A Hurricane, a Stranded Captain and a Dinner in Fairhope: How SailTime Alabama Came to Mobile Bay
Sometimes a business is born from a business plan. Other times it takes a Category 4 hurricane, a sailboat limping into Mobile Bay on a dead engine, and a long dinner conversation. For Christopher Jones, founder of SailTime Alabama and PowerTime Alabama in Fairhope, it was very much the second story — and it has reshaped the way Gulf Coast boaters think about owning time on the water.
Point Clear Summers and a Father’s Cruises
Jones is a Mobile native who spent his childhood summers at his grandparents’ home in Point Clear, where he first learned to sail a small Sunfish across Mobile Bay. Sailing ran in the family. When he was a teenager, his father, Skip Jones, bought a 37-foot Tayana and began taking the kids on multi-day journeys — trips Christopher jokes he survived, and which quietly built the seamanship he would one day teach to others.
As an adult, he kept finding his way back to the water. He has sailed New York Harbor, the Chesapeake Bay, and San Francisco Bay, and has experienced, by his own count, the two best days of a boat owner’s life: the day he bought his first boat and the day he sold it.
His professional life, meanwhile, took a more conventional route. Jones started his career in Washington, D.C., as a policy analyst, worked stints in the Northeast and Atlanta as a business systems consultant, then moved back to Mobile to build a career in telecommunications. Nearly a decade ago, he and his wife settled in Fairhope — close to the bay where he had learned to sail.
August 2020: A Storm, a Shortage of Fuel, and a Fateful Dinner
In late August 2020, Hurricane Laura — a deadly Category 4 storm bearing down on the Louisiana coast — caught a delivery captain mid-passage from Key West to Houston. The captain lost his mainsail, then his jib, then his generator, and was nearly out of fuel when he changed course for Mobile Bay in hopes of finding shelter.
The run into the bay ended with the boat completely out of fuel. The captain’s childhood friend from Mobile hurried out with enough fuel to complete the journey up Fly Creek. The stranded captain happened to be a fraternity brother of Jones’s brother-in-law, Corbin Porter — and a sailing instructor with SailTime Houston, the local base of a national fractional boat-membership franchise.
That night, Jones and Porter sat down to dinner with the captain. “As we exchanged tall tales of the high seas, he told me about SailTime,” Jones recalled later. “I wanted to be a member. I thought it was so cool. But when I looked it up online, there was no SailTime near Mobile. So, to make a long story short, I decided to open a base myself.”
Before the year ended, SailTime Alabama and its powerboat companion, PowerTime Alabama, were launched — with a territory running along the central Gulf Coast from Mobile to Panama City, and headquarters at the Fairhope Docks at 9 South Summit Street.
How a Membership Club Puts Boats Within Reach
The model is simple enough to explain in one sentence: instead of buying a boat outright, members buy guaranteed time on one. Membership aboard each boat is limited to an owner and seven members, everyone is trained on their specific vessel, and time throughout the month is divided equally. The boat is maintained by the base staff and ready to go when members arrive at the marina.
Membership fees start at only a few hundred dollars a month, and that fee covers insurance, marina costs, and regular maintenance — expenses that quietly add thousands to the annual cost of traditional ownership. Members schedule blocks of time online, share a late-model, well-equipped boat with only a handful of other people, and skip the scrubbing, hauling, and winterizing entirely.
The Other Side of the Deal: Owner Members
The program also has an answer for people who genuinely want to own a boat but dread the upkeep. Owner members place their boat in the fleet, keep guaranteed monthly usage of it, and receive a check at the end of each month while the base manager handles maintenance, preventative care, and repairs. As Jones puts it, owners get to experience “the third best day of a boat owner’s life”: you still own the boat, a professional maintains it, members pay to access it, and the owner collects income.
The Fleet: Names With a Story
Every boat in the SailTime Alabama fleet carries a name that nods to the strange season in which the business was born. The teaching boat, a 26-foot Colgate day sailer kept at Fly Creek Marina in Fairhope, is named Knot On Line — a pun on the preferred method for learning to sail and a wink at the pandemic-era slang for video meetings. It is the workhorse of the sailing school, which is an affiliate of the American Sailing Association and runs classes throughout the week.
The heart of the membership fleet is a pair of new Beneteau sailboats: Coastal Distancing, an Oceanis 30.1, and Happy Ours, an Oceanis 40.1. Each has a head, a galley, and two cabins, with accommodations comfortable enough for overnight voyages. While members enjoy them most of the month, the larger boats also serve as the platform for advanced instruction in coastal cruising, bareboat cruising, and offshore sailing. The school’s longest course is a five-day, four-night cruise along the Gulf Coast, and plans have been developing for an offshore class that would cross the Gulf of Mexico to St. Petersburg, Florida — with a return course sailing back to Fairhope.
On the powerboat side, PowerTime Alabama operates a 23-foot Sea Hunt center console named Knot Virtual, kept on a boat lift at Bear Point Harbor in Orange Beach. As with the sailboats, new powerboat members receive instruction before taking the helm on their own. More boats join the fleet as owner members sign on.
The Gem of the Fleet
The boat that draws the most attention is not the newest. The Dolores Catherine is a 1936 Biloxi Lugger, built as a fishing vessel by the Covacevich Shipyard on the Mississippi coast and meticulously restored as a lugger by Jones’s father, Skip Jones. Docked at Fly Creek Marina in Fairhope, the classic wooden vessel is available for charter with up to six guests — a rolling piece of Gulf Coast maritime history that regularly turns heads along the Fairhope Docks.
Sailing for a Purpose
Jones has also made community involvement part of the base’s identity. He is a member of the Fairhope Yacht Club and has sponsored the club’s annual Children’s Cup Regatta, a fundraiser benefiting pediatric patients treated at Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham — the medical center that treats more than 90 percent of Alabama’s children with cancer and blood disorders. “I knew in my heart this was a great opportunity to get behind and to support the children in our community,” Jones said when the sponsorship was announced.
Learning to Sail on Mobile Bay
For area residents who have always wanted to sail but never had a boat, the American Sailing Association pathway offers a structured route from beginner keelboat skills through coastal and bareboat cruising, taught aboard Knot On Line and the Beneteaus. Instructors emphasize the practical skills — docking among them — that make new sailors genuinely safe on the water, and certifications carry weight with charter companies worldwide.
Between the sailing school, the membership fleets, charters aboard a restored 1936 lugger, and a growing roster of owner members, SailTime Alabama and PowerTime Alabama have built something unusual on the eastern shore: a way for Gulf Coast families to spend their weekends on the water without ever buying a boat — or, if they do buy one, without ever hauling it themselves.
SailTime Alabama and PowerTime Alabama operate from the Fairhope Docks at 9 South Summit Street in Fairhope, with powerboats at Bear Point Harbor in Orange Beach and sailing courses departing from Fly Creek Marina.