Ottawa sailor cruising into his 10th decade
A steady hand at the helm and solid footing on deck
When I was 11, my buddy and I paddled a canoe to Kingston. My parents drove along the road beside the water periodically to see how we were doing. DON LOMER, 96
Boats have always been the passion of Don Lomer, who turned 96 on Saturday — and they still are.
He just bought a new boat, a Rosborough, which he will be naming Plan B.
The Ottawa native grew up on Linden Terrace in the Glebe, and his father, Dr. Theodore Lomer, was medical officer of health from 1913 to 1948.
He attended St. Patrick’s College High School and then joined the Royal Navy during the Second World War, serving for four years. Much of his boating knowledge comes from the Navy where he was a port clearance diver.
His late wife Naomi was the only Wren surveyor in the British Navy, and that’s how they met; he was a mine disposal officer and she did maps and charts of minefields. She left the Navy at the end of the war and got a job at the Southhampton Harbour Board.
Lomer’s brother Gord, who recently passed away at age 87, used to write the Below the Hill column in the Ottawa Journal and then worked later in life for the Bahamas News Bureau. Their sister Adele is 93.
“All my life I’ve been on boats,” Lomer said. “When I was 11, my buddy and I paddled a canoe to Kingston. My parents drove along the road beside the water periodically to see how we were doing. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved the motion of a boat, how they react.”
Lomer and Andy McKenna, his buddy on the canoe trip to Kingston, used to swim together. “I jumped in the deep end, and he stayed in the shallow. I didn’t know the whole canoe trip that he couldn’t swim.”
An uncle who owned a runabout at the Dow’s Lake boathouse in the ’20s and ’30s gave him a book about a man who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on a boat with a one-cylinder engine. “It sounded like fun,” but Lomer never did that himself. “I went overseas with 3,000 other guys on a Polish troop boat, MS Batory.”
After the Second World War, Lomer switched to the Royal Canadian Navy, followed by a series of jobs including radio and television sales. He retired in 1983.
He and his wife Naomi, who died in 2000, were married for 53 years. He has two children, Barbara and Robert, both in Ottawa, and a grandson, Ryan, 19.
For years, the family lived at Rocky Point and kept a boat at home. He then bought a houseboat and kept it at the Manotick Marina and then at Rideau Ferry.
“It was a 33-foot boat with a 10-foot beam and had everything in it; propane heat, stove and lights. I didn’t have to plug into anything. The kids loved it. They grew up in the houseboat and learned to love boating themselves. Rob, at age 10, got a 10-foot dingy, and he used to take it out by himself.” Barbara and Robert both own their own cruisers now.
“The new boat is smaller and I can single-hand it,” says Lomer. “With the larger one, I can’t handle it alone. The new one is 24 feet and has a diesel engine.”
After the home at Rocky Point, Lomer lived for 10 years in Amberwood and has been in his own apartment for five years on Richmond Road. He boats seven months of the year — “even April if the weather’s good, and I can get a boat in the water.”
“In the winter,” he laughs, “I dream about boats and drink gin.”