Issue 2 : Sept/Oct 1998
As a photographer, I am interested in capturing the aesthetic and practical images that greet and nurture the cruising mariner. Especially moving to this first mate are the twilights when the sea seems enameled (with the reflections of masts resembling lightning forks or wriggling snakes); the occasional one-of-a-kind shot (such as the young woman I once glimpsed rowing to shore in Vineyard Haven, Mass., reminiscent, in her straw hat, of a Renoir or a Mary Cassatt); stately bronze-hulled vessels and certain small staunch yachts like the Herreshoffs; to say nothing of sails filled with light and air or sapphire seas and stands of spruce.
Equally absorbing are those pictures detailing the bread-and-butter side of the sport: picking up a mooring, dropping an anchor, dinghying about.
The loveliness can never be caught in an absolute sense. Taking pictures incessantly and seemingly of everything — one can record, at best, only bits and pieces of that glory. Even though ever at the ready, no one can be perfectly prepared. You’re at the helm or taking down or bagging a sail, or there simply isn’t time to grab your camera before that windsurfer has whisked away or a flock of gulls whirled upward like dry leaves in a gust. A deep sense of loss accompanies any perception of glamour missed.
The camera becomes the “third person” aboard a boat. We go to great lengths to shield it from the sun and from humidity and salt water. It must be kept from rolling off a cockpit locker, while at the same time it must be kept constantly at hand.
Hard on the wind, beating for hours against a blow of 20-25 knots (or when wallowing in 10- to 12-foot swells), I’ve wondered sometimes why I didn’t marry a golfer. And yet, a bottom I pity the landlubbers denied the visions that are a mariner’s daily fare. What a privilege it is to witness the panorama presented by the great world of the water; a sphere so different from earth with all its verdant images. An inexhaustible resource, this harsh and sun-drenched realm, this milieu ranging from the malevolent to the miraculous …
First and foremost, there are the myriad boats: racing machines with skyscraper sails; skiffs hardly larger than tubs; sportsfishermen, whose bow configurations suggest the snouts of sharks. There are the lobstermen leaving their neat little seas behind them as they work their trawls, the ferries and freighters criss-crossing the waterways, the fishing draggers crowned with mantilla-like seines. Moving en masse and under spinnakers up Buzzard’s Bay, there is the New York Yacht Club, 90 boats strong, and flotillas of powerboats like packs of hounds (which pursue, catch, and pass the slower sailing sloops en route to the Cape Cod Canal).
There are the seasons with their ever-changing sights. Spring, with its stenciled horizons; summer’s incredible explosion of craft; autumn’s shores, no longer clothed in green or swathed in blue, but etched in violet and vibrant orange.
There are gloamings of garnet-red. Dusks when anchorages seem crafted by Cellini so gilded are they by the setting sun. And after dark the steady shine of masthead lights, the silvery light of the moon on the water, the rich gold of the windows of the homes ashore, the dark shapes of boats.
If I have railed at times against abysmal elements, I have also exulted in the vistas served up by the adverse: in silt-like haze, in the staunchness of chop, in a coast smoking from turbulent surf, in fog hanging above the hills of our home port like a pastel mirage, in waters so still and stagnant that lobster pot buoys float upon them like swollen bees.
Not all weather is foul weather. There is a particular kind of weather that can occur in any month but is always essentially October in its absolute clarity of atmosphere and opulence of color. That’s my favorite weather.
If the nautical scene is somewhat bleak, it is just as often fetching or sumptuous and plush, part of a satisfying panoply for both the eye and heart!
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
