Boat cards connect good friends and good times with places far and near
Issue 118: Jan/Feb 2018
They’re a throwback to a time we seem to have moved past, a quaint time when all letters were handwritten and secure communications could be ensured with a wax seal on an envelope. Boat cards are largely unnecessary today — no need for them when you can tap together smartphones with a fellow sailor you just met, or friend each other on Facebook.
And yet, boat cards persist, still widely exchanged by sailors, perhaps because they are every bit as primitive as harnessing a finicky wind to get where you want to go, very slowly. And I think there is more to it.
On the docks and in the yards where we meet one another, we are all one, part of a community bound together by an interest in sailing and a devotion to our boats that can be neither understood by our non-sailing friends nor justified to our accountants. What we have in common and want to know about each other has much to do with what we sail and where we sail, little to do with who we are away from our boats.
Hence boat cards. Because I don’t know Jana the commercial pilot or Shaun the electrician, a couple who share a home in Burbank. I know only Jana and Shaun from Mimosa, a Cal 31 in Marina del Rey — when we met they gave me a card that says as much.
I first learned about boat cards in the mid-1990s, just before I cast off from California to head south aboard my 1980 Newport 27. A friend there to see me off handed me a stack he’d printed for me. They included a grainy picture of my boat along with my boat’s name and hailing port and my name and mailing address. I thanked him and tucked the cards away down below with no sense of how much I’d soon come to appreciate having them. In the many months and anchorages that followed, I met as many new people as I’d met before in all of my life. It was a heady time, and were it not for the cards we all exchanged, I’d have had a hard time recalling names and contact info weeks or months later when many of our paths invariably crossed again, and especially when they didn’t.
Years after selling that boat and moving ashore, I still retain the pile of boat cards I collected then. They are varied, tangible reminders of people and places and experiences. And while the photos I took back then are treasured representations of places and times, these boat cards are actual artifacts of places and times. They are tiny gifts passed hand to hand, many bearing my notes scribbled on the backs.
I thought of boat cards again in 2010, as Windy and I prepared to jump back into the sailing community with the purchase of Del Viento, our third keelboat. Now we had an email address, a blog address, and the kids’ names to add to a card. I asked a friend the name of the artist who’d done the ink-pen drawing of her boat on the card she’d given me. I then contacted the artist, a sailor who loved to draw boats, and sent him some pictures the surveyor had taken of our boat and described the scene I imagined.
“No problem,” he said. He followed up with one draft after another, encouraging me to request any tweaks I wanted made; it turns out he did all his drawing on an iPad, so changes were easy to make and the digital file was easy to send. In the end, the payment he requested was a donation, in his name, to the Ronald McDonald House, in any amount I felt was appropriate. “And,” he added, “please send me a copy of your card after you’ve got them printed, I’ll add it to my collection. I love to look at them.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I like boat cards too.”
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
