Sailing Saint Barbara
The Dream
Steve Mulkerrins grew up on the rugged Connemara coast of Ireland. As a young boy, Steve remembers sitting beside his father and watching Galway hookers (a type of boat used along the west coast of Ireland) docknear his small village to deliver supplies. Steve's father sold insurance for a living, but he was also a prodigious Gaelic playwright and a Galway hooker enthusiast. Steve absorbed his father's passion for these boats so much that he would come to build his own Galway hooker some 35 years later in America.
Steve was
learning from shipwrights and trying his hand at carpentry by the age of ten.
Ambition and Connemara's struggling economy would lead him to England by the
time he was 16. Three years later he moved to Boston. In Boston, he supported
himself framing, but in his spare moments he continued to seek more creative
aspects of the craft…whether it be carving traditional Irish harps out
of scrap lumber, or traveling to Maine to work on schooners when time allowed.
In Boston, Steve married and he and his wife Agnes relocated to Chicago. During
those early years in Chicago on his daily commute, Steve began to daydream
about a Galway hooker sailing out toward the Great Lakes, past the endless
rows of white fiberglass yachts and speedboats. In 1999, Steve Mulkerrins
visited Connemara and met with naval architect Thomas Mallon, who was recommended
to him by a friend. The two began to draw plans for the St. Barbara, a boat
he would name after his beloved mother. Two months later, with blueprints
in hand, Steve began the endeavor of a lifetime.