Scenes from a sailing season
Issue 114: May/June 2017
Friday, May 22
On the water at last! I step into the cockpit and feel Finn dip toward me as if in greeting. I scull away from the boat ramp past the pilings, months of fantasizing about this moment melting behind me.
Pier cleared, I hoist the sail, glad for the bite of the lines in my hands and the heft of gaff and boom. I sit down on the cedar planks and bear off. The sail snaps taut and the boat surges forward, wake burbling, tiller trembling, dinghy bounding behind.
We slip through the harbor at an easy heel, the sunshine toasty on the shoulders of my gray chamois shirt (some clothing habits from my commercial fishing days are hard to shake). Rounding the channel markers, we pass a cormorant, its beak clamped around a fish too large to choke down. An osprey peeps and lifts off its nest atop the light tower. Two terns flick past the nun, peering down at it as if on an inspection tour. We cut into the open bay, the only other boats a sloop way out by Cleveland Ledge light and a head boat idling off Fiddler’s Cove.
I reach over to trail my fingers in the cold water. Absorbed in sky, water, wind, sun, and motion of the boat, I am my youthful self again, and the concerns of my graybeard’s life dissolve like the cloud tufts behind us. We head for the mooring field across the blue-green shallows. I see only winter sticks and mooring balls. This is Finn’s eleventh season, and we’ll be the first ones in the water once again. Rejoice!
Saturday, June 20
I wake up to cool sunshine and a 10-knot northerly scaling the royal blue and aqua water. I sense Finn drumming her fingers, but chores await and noontime rolls past before I brave the bracing water and swim out to her.
My son and his girlfriend want to fish and, with the freshening gusts, I decide to reef so we can maintain trolling speed. I love using Finn for her ancestral duties as a fishing boat. Her sweet lines embody the clan of sturdy working craft from which she’s descended.
The farther out we go, the heavier the gusts blow, and we come about and reach back in with a bone in our teeth. Matthew has one strike before we moor, douse sail, and drop lines overboard. Jana’s close encounter with a green crab turns out to be the only action of the day. No one cares. Fishing, chatting, laughing as they bait up with sea worms (he’s going to vet school, she’s in med school, they’re both more interested in sea worm anatomy than their effectiveness as bait), rocking with Finn as she paces on her mooring, sipping ice-cold beer while watching the gusts crinkle the water and leaden streaks and swaths of cloud smear the sky . . . I hover in saltwater-borne bliss.
Friday, July 3
Passing a truck advertising Pilsner Urquell, my favorite beer, on the way down to the Cape must be a good omen. By noontime the northerly gusts ease and I wade out to Finn to take her out for a sail.
She nods as I approach, the sun beating down out of a spotless sky on my bare shoulders, the cool clear water only hip-high on its way to an astronomical low. I ghost back to the beach to pick up my wife, Ellen, and my mother-in-law, Janice. At 80, Janice is still game for a sail. The last of the gusts quits and I lead Finn out over the shallows. The water has become mercury-slick. But a suggestion of a breeze lifts us past the fangs of the rocks, black-backed gulls and cormorants standing atop them, the latter with wings outspread. Past the last mooring ball, we enter a zone of light air and laze our way from spot to spot — the oyster farm barge, Halftide Rock fringed with lime-green seaweed, the moored black-hulled Doughdish, her tanbark sails furled.
But the Pilsner luck runs out. Late in the afternoon, we learn of the death of a close friend’s father, and our plans to spend the rest of Independence Day weekend knocking about in watery freedom crumble. Here’s to life, then, and a toast to the boats that make it worth living.
Saturday, July 18
We sit at the edge of the water just after two o’clock, squinting against the strengthening sou’wester. Beyond Scraggy Neck, a gray ceiling darkens. Above us, filtered sunshine throws scintillas on the gray-green chop.
To sail or not to sail? The wind seems intent on outdoing itself with each puff. Beyond Halftide Rock the water dances with whitecaps and two sailboats in the open bay heel hard over.
From the west comes a bumble of thunder, helping me resist our temptress as she beckons to me from her mooring. My wife rises to spread out a towel and the wind kicks her beach chair over.
Spits of rain fall on us, and now a shower commences, cold enough to raise gooseflesh on my skin. Another roll of thunder resounds.
Then the rain fizzles, the clouds part, and sunshine bakes the chill out of me. But the wind keeps increasing. I wade out to Finn and climb aboard. Two of my brothers-in-law follow me, David to rake quahogs off the stern and Tommy in his kayak to deliver me a beer. Soon his daughter Celia swims out and climbs aboard, and we chat about the pros and cons of her spending a night on Finn solo. With the gusts building, I have to content myself with no sailing. (Am I getting softer as I get grayer?) But bobbing in the cockpit in the sun and shooting the breeze with kinfolk ain’t half bad.
Sunday, August 2
My vow to rise at daybreak for a sail before racing home on the Cape Cod Speedway disintegrates. At six o’clock, in spite of the ruffled blue water and spotless blue sky I see out the window, I stretch back for a catnap and don’t awaken till eight. Groggy and stiff, I debate whether to squeeze in a sail — a booming sou’wester kept us off the water all Saturday — or hit the road.
I pour a mug of coffee and go out onto the deck to watch Finn prance on her mooring. Sailing to me is the antithesis of deadlines — my life ashore is a gauntlet of them. To frog-march myself down to the boat, remove cockpit cover and sailcover, hang rudder, insert tiller, drop centerboard, and hoist sail with only enough time to round the number 5 can taints one of the glories of sailing my little craft: the return to my youth when I was as footloose as a cloud, a young seadog skylarking aboard the sloops and yawls my family sailed on the Chesapeake, to Shelter Island and Block Island, Newport, the Elizabeths, the Vineyard, Nantucket.
Better to forgo it than to rush it. I finish my coffee, scan the bay with the old pair of field glasses (Kommandant brand, made in Germany) and bring Finn into focus. I swear I see her shake her head. Then she turns her stern to me, pointing her proud prow away toward the brilliance of the open bay. Something inside me wilts. I know a reproving look when I see one. Shame on me: I’ve disappointed a lady.
Saturday, August 29
One good sail deserves another. The previous evening’s outing with Celia and my college-age nephew Ted fresh in my mind — the late sun dazzling, 7-knot southerly giving us a steady push, terns diving on boils of bait, another catboat tacking with us and trading compliments — I hustle down to the beach in the morning sunshine, swim out to my waiting vessel, say “Greetings, netop! (“netop” being an old New England term meaning friend), and sail back to collect a new crewmember, my niece Nina, Celia’s elder sister, once a sprite who used to doze beneath the foredeck, now of the age to be applying to college.
We shove off in light air, sea scalloped, sun hot, shade cast by the sail cool. I scan the open water, the far shore floating in sharp relief, and see only one other sail. A few tacks here and there later — one to pass kindred spirit Alcaduwi, a Beetle making a late-season appearance on her mooring — and we return to pick up Ted. We sail to Lawrence Island, then beat out to Seal Rocks to glimpse the lighthouse on Wings Neck. Now the breeze has hit its stride, and the swells out here give us a rollicking ride.
We scream back in and pick up fresh crew: Celia (fast becoming a seadog) and my sister-in-law Julie. Ted remains aboard, and we pound out in the late-afternoon glare, the chop lurching and squirming and foaming. Forecast: 5 to 10 knots. Reality: 15 gusting to 18. I lean my full weight against the weather helm, the seas douse us, we heel hard in the sizzling wake — glorious! A few more sporty tacks and we return to the mooring. I spend the shank of the afternoon quahogging in water as thin as I’ve seen it, thanks to the super moon, or sturgeon moon as Native Americans called it.
Finally I wade to shore. I plunk down in a beach chair, knee bruised, ankle cut, deltoid tattooed with a half-dollar-size black-and-blue mark, hands raw from handling wet line, fingers and toes saltwater-pickled and wrinkled. I’m euphoric.
Later that night, still rocking as I used to after returning from a long trip offshore, I peer off the porch at Finn, the moonlight on her hull making her look like a floating gull feather. She must feel satisfied. I know I do — a full day spent schooning around Megansett Harbor and Buzzards Bay, my equivalent of a successful passage of the Strait of Magellan.
Friday, September 18
Seven thirty. A windless morning. I’m in the dinghy pulling on worn oars. Wabi-sabi — the sensibility that imperfection and wear give objects and life deeper meaning — should have been the name of this little vessel, though we’ve always called her Ringy Dinghy.
Wistfulness should be added to that aesthetic: I’m towing Finn from the mooring field to the boat ramp to haul her out. Timing and obligations conspired against us, and we’ll see no October sailing this year.
I watch her skim along behind, and I think of the season, now also behind us: the minor mishaps that bloodied elbows and swelled knuckles, the drafty days and doldrums, the laughs we had with friends and family members turned crewmates, the boats and birds and fish and skies, the quiet cruises when only Finn and the water whispered their secrets to each other, the swift arrival of September with its angled light, its chilly blue water. We round the breakwater, and I picture the months ahead: pining for the feel of the boat, poring over sailing magazines and nautical books to fill the void, gazing at pictures of seasons past. My youthful voice cries out: “Ship those oars! Climb aboard! Take a last sail out, back out into the bay!”
I look around. The water’s a silver-blue gel, the wind still abed. Even the terns are gone.
I sigh, and keep on rowing.
Craig Moodie lives with his wife, Ellen, in Massachusetts. His work includes A Sailor’s Valentine and Other Stories and, under the name John Macfarlane, the middle-grade novel Stormstruck!, a Kirkus Best Book.
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