We learn to expect the unexpected, then tell the story
Issue 122: Sept/Oct 2018
Fifteen miles off the coast of Mexico on a sunny New Year’s Day, 2012, the autopilot steering, my wife, Windy, and I and our two daughters were eating lunch on the foredeck of our home, a 40-foot sloop. Windy saw it first.
“A whale . . . we’re gonna hit it!”
I was already sprinting back to the cockpit, where I disengaged the autopilot and cranked the wheel to starboard. Seconds later, our focus was off the port side as we glided past the motionless animal, whitecaps rolling over it as if over a small low-lying island.
“It’s dead,” Windy called from the bow.
Just then, the whale rose another foot from the water, blew a plume of stinking mist that the wind carried over us, and sank back down, again motionless. That’s when we all saw the netting the whale was caught in and the small net floats that trailed behind it for at least 200 feet.
After two hours cutting away huge pieces of weighted netting, first from in the dinghy, then from in the water, I gave up. I’m a strong swimmer and wore fins, but 1- to 2-foot wind-driven seas made my efforts to move through the water feel inadequate. The first time a swell pushed me up against this living creature the size of a city bus, it was thrilling, and scary. When one of my fins got caught in the netting a second time, I imagined getting more tangled and pulled down by the mass I was cutting away. When I moved past the gaze from a brown eye the size of an apple to an unbound pectoral fin the size of a longboard, the whale quickly lifted the fin and I felt myself sucked and pulled by the strong currents it made. That happened again when I worked my way around the front of a massive head that moved quickly downward.
I climbed back aboard Del Viento, shivering. “I can’t. I cut away a lot, but the animal’s still bound somehow. I can’t save it.”
It’s a long story involving other boats and sailors and a failed expedition at dusk to find the whale we’d left stranded hours before, but about 10:00 a.m. the following day, two other sailors, aided by other boats and dinghies standing by, spent 45 minutes in the water and managed to free the whale, which had remarkably survived the night. I’ll never forget the collective joy we felt as the whale swam away.
Of course, I’ve told this story many times since, and I’m telling it now because it highlights the unexpected that’s part and parcel of sailing. We didn’t imagine we’d come across this whale that day. We’ve never foreseen any of the times we’ve run aground, the perfect passages, the engine troubles, the sail-trim discoveries, or the broken boom. Every wind shift is unexpected and requires a response.
Our shore lives aren’t scripted, but it’s easy, often necessary, to fall into a pattern that seems rote. That’s why we own and maintain these old hulls, because in stark contrast to shore life, sailing piles on the unexpected. It’s wonderfully inherent. And you don’t even have to raise the sails; just messing about in boats is a sure way to keep you on your toes.
And what’s the product of the unexpected? Experiences, of course. And experiences fulfill, whether they demand something from us and teach us something new, or they simply reward us for being afloat. When we tie up again, we’re eager to share what happened to us, because humans are storytellers by nature and a sailboat is simply the perfect story-making machine.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
