The sailing stories we tell can be a map to a meaningful life
Issue 150: May/June 2023
My first sailboat sank in 6 feet of water. In retrospect, minor maintenance could’ve saved the little dinghy. But I was a kid; those parts cost money; and anyway, who needs a boat that floats?
Okay, the boat didn’t technically sink, per se. Foam flotation made that all but impossible. But when the hull filled with water and tennis shoes and soda cans began floating out of the cockpit, my buddy and I quickly realized we were in a fix.
“Save yourself!” I yelled at one particularly memorable moment.
“Save myself?” Steve said, laughing. “From what?”
We jumped out of the boat and into the warm August water, swimming and pulling on a bowline until we’d floated the boat ashore. Back on the beach, brilliant minds hatched a foolproof plan to recover the semi-submerged vessel. My older brother reversed a rusty S-10 pickup down into the water’s edge, hooked up an old clothesline as a tow rope, and pulled until the wheels spun.
Easy work. In a single afternoon, we’d sunk a sailboat and stuck a truck in the lake.
Most sailors have stories like this. Look closely and you’ll see that the tales we tell (the funny, the embarrassing, the beautiful) are rarely about ego or the material. Instead, our best memories call back relationships with the environment, the bonds of family, and the connectedness of friends.
In my memory, I can still see my childhood buddy Ben smiling in the Sunfish he sailed each summer when we were kids. I can see my father cutting plywood daggerboards for our catamaran. And I can still hear echoes of a conversation shared with my mother. “Couldn’t you just stay out here forever?” I asked her as we bobbed along monotonously on a windless summer day.
“It’s great,” my mother said. “Though, I’m not sure about forever.”
Nostalgia takes us back in time, but its real power is its ability to orient us forward and offer clues to what a meaningful life might look like. I think of this often as I take my own kids sailing on our Cape Dory 25. They’re young now. This is our first year with a sailboat. And as the California spring inches closer to summer, I keep wondering: Which experiences will they remember? What meaning will they make? What stories will they tell?
Twenty bucks says they won’t remember some chipped paint, a sale on outboards, or a fancy piece of new rope. Instead, years from now, with the wind at their backs, small, seemingly insignificant moments will resurface from these early years on the water. Maybe they’ll recall the briny smell of the sea, the way you can feel a gentle breeze on your arms, or what a gift it is to drift off to sleep and wake to the sound of seals or the sight of dolphins. Or maybe they’ll remember that first time they held the tiller and guided us back to the slip at sunset.
Guess I’m biased, but I bet the stories these guys tell will be amazing. And like that, we’ll be transported back to when they were kids and we were young parents, a small family out sailing a little boat along the edge of an immense ocean.
It’s a ways off now, but I can see it already.
David Blake Fischer lives in Southern California. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed, the Moth, and Cruising World magazine, where he pens a lighthearted, selfeffacing monthly column for noob sailors. Follow his reflections and escapades on Instagram @ sailingdelilah.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
