One more challenge before letting go
Issue 90: May/June 2013
We could have kept sailing. We aren’t so old and tired that it’s no longer possible. The aches and pains are bad, but not intolerable. My eyes aren’t yet a danger. But age diminishes enthusiasm and we began to think of what else we could do with the $3,000 or $4,000 a year it cost us to keep the Puffin.
A good test by which to decide whether or not to give up sailing was to imagine ourselves so wealthy that all the work except the actual sailing was done by marina staff. If we had to do nothing but ride the launch to the boat and sail, would we have kept on? Sadly, the answer was, not very often.
But I’m going to miss it. I’ve often thought that, if Mars had kept enough water and air, Martians might have peered through telescopes and seen Earth’s mighty oceans, seas that aren’t the ice of Europa or the liquid methane of Titan, but vast planetary reaches of roiling water propagating enormous waves born of wind and infinite fetch. They might have imagined stories of sentient creatures navigating those seas in craft that transmuted the wild winds into governable propulsion. But their fiction could scarcely have been more fantastic than the reality, and even a sailor in a small 21st-century sailboat cruising New England waters within sight of shore is a part of that ancient wonder.
Knowing our June cruise from Salem to Cape Cod would be our last, I decided at the last hour to singlehand on that final delivery (over the objections of Mary Ann, who thought it too risky) to see what last lessons I might learn.
First, I learned that if it all becomes too much — if yelling at the storm, “Go ahead, do your worst!” does no good in the face of the cold, the stinging rain, a flogging mainsail, and all pleasure is overwhelmed — then, as the song goes “turn that boat around, the sea will do no harm” and run for it. Before the wind, with the torrent at my back and the flogging mainsail pacified, I could regroup. Admitting defeat and acting on it gave me as much of a feeling of control as pressing on would have and then, as my inner clouds dissipated, the storm passed and I was back on course.
Second, I learned how good it feels when there’s someone to take your lines as you pull up to a slip in the dark, exhausted by the weather and dealing with problems that are easy when you have a shipmate. Friendly, helpful, sympathetic human beings magnify the pleasure of a snug harbor on a stormy night.
One of the world’s oldest nautical poems was of a man at sea lamenting the hardships he was confronting and who, when he returned to the sweet comforts of the land, again began dreaming of adventure at sea. The Puffin is gone and, as all sailors will understand, there’s plenty about owning and sailing a boat I won’t miss, but when I see a sailboat now I recall the quiet evenings on our mooring (with a mooring’s odd sense of cozy security), our one-pot dinners, our card games by lamplight, the little maintenance projects, the perfect winds that sometimes filled our sails to take us into the harbors of New England, seeing the seaports as our forebears saw them and, if we were lucky, encountering schooners and full-rigged ships on the way as if we had entered a time warp back to the middle of the 19th century. We loved the camaraderie at the marinas, the other sailors all happy to be there. Though we made no bluewater crossings, sailing was as close to high adventure as I’ll ever get. It was just plain interesting and it made me more interesting.
I feel good that, on this water-planet, I didn’t neglect to explore what the world mostly is. I could say to the Martians, “Yes, I know this is a fantastic world. I sailed her waters as best I could.”
But now what? It’s a hard act to follow.
Michael Hoffman grew up on his family’s fleet of old tugs and ferries in Northern California and watched the maritime life of Humboldt Bay from his kitchen window. He never felt drawn to sailboats, but when he tried sailing 40 years later he instantly regretted waiting that long.
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