“I love traveling on the water,” says Mickey Anders, pastor at First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Anders has just completed a cruise down the Ohio River. Not aboard the Delta Queen or another luxury steamboat ... he made the journey from Ashland to Owensboro in a $50, 20-foot sailboat with a three-horsepower motor for backup.
“I love traveling on the water!” Anders says.
That love for the water may have been passed down through his genes.
“I’m in a fishing family,” he said. “My dad was a fisherman. But probably one of the most formative experiences in my life was that between my junior and senior years in high school I went to the monthlong Minnesota Outward Bound School and we took a canoeing trek up into Canada — kind of a wilderness survival thing.
“And it was the kind of experience that makes me have the attitude that I can do anything I set my mind to do. I love adventuring. I love seeing what’s around the next bend ... I just love being on the water.”
Anders said he became interested in sailing in college and in 1986, with a tax refund, he bought a little boat. He then began reading everything in the library about sailing, sailing adventures, and people who had sailed around the world.
“I sailed halfway across Arkansas without a motor and then I got in trouble a time or two around some locks ... the wind was up and I had to use my oars, and one of my oars broke, and it was a very dangerous time.” He finished the trip with a motor on board for emergencies and since then always has a motor ... just in case.  Four years ago, Anders and his wife, Sarah, took what he calls his “Mother of All Vacations.” They chartered a 40-foot sailboat in the British Virgin Islands for a week. “It was a great experience,” Anders said. “But what’s really amazing is you charter a boat and they give you a boat worth $100,000 and say, ‘See you next Saturday!’”
Anders has been the pastor at First Christian for two and a half years. He has a Doctor of Ministry degree from the Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, which he attended from 1970 to 1973. Upon finishing at the seminary, he went back to Arkansas where he served as youth minister, associate pastor, and pastor at several churches.
“I was Southern Baptist for 20 years and then in the early ‘90s I kind of had my own mid-life crisis and wound up changing denominations,” Anders said. “I actually got out of preaching for a while and worked in Chamber of Commerce work.” Anders was employed by the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce and then was executive director of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce.
“I started talking to folks in the Disciples denomination ... all that time I was attending a Disciples church,” Anders said. “And then I was an interim pastor at a little church in Arkansas.”
Anders said he had meanwhile submitted his resume to a placement service and got a call to come to Pikeville.
“When I decided to leave Arkansas, I said, ‘Lord, take me anywhere that’s near the ocean!’ And you can see where I am!”
But Anders says he likes it here in Pikeville. “When I walked into First Christian Church I looked up at the stained glass window, and there’s a sailboat up there. And I thought, ‘I know this has to be a call for me!’ That was pretty neat.
“We’ve found Pikeville to be a great town,” he said. “And you can get there (the ocean) from anywhere; you just have to be willing to drive!”
Mickey and Sarah have two sons: Andy, 23, who lives in Little Rock and works at a door manufacturing company, and Will, who will be a senior at Pikeville High School, where he is in the band; he wants to go to East Tennessee State and study computer graphics.
In addition to serving as pastor at First Christian where he is the only full-time staff person, Mickey teaches a 34-week Bible study one day a week during the school year, teaching a class in the morning and one in the evening. He is also a member of the Pikeville Rotary Club and on the board, and was recently elected to the board of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce. Sarah is administrator at Christ Central School.
Although he has numerous interests and responsibilities on land, Mickey’s sailing days are far from over. “I’ve still got a gap from Louisa to Ashland that I’ve got to go back and do,” he said. “And I want to go back to Owensboro and then go down the Mississippi to Hickman, so it would be the whole way across Kentucky from Pikeville. That’s my goal. And Sarah wants to go along, on shore, and check out all the flea markets and meet me at night and sleep on the sailboat.
“I’d love to sail the Kentucky River ... that’s a really neat river,” Mickey said. “And when I retire I’d like to do the Mississippi. I would also love to go up the East Coast and down to the Bahamas, and back up, and spend a couple of years just doing some serious sailing.
“Sarah’s and my ideal plan for retirement is to buy a motor home and a sailboat and she’ll go along the shore and I’ll sail, and we’ll get in the motor home and go explore the land, and get on the boat and spend the night.”
Anders says to his surprise there are towns along the Ohio River that have no access to the river. “It looks to me like any town on the river would have a boat ramp and a dock. You’d think a town of any size would have that. But of course, Pikeville makes no use of our river, either. You have hardly any access to the Big Sandy from here.”
Last September, Anders motored down the Big Sandy to Louisa on his 13-foot sailboat, “But I didn’t put the mast on it,” he said, “because there’s no wind on the Big Sandy at all, and I wasn’t sure what I would have to go under. I knew on the Ohio I didn’t have to worry about low bridges, and when you’re sailing, you have to worry about low bridges. That was a problem for getting up some of the creeks. I couldn’t go up very far because there would be a bridge that I couldn’t get my mast under.”
Although Sarah does join Mickey sometimes, usually he sails alone. “I’ve gotten used to sailing alone just because it’s hard to work things out with other people’s schedules — work out when they can go. No one in my family is very interested in sailing with me. Andy would go, but he’s working now. He always says he’ll sail around the world with me when I do that ... and he might, if I ever do that. I’ve read that 99 percent of the people who say ‘I’m going to sail around the world,’ never do, so I’ve said I’m not going to say it.”
The story of how Mickey obtained the $50 sailboat he used on his Ohio trip is an interesting one.
“I always had that little 13-foot boat,” he said, “and then my brother-in-law put me on to the $50 sailboat. He lives near Elizabethtown and bought it on eBay and I bought it from him. It was in really bad shape and needed a lot of work. I bought it at the end of December and spent five months — all my spare time — working on it.
“For one thing, it didn’t have a boom and it didn’t have a sail. But then on the Internet I found a guy in Maine who had used sails for this boat, and I got those for $100. And the boom was going to cost me $500 to buy a new one, but I managed to rig it around and I’m using the boom off my little boat. It actually fit! Then I did a lot of painting and cleaning up.”
When he put it into the Ohio for the maiden voyage, Mickey noticed the boat had a slow leak. A small one. He said he stood in water most of the trip, due to storms and the slow leak. “I would have liked to have tried it out before I started on the trip, but I didn’t have the time,” he said.
Aside from minor problems that arose, Mickey says, “It was a great adventure and I recommend it. It is a wonderful way to see Kentucky in a way you can’t see it any other way ... from the river. You get a lot of impressions going down the river that you just couldn’t get any other way.
“One of the things that fascinated me was the number of men working on the river — working the barges, power plants — It seems like there’s a power plant every 20 miles — there’s so much industry on the river. And the homes — beautiful homes on amazing house sites. And some of the towns are so beautiful and quaint ... and there would be just no way to see those things from the road!”
Anders loves being on the water. It only gets better if he’s in a sailboat. “For me, it’s the simplicity, the self-sufficiency ... I like that,” he says. “And once you get out there and you’re sailing ... and it’s quiet ... and it’s mystical ... to be going across the water with just the wind ... it’s an amazing experience. And it’s, for me, a religious experience, too.”

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