Guide Profiles: Paul Dixon

February 5, 2008 By: Marshall Cutchin

Seven years before ESPN’s somewhat stilted production of Guide House (featuring Paul Dixon, Brendan McCarthy, Amanda Switzer, Matthew Miller, and Bryan Goulart), Dixon was profiled in New York magazine by writer Guy Martin. Besides noting Dixon’s annoyance at Peter Kaminsky for wanting to eat his fish, Martin captured some nice subtleties about the sport and the person. “Martha Stewart’s $400,000 Hinckley ‘picnic boat,’ the Skylands II, lolls — as its owner would loll if its owner were a half-million-dollar pleasure boat — primly buttoned under a white canvas skirt. Not fifteen feet away, a sun-blasted captain named Paul Dixon engages in the martial preflight check of his craft, a twenty-foot Hewes skiff so shorn of detail that it looks like it’s been stripped for refitting: no cabin, no above-deck cleats, no seats with backs, no rail.”