A Voyage Deferred: An Update on the Vollmer Twins

In August, we brought you the story of Van and Carl Vollmer, 85-year-old twins and longtime Brooklyn carpenters with a dream to sail the world until they die. Van, the trip’s mastermind, had posted flyers around Williamsburg and Greenpoint seeking 12 to 16 members for his crew. He had not, however, officially secured the $3 million needed to buy the Peacemaker, a three-masted Barquentine central to his vision. Van insisted at the time that a wealthy friend named Felix, who did not wish to speak to the media, planned to transfer him the money for the boat by Aug. 31 — the twins’ 86th birthday.

Van and Carl’s birthday came and went with no boat. (And no party.) Fall has since arrived, and the twins remain landlocked. In the meantime, their dream has taken on a life of its own.

For most of November, Van and Carl Vollmer have slept on the floor of a boarded-up sushi bar near Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue subway stop. The building owners have agreed to let them stay there, the twins say, on condition they show the space to potential buyers and tend to upstairs tenants.

The sushi bar’s stripped interior is now home to all Van and Carl’s earthly possessions: piles of clothes, books, woodworking tools, gadgets, cookware, loose paperwork.

A single lantern, perched on a leftover dining booth, lights the room.

“I’ve got to fit all my things into two suitcases,” Van said on a recent Thursday evening as he surveyed the mess.

Carl, like Van, plans to fill two suitcases and leave the rest behind. “All my chips are on this deal going through,” Carl said.

Van’s childhood sweetheart and current girlfriend, 86-year-old June Raymond, has likewise agreed to join the crew — for the first leg of the trip, at least — and spend Christmas with them in the Havana harbor.

“She told her family, ‘We’re not having Christmas at my house this year,’” Van said.

Over dozens of conversations from August through November, Van hasn’t once wavered in his conviction that Felix, a mysterious character with a job in finance who wants to join the voyage, is in the final stages of closing a $20 million deal involving Venezuelan bonds.

According to Van, Felix plans to put $3 million of his haul toward the Peacemaker, and another $2 million toward boat renovations and other journey expenses.

“The money’s in the bank,” Van said last Monday, as he’d said the week prior and the week before that.

Van has insisted, again and again, that Felix is handling a few final bank transactions, and that the money should be available any day. (In recent weeks, as in months past, Van has remained hesitant to pass Felix’s contact info onto a reporter, lest it somehow jinx their arrangement.)

“The minute he says the money is available, our broker will go and buy the boat,” Van said. “And I’ll grab a couple suitcases and my tools and my computer, and I’m down there.”

The Peacemaker, currently docked in St. Mary’s, Georgia, was built in the late 1980s as a pleasure craft for a Brazilian industrialist, then re-purposed in 2000 as a goodwill vessel for a religious sect called the Twelve Tribes. The sect put it up for sale earlier this year.

“If I wanted to design a boat [for the trip], I couldn’t have done as well,” Van said.

Larry Clinton, the Twelve Tribes member charged with selling the Peacemaker, told Patch that Van was the most promising of the boat’s prospective buyers.

“He keeps telling us that the funds are going to be available any day,” Clinton said in August. “I don’t know what kind of pleasure he would get out of leading us on.”

Until Van can come up with the money, though, the Peacemaker remains listed as “for sale” on the Twelve Tribes’ website.

Van will also need to obtain a captain’s license. To this end, he said he recently enrolled in an online course, and will complete an in-person sailing test on Dec. 18 in Florida.

“I’m not worried about it,” Van said. “I’ve got a lot of experience.”

Somewhat more anxious about the state of the voyage are the ship’s potential crewmembers — adventure-seekers from around the world who have read about the Vollmers’ plans online and, eager to join, reached out to Van via phone and email.

Van estimated he’s juggling up to 100 people who are dying to come aboard.

“I’ve got all these people who want to go,” Van said. “I can’t keep track of them all.”

Around Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the brothers, now 86 years old, are recognized often. At a trendy local salad bar on a Monday night, a pretty young server named Susie, in bleached bangs and a bandana, refused to let Van pay for his food. “Van is special,” she said to a reporter. Then, to Van: “Where’s your brother tonight?”

“I have no understanding of what just went on,” Van said while eating his salad.

Since Patch’s story on the Vollmers went live Aug. 25, their names have appeared in the Times of London, the UK Guardian, Mental Floss, Gothamist, PIX11 News and various foreign-language papers around the world.

The Vollmer twins, nearly un-Google-able in the past, said they’ve been forced to adjust to a new public profile.

“My niece who I hadn’t seen in 20 years sent me an email,” Carl said. “I guess she read the story.”

Van described a similar experience with a former landlord: “I told him, ‘I’m going to sail around the world.’ And he says, ‘You’ve got to go see that guy in Brooklyn.’”

Through it all, the Vollmers have been hounded by a procession of New York City news outlets eager to run their own story on the epic sail — among them the Village Voice, Brooklyn Paper, News 12 Brooklyn, CBS New York, Gawker, DNAinfo, the Huffington Post and New York Magazine.

“The media is more hungry for stories than we are for the boat,” Van joked at the height of the late-August frenzy.

For more than two months, the Vollmers turned reporters away wholesale, not wanting any more media attention until the Peacemaker was in their possession. But this November, convinced Felix’s deal was on the verge of a breakthrough, Van decided it was safe to talk.

On Friday, Nov. 13, Van plucked one of his favorite possessions from among the piles at the sushi bar — a decades-old painting of a ship on stormy waters — and toted it, under arm, to a nearby photo shoot with the New York Observer. (Although at the time, he believed the 2 p.m. appointment to be an interview with the New Yorker. A reporter there has also been pursuing him.)

Van said he didn’t remember how he’d come to own the painting, much less who painted it.

“All I know is I’ve had it for about 30 years, and I love it and I watch it and I dream about it,” Van said.

“The waves move when I look at it,” he said.

The Friday photo shoot was set at Cantina Royal, a hip, late-night Mexican joint near the Williamsburg waterfront where Van holds most of his ship-related meetings.

“Do you really think it’s going to happen?” Julio Mora, owner and head chef at Cantina Royal, whispered, concerned, to a Patch reporter as Van smiled and posed with his painting.

“I want it to happen,” Mora whispered. “They need it.”

Mora, an ex-reality TV star with a bold mustache, lets the twins eat and drink for free at his restaurant. He also lets them shower in its black-lit bathroom. In turn, whenever a lock breaks or a screw comes loose at Cantina Royal, the Vollmer brothers take care of it, free of charge.

“We keep the place running,” Van said.

In all the days they’ve been waiting for Felix’s money to come through, the Vollmer twins have unwittingly become the restaurant’s — and the neighborhood’s — grandfathers and mascots.

One chilly Thursday night in November, after they’d enjoyed a couple bowls of chicken soup and pints of beer at Cantina Royal, Mora hurried the twins across the street and past a doorman at one of Williamsburg’s more exclusive parties.

“I have to show you one thing,” Mora said to the twins. “Come on, come with me.”

Inside ACME Studio that night, model-hot guests in Moschino — or nothing at all — posed for photos with a live llama who was milling about the party.

Still, the 86-year-old Vollmer twins were a draw in their own right.

Konstantin Rubinov, a young dentist wearing a fedora and a fat silver ring, summoned a rotation of friends and partygoers to meet and take photos with the Vollmer twins.

“These guys went viral before they went viral,” Rubinov said. He remembered, years ago, calling the elderly handymen for help when a rainstorm threatened to tear down the sign above his business, Williamsburg Dental Arts.

Van and Carl teetered up a ladder that night and secured his sign in the pouring rain, Rubinov said. “They saved me!” he cried, gesturing for drama.

Back at the restaurant, Van and Carl wondered, as they often do, why everyone — the neighbors, the press corps, the internet — suddenly seems to find them so interesting.

“What blows everybody’s mind is that we want to die at sea,” Van said. “That we’re going to be dumped overboard.”

Van explained that he stopped believing in the afterlife on the day Carl’s father-in-law died in a third-floor Greenpoint apartment.

“I carried his father-in-law down two flights of stairs in a bag, and he started to slide down,” Van said. “I grabbed the bag to keep him from sliding any further, and I got an ankle.”

“When that happened to me — when I grabbed that ankle — that was the end of my belief in eternal life,” Van said.

“When you die, you’re a cold carbohydrate,” Carl said. “That’s it.”

“I don’t want my remains to lay in the cold winter ground with the worms eating it. I don’t want to go into a fire,” Van said. “I just want to sleep with the fishes for eternity.”

“Sleep with the fishes,” Carl echoed.