The Pilot News - Furry builds worldwide career in sailing, Hollywood on Culver experience

Ed Furry was the man of the hour last month when Culver’s Uptown Cinema premiered the Disney documentary, “Morning Light,” at a gala event which doubled as a fund-raiser for the Maxinkuckee Yacht Club’s Junior Fleet, one entity in which Furry cut his sailing teeth, as it were. The event, Furry told an appreciative audience of Culver Kiwanians June 4, garnered “an incredible turnout” of 145 people, rather than the 75 anticipated. “That says a lot about this community,” Furry added, noting many more people expressed interest in attending but were out of town. He credited Uptown Cinema owner Dan Bickel as “a big reason why the movie was a success here.”
Furry said there’s hope of showing the film in other local venues this summer, particularly since the DVD version was released June 16, though he stressed “Morning Light” is “a movie you want to see on the big screen. The videography is amazing.”
Ed Furry, the son of Bill and Krista Furry of Culver, said he grew up on Lake Maxinkuckee learning to sail – in part from his father and uncles involved in sailing – before attending Culver Academies’ Summer Naval School. Unlike many who have enjoyed sailing the waters of Maxinkuckee, however, Furry felt drawn to pursue a life in the craft, and after attending school for a time at Xavier and then Indiana Universities and coaching sailing at Culver, he headed to San Diego at the invitation of a Godmother who lived there. “What 23 year old would say no to that?” Furry smiled.
The next several years of Furry’s life were filled with an array of work in coaching and sailing, from several prominent sailing companies in the San Diego area, to a stint with the Bitter End Yacht Club in the British Virgin Islands, to the American Yacht Club in New York, as well as work in Houston and for well-known Quantum Sails as a sail-maker.
In spite of the prestige of Quantum, however, Furry said he was learning most of the money from a $20,000 sail didn’t wind up in his pocket. “I learned I needed a college education,” he said.
So Furry attended San Diego Community College while working for the largest sail-maker in the world, North Sails and waiting tables before returning to Indiana and finishing his degree at Indiana University. While in the Hoosier state, Furry worked at Culver Marina while continuing to sail, leaving the establishment when it was sold by its longtime owners, the Campbell family, before heading for Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he worked for Red Bull on sailing events.
In Chicago, Furry says he was running a match racing regatta with the highest grading possible sans prize money, running a Farr 40, which is a $350,000, 40-foot boat and eventually running other sailboats and handling their maintenance, lining up and coaching sailing crews, and working with sponsors.
The following year, he handled nine sailing events between Key West, Florida, and Newport, Rhode Island, where “I was in charge of everything you had to do with the boat; I’d pretty much rebuild the whole thing between every regatta. Imagine all you have to do to your car, and then dunk it in saltwater!”
Traveling to Spain, Furry found himself the commentator there for a Volvo Around the World Race, something he repeated in Annapolis soon thereafter.
Soon after, Ed Furry decided it was time to start his own company, Sail22, a name derived from a “family number,” that of his father’s (now Ed’s own) sailboat as well as the date of Ed’s birth. The company, he says, was established to work with smaller race boats, some of which may be spotted by local folks driving by Furry’s home on 18B Road while he works on them.
“We work with a lot of different clients,” Furry noted. “We do anything from moving their boat, regular maintenance and rigging.. We make custom parts right here, (such as) carbon fiber pieces. There’s an inflatable boat in my yard right now! We represent Protector Boats, a New Zealand company which builds 22 to 40 foot inflatable boats (which are) actually fiberglass boats with a big set of tubes going around it. In between races, a lot of crew and sails are moving around. We can come up along a sailboat, bounce up against them, move some equipment, and go on our way.
“We will find you housing (for a sailing team), a team chef, make dinner reservations, and run regattas. I’m running my very first coaching regatta in October to get teams ready for the World’s. The first three teams committed are all high end teams, which makes us feel pretty good about what we’re doing.”
But the biggest thing to happen to him, says Furry, was his involvement in “Morning Light.”
Roy E. Disney (Walt Disney’s nephew), said Furry, has been “a huge sailor for many, many” of his 79 years, so while Disney himself is somewhat past his sailing prime, he was approached with the idea of putting together a young team to sail one of the most sophisticated boats in the world, an idea Disney liked.
Disney auditioned a crew of 30 young adults – aged 18-23 -- to man a 52-foot sloop in the Transpac open ocean sailing race from California to Hawaii, over 2300 miles The would-be sailors had six months to train for the race, which is where Furry came in, having been asked about it a few months before training was to start. After a brief introduction to the boat captain on the film, Furry headed to Hawaii for an eight day trial period to decide if both he and the crew wanted him to stay on the project.
“I seemed to get along with all the kids, the movie guys, and Roy,” recalled Furry. “I still didn’t know what I was getting paid!”
Furry spent the next three months back and forth between San Diego, Los Angeles and Hawaii training the young crew, focusing heavily on maintaining the boat. “To get a boat from L.A. to Hawaii…I wanted them to be able to fix it if there was a breakdown.”
Part of the challenge for Furry, too, was working with the camera, sound, and other technical crews to wire the boat for filming, which meant factoring in the added weight of the cameras to the boat, a “bit of a challenge,” said Furry.
He reunited with some of the crew at the film’s October, 2008 premiere at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, though Furry says he didn’t see any movie stars there.
The movie aside, Ed Furry handles his company and the life of a professional racer, which he’s quick to note doesn’t actually leave much room for the partying lifestyle some might expect, “not that I don’t drink rum!”
“When I’m on the water, it’s a job, and I have to be on top of things,” Furry explained. “That’s hard enough to do – the boat work and sailing -- and then to go drink all night, it just doesn’t work. Now, Sunday nights after regattas for people like me are usually a lot of fun!”
This summer, however, Ed Furry may be working on a boat in his Culver area yard, or out on the lake which drew him first to sailing, though Lake Maxinkuckee and the ocean, says the sailor, are different animals.
“My oldest cousin, Bill Becker, is starting to do some work with me right now,” he noted. “He had never sailed on a boat that had more than just the mainsail. Even though we have some great sailors here (on Lake Maxinkuckee) with pretty technical boats, it’s a pretty different world out there (on the ocean). It’s like comparing the Plymouth Speedway to Formula One. Big difference.”
And from time to time, even out on the ocean, Furry is reminded of his Culver roots. The first year he taught sailing in San Diego, for example, he recalls, “I had my Culver (Academies) ring on. Another sailor, whoever the guy was, didn’t realize mine was a summer school ring. He said something the (Culver) winter school guys say and put his hand up, and he had his Culver ring on. That was a pretty interesting experience.”