Some boats you just can’t live without.
Issue 139: July/Aug 2021
Somewhere along the line, my boat ate one of my favorite earrings. It was a small, silver-set piece of green glass, with a clasp that kept it closed just so it wouldn’t fall off your ear and get lost. But lost it got. I searched every inch of the boat, but the boat just ate it.
Then time passed, and life ate the boat. That is to say, it was time to sell her, our 1978 Peterson 34, Luna.
I was bummed about the earring, but selling Luna broke my heart. My husband, Johnny, and I had bought her when our daughter was a newborn and our son was 3 years old. I was then desperate to get out of the young-mom urban grind, to see stars, to feel the water’s freedom again. Johnny had known her IOR racing lines for years, knew just how to answer when I pleaded: “Find us a boat. Now.”
And, because he has the skills, he found her and then turned her into a fast, beautiful cruising boat for a young family. Our kids grew up on her learning what it means to love sailing, the natural world, and the water life. They also learned how something seemingly inanimate could become part of you, how you could love what was, to the uninitiated, nothing more than a shapely aggregate of fiberglass, metal, and wood. When we left her for what we thought was the last time, our daughter wrote her a goodbye note and hid it. It’s still there, probably with my earring.
We sold her to a friend who admired her and had hoped his wife-to-be would enjoy sailing as much as he did. The marriage took, but not the sailing. Luna sat in the corner of a boatyard on the hard and waited, the way good old boats do. Her dark green hull dimmed, her deck got a little leaky. Moons came and went. Leaves blew in and out of her cockpit, snow scrimmed her decks, and sun baked her topsides.
It is a great attribute of fiberglass and a good, if lonely, boat, this ability to wait.
We weren’t waiting. We’d moved on to a bigger boat, one that took our young family sailing fulltime, an open-ended journey. And when that journey finally ended, and we returned to land, we sold the bigger steel boat (waiting is definitely not one of her attributes). Somehow, it didn’t hurt as much as the day we’d sold Luna.
And before long, we were figuring out how to bring Luna back into the family. The first day Johnny and I took her sailing again, I couldn’t stop the déjà vu. My hands, after something like seven years, knew precisely where to place themselves. My body, my muscles, my sense of balance, all found the memory of how to move about on her. After the bigger boat, she drove like a Ferrari, nimble and quick, and so easy to sail. We were talking to her, and she to us, without a word being exchanged.
You’re never the same, after you’ve been away. The face of the world has changed, just as you should, and the idea of going back to some long-ago time and place is a false nostalgia. Still, sailing Luna again felt like home.
It’s silly, but I like to think that during all those years spent conversing with the seasons, she was just waiting for us to evolve. And now that the kids are finding their own sea legs, we fit her perfectly again, a couple just starting out on some new adventure. I’m hopeful it’ll take years to make up for lost time. Maybe, among other things, I will find that lost earring after all.
Wendy Mitman Clarke is Good Old Boat’s senior editor. Luna spent the winter receiving some TLC for those leaky decks, among other things, and is sailing again on Chesapeake Bay.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
