Bob Comyn: Retiring in order to get to work

MARIN, California - Mountain climber, pilot, airplane mechanic, high-tech entrepreneur, international property developer: Bob Comyn has led a full, busy life. And he's nowhere near the end of his plans.

Most people in their late 50s would aspire to look as relaxed and attractive as Bob and his wife, Bev. Fewer would be eager to implement two of this pair's secrets: Revisit teenage love when you're in middle age; and when you retire, take the time to get busy.

Bob has focused heavily for the past few years on building an airplane, a glamorous, pressurized four-seater that flies about twice as high as a standard Cessna and, at 300 knots, cruises much faster. You could think of it as a full-sized model plane built from a gigantic collection of parts that arrived at Bob's doorstep one day in 2001.

"It was a million-piece jigsaw puzzle," Bob said. Putting the pieces together to create a Lancair IV-P was the equivalent of a part-time job for five years. He spent almost 5,000 hours soldering, wiring and gluing every inch of the project, along the way learning to work with carbon fiberglass and other unfamiliar materials.

As he spent day after day, month after month, laying out pieces in an airplane hangar, Bev continued her work as a special education teacher. "When I went to school, he went to the airport," she said.

For Bob, 58, "retirement" has been less like a leisurely idyll than a routine of seemingly endless, exacting work - work that he finds enjoyable, stimulating and rewarding. One friend teased him, saying: "I don't want to retire, because I don't want to be as busy as Bob."

The Lancair made its first flight in the spring of 2006. By the end of the year, Bob had logged more than 80 hours at the controls. One flight was a weekend trip to Colorado to visit Bob's new grandson. The Lancair made it in three hours and 15 minutes, a little more than an hour longer than a jet would have taken.

Assuming you don't count the thousands of hours that were spent putting it together, the Lancair saves more time than you might think. Bob can hop into his plane and take off without having to negotiate metropolitan airports. As he said to a visitor: "I'll bet you that if we both left from here, I'd get there first."

As amateur aviation goes, the Lancair is a sexy plane -- a high-performance piston-driven one-engine craft for which Bob pursued specialized pilot training. After he got a pilot's license in the late '90s, Bob became a certified flight instructor. He continues to teach in order to stay current on aviation issues and enjoy the company of student pilots, including an electrical contractor, a fire chief and even a businessman who commutes to Poland while living in Marin.

A Midwesterner with a touch of cowboy, Bob is making a transition to big-city California living. Bev, who at age 56 has lived north of San Francisco for decades, is getting used to marriage for the first time. She's in her final year of teaching and is preparing for retirement and the couple's upcoming move to Arizona.

She and Bob met at a high school dance in the Midwest and were college sweethearts for a few years before they went their separate ways. But they kept in touch over the decades while Bob married, became a father and later divorced - and while meanwhile she moved to California and began teaching.

She kept their college love letters. Thirty years later Bob asked her if she'd consider dating him again. Bev recalls: "It was wild, because he was like my first true love. Reconnecting, we had to get to know each other again."

After college, Bob discovered he had a knack for developing custom business software. He started a company, sold it after 15 years and moved to Colorado. Living at 10,000 feet, he started bagging the state's 50-odd peaks over 14,000 feet. That's where he started flying, buying the Lancair kit in 2001, two years before he moved to Marin to marry Bev.

In Colorado, Bob studied Spanish and spent time in Central and South America. While there, he connected with other investors interested in developing a beach north of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. The development, Playa Las Tortugas, or Turtle Beach, was built with specific environmental goals including the preservation of sea turtles, which use it as a nesting ground.

Sea turtle eggs are a target of poachers because the eggs have black-market value as aphrodisiacs. During nesting season, officials patrol the 12-mile stretch of beach; when a cache of eggs is discovered, they are dug up and taken to a secure base until they hatch. Then the infant turtles are returned to the beach to make a dash for the ocean.

Although birds pick off the vulnerable young as they scramble for the water, biologists nonetheless release them far up on the beach, Bob said, because scientists believe that while the turtles crawl into the water they pick up sand that gets buried in their tails. Somehow the sand helps the turtles eventually return to the same place to lay their eggs.

Bev fondly describes the beach as "like an old coconut grove." Bob said he does not expect to turn a large profit on the project, but he's pleased his group may have set a good example by meeting environmental goals.

A Merriman client since the mid 1990s, Bob says he's still working on mastering the concept of retirement. "I want to try to simplify my life," he said emphatically. "I really do."

Bev is among a number of amused skeptics who roll their eyes. "He's talked about building a helicopter," she said.