Issue 145: July/Aug 2022
I don’t know what most 14-year-old boys want for their birthdays—I could speculate, though it’s a slippery slope—but when my son, Kaeo, turned 14, his birthday request was absolutely no surprise. He wanted to go sailing.
Understand, we already were sailing. We were cruising full-time as a family aboard our 45-foot Adams, Osprey, and that April, we were at the end of a winter we’d spent in the Guna Yala, an archipelago of 378 gem-like islands east of the Panama Canal. It’s a surpassingly beautiful place, and we were there with other cruisers, among them our friends Julie and Mark, who sailed a Tayana 37 named Rachel.
When Julie and Mark asked Kaeo what he wanted for his birthday, his request was simple: that they let him borrow their Trinka sailing dinghy, so he could make that little boat his for a day and sail her wherever he wanted.
I have a series of photos from him that day as he sailed past the beach where we were hanging out. He’s hamming it up in some of them; in others he’s standing and roll-tacking the little boat as if channeling his Opti sailing lessons. But in my favorite image, his face is mostly hidden under his hat, his gaze dreamy down in the boat. He’s sitting to leeward, one hand on the tiller, the other trailing in the turquoise water.
Bliss. Communion. Joy. Freedom. All of these I see in his body’s languid expression, his hand cupping the water not to hold it, but to let it go between his fingers, there and gone like a liquid whisper.
At the time, one of Kaeo’s favorite books was Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, a story whose main characters—four siblings—commandeer a sailing dinghy named Swallow and have a summer’s worth of fantastic adventures as she takes them far afield on a lake in England’s Lake District.
Was he imagining himself as young John Walker, captain of the Swallow? Or was he being transported somewhere else by that humble little boat that served primary duty as our friends’ hard-working family car and dinghy, but on this day was freed from the mundane and transformed into something altogether more inspired, more insouciant?
“The boat was the realization of that inner vision of wind, water, tides, terns, and salt air,” writes Richard Bode in First You Have to Row a Little Boat. “It was the summation, the epiphany of a boy’s life as it was, as it would become, as it had to be.”
This issue of Good Old Boat is dedicated to celebrating small boats. And whether it is Webb Chiles circumnavigating in a 24-foot racing design, Nica Waters describing how a 28-foot Bristol Channel Cutter has framed a family’s sailing life, or 80-year-old Ferd Johns and his Sanibel 18 finding camaraderie amid dozens of other small boats capering up Puget Sound in the Salish 100, an unspoken but bright common thread weaves through every one of these stories.
The best I can do is call it a sense of wonder.
For all the most ordinary reasons, small boats are practical—they cost less to buy, keep, maintain, and sail. They’re easier to handle, they fit in shallower, smaller places, we can throw them on a trailer and take them someplace new and different. But for the most extraordinary reasons, they speak to things much more elemental.
For one, they literally put us closer to the water. In Ann Hoffner’s lovely reminiscence about growing up sailing a Mercury 15 in summertime Maine, she describes her bare feet feeling “the water chuckling by as she sped along on a reach, and the fiberglass was always cold.” That exquisite sensory memory has remained intensely immediate across decades. That’s what a small boat can do.
For another, they remind us of the beauty and healing power of unfettered simplicity, gifts that Ken Van Camp’s O’Day 192 provides to quiet his mind as he frets about his life’s trajectory on a peaceful Pennsylvania lake.
Often, the first boat we sailed was a little boat, and so they invoke a version of ourselves that is less troubled, less burdened by the realities of adulthood. By their very nature and size, they require us to distill our lives to the essence of what we need in the moment. And there, we find our sense of wonder restored.
My son is 25 now, a long way from that 14-year-old celebrating an unforgettable birthday solo sailing a friend’s Trinka. But every time I see him sail a small boat—which he still does as often as possible—I know a part of him is set free, and always will be. That’s the enduring power of small boats.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
