. The article also features a profile of both the builder of Utopia, Fred Peterson and his shipyard Peterson Builders Inc, and also a day sail trip on the Utopia herself.
Excerpt from the article published in National Geographic March 1969 issue titled: Wisconsin's Door Peninsula "A Kingdom So Delicious" by William S Ellis, Photographs by Ted Rosumalski.
Schooner Has Known Far Landfalls...
Flying most of her two thousand five hundred square feet of sail, Utopia moved downwind through the open drawbridge.
Smaller sailboats, flaunting their speed and maneuverability, skittered around us like children taunting the village oaf.
But when the breeze yeasted into a strong wind, many of the other boats fell behind while their crews worked to corral battered sails. “Class will tell now!” one of our crewmen yelled as Utopia took the wind and ran.
Still, others crossed the finish line ahead of us. I suggested to Mr. Peterson that his steel hulled schooner is better suited to the ocean.
“No question about it,” he agreed, recalling a memorable voyage that began in 1956.
In that year, Fred Peterson, then 62 years old, hoisted anchor in Sturgeon Bay and sailed Utopia down the Mississippi River and across three oceans and ten seas. With pickup crewmen, (“was it the Tongan or the Marquesan who chewed kava root while hoisting sail?”) the vessel circled the globe, returning to Sturgeon Bay in 1959.
Moving Utopia back to her berth after the race, we passed docks crowded with the hulks of tankers and freighters gone to scrap after many journeys on distant seass. A Coast Guard cutter, somber-and Spartan in coiled-line orderliness, backed away from its pier and hurried off toward the other side of the bay.
A fleet of prams put out from a yacht basin, their colorful sails beating in the breeze like the wings of monarch butterflies; boys and girls no older than fifteen, handled the tillers….
