Staying on Course

Although he is a skipper without a ship, Danish-born Svend T. Simonsen, 59, has been taking a remarkably rewarding cruise through the $3 billion-a-year pleasure-boating business. So many ex-landlubbers are signing up for Simonsen's correspondence courses in piloting and celestial navigation that his Coast Navigation School in Santa Barbara, Calif., took in a total of $85,000 last year. His income may not qualify him as a tycoon, but the captain wins high marks for return on an original investment of $32.

It was just a year and a half ago that Simonsen wrote a $32 check to pay for a student-soliciting advertisement in Yachting magazine. The fact that at the time his school existed only in his imagination was no deterrent. When the first student signed up, Simonsen recalls, "I not only wrote each lesson as we went along, but I also cut the stencils and ran them off on the mimeograph."

Simonsen had quite a lot more than imagination going for him. He composed his lessons out of a wealth of experience. After emigrating to the U.S. at 15, he taught himself English by laboriously translating an 800-page Danish novel with the aid of dictionaries and a thesaurus. Later, while studying civil engineering at New York University, he began sailing for recreation, and set out to teach himself seaman ship. During World War II, he was tapped to teach navigation for the Army's Transportation Corps in the U.S. and Australia. After the war, Simonsen sailed as a captain for the Military Sea Transportation Service, but he beached himself in 1950 because he "found going to sea pretty dull in peacetime." Working ashore was not much more satisfactory. After a series of sales jobs in the U.S. and Canada, including a stint as a salesman for Sears, Roebuck, Simonsen decided to go back to sea vicariously--by teaching other people how to handle themselves afloat.

Though free navigation courses are offered by the Coast Guard's Power Squadrons, Simonsen correctly guessed that many aspiring boatmen would prefer studying in their own homes, and at their own speed. To accommodate people who "want to buy a boat this winter and sail it to Hawaii next summer," he devised two simplified courses in celestial and coastwise navigation, both of which can be completed in as little as three months.

Satisfied Graduates. With the captain busily grading lessons and his English-born wife June handling advertising, the Coast Navigation School, headquartered in a modest suite of offices in Santa Barbara, is working overtime to keep up with a current enrollment of 1,100; and it gets 500 new inquiries a month from as far off as Egypt and Thailand, to say nothing of G.I.s in Viet Nam.

Letters from satisfied graduates attest to the quality of the courses. But Simonsen has another, more practical measure of success. So many of his celestial students asked him where they could find a satisfactory sextant that he is now importing that vital navigation instrument and selling it by mail. Marketing Japanese-made sextants under his own Simex trade name, Simonsen sold 240 of them (top-priced model: $225) in the first six months; he expects to sell 100 a month in 1968, and he plans to broaden his line to include such other navigational gear as marine radios. Not surprisingly for a small mailorder operation, Simonsen's success owes much to low overhead: one of his major expenses is a monthly postage bill that runs to some $400.

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