Two sailors with One Love experience a magic moment
Issue 39 : Nov/Dec 2004
The temperature hovered below 60, and that was in the sun. My wife cast off the bow lines as we pulled away from the slip for the first time. I felt a flutter in my stomach. Thanksgiving Day isn’t exactly prime sailing here on the Chesapeake; we’d certainly be the only boat in Willoughby Bay.
Ten months earlier, I lay in my rack on board one of Uncle Sam’s haze-gray cruise liners and dreamed of boats. I flipped through magazines that my wife knowingly forwarded, rereading articles two and three times. It was an interest my shipmates didn’t share or even understand.
“You want a what?” they asked. “You’re living on a boat for the next six months. Isn’t that enough?”
There was a part of me that understood their feelings. We had deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom, which became Iraqi Freedom. No- body knew when we would be home. A sailboat was a compulsion though. I would cram myself back into my rack with Jimmy on the Discman and a two-month-old Good Old Boat in my hands and escape. This boat would be mine, I would be the skipper, and I could stay close to home.
I grew up with the family Laser on small New England lakes. Summers were spent on canoe trips and at the beach. I bought my first boat at 13, an Aquaterra kayak from the clearance rack at Eastern Mountain Sports. A touring boat of classic milk-jug construction, it still hangs on the wall of my garage. I added to the armada with a worn whitewater boat that my brother gave me.
Interest returned
Kayaks were perfect as the Navy moved me around the country, but I started to dream of something more. Because I was stationed in places like Annapolis, Pensacola, and San Diego, my interest returned to sailing. Growing older, but not up, I found myself back from the second Gulf War, returned to a suburban life with my wife, my dog, and a wad of hostile-fire pay burning a hole in my pocket. It was time to start shopping.
Nobody goes into government service — military or otherwise — to get rich. Even with the extra money I earned in the combat zone, I knew that I was looking for something “experienced,” a good old boat. Having married up in life, I also knew that I could count on my wife, Charity, to help with some sweat equity. My father-in-law, a teacher by profession, was refurbishing his second cruiser, a 36-foot Morgan, so I knew that with a little help we could make our oldie a goodie. There was just
one problem: it was summer, peak sailing season and the peak of boat prices. I also wanted to spend time with my family and friends after being deployed for six months. So the dream wallowed, living next to my nightstand in stacks of books and magazines.
It caught my wife by surprise at the beginning of November when I told her my plans for the weekend. There was a boat for sale, a 1984 22-foot Gloucester, 20 minutes from home. I had already talked to the seller, researched the boat on the Internet, and set up an appointment to see it Saturday morning.
Work ahead
“You want to buy it?” she asked 18 hours later.
It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t in great shape, it needed interior work, and in a season or two it would need new lines and maybe new sails. Of course I wanted to buy it. This boat wasn’t the expensive Catalina without a trailer, the engineless O’Day with a broken trailer axle, or any of the other boats we had considered. The hull was solid, the trailer barely used, the outboard well maintained, and the rigging in good shape.
She looked lonely sitting on her trailer, fenced inside the backyard, but there was something about her. The slight rise of the bow, the salty-looking oval portholes, the low cabin trunk. She needed some TLC. All right, she needed a lot of TLC if she was going to be the boat we dreamed of. That was the thing: she was the boat we dreamed of, and we decided that she should be named One Love.
Two and a half weeks after dropping the trailer onto the hitch, we puttered out of the marina and into Willoughby Bay. It had been a whirlwind 17 days of power buffers, orbital sanders, paint, gelcoat repair, polish, wax, vinyl tapes, and lots of soap and water. The stack of receipts was piling ever higher, but it didn’t matter on Thanksgiving Day as we cleared the marina’s channel markers and brought the bow around into the wind.
Limp windsocks
What wind? Charity and I glanced around at the crystal-blue skies, the high warming sun, and the limp windsocks at the Navy Heliport. She took the tiller and tried to crawl deeper into her ski jacket, while I found the main halyard and started pulling.
With the sails set limply, not even luffing in the wisps of breeze, I scanned the horizon. I must have looked crazed, glancing around at the windsocks and flags . . . anything that would show the wind. Charity leaned back against the transom and listened to the sputter of the idling outboard, kind enough to observe my mania without comment.
Then I saw it. I reached back and killed the engine, locking it up out of the water. Settling back into the cockpit I glanced again. It was still there.
“What are you doing?”
“The wind is coming,” I replied. She looked at me with doubt in her eyes. But it was coming. The flags on Willoughby Spit had begun to move. A northeast wind from the Chesapeake was slowly rippling the calm water. We waited as I watched the ripples move ever closer.
We heard the sail begin to fill with air, not with a pop but a flutter. I let out the main a little, not wanting to oversheet, and One Love began to move. We glided forward, ghosting ahead under sail. Charity and I looked at each other, exchanging grins. We were quiet for a minute, enjoying that moment after the sails are trimmed and the course is set. Exhaling into the breeze, we felt the problems of life ashore drift into the wake as the hull sliced through the water. It was the perfect holiday.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
