Life and the sailing season don’t always align
Issue 128: Sept/Oct 2019
My wife sits down on the seawall above the beach. I tell her that I won’t be long. She laughs and waves me away. “Take your time.” A gust of chilled north3east wind lifts a wing of her dark hair. “I’m fine right here.”
Her smile fades as she squints across the water at the mooring field. Only one sailboat lies on her mooring — Petrel, a catboat. Usually Finn’s first in. Not this year. A diagnosis has put our sailing season on hold.
I shift my eyes to our mooring ball, not a hundred feet upwind from where Petrel prances. It sits boatless, forlorn without our twelve-foot catboat frisking from it. Who knows how long Petrel will have to wait to welcome her smaller companion back to the water.
I trudge back up the dune path, pushing through the perfume of Rosa rugosa, to where the dinghy rests upside down at the path’s edge. I muscle it over and it rumbles to a rest. I set the oarlocks and oars aboard, then drag it down to the water’s edge.
As I shove off and row past the jetty, the early-June sunshine sends waves of oscillating light through the clear shallows. Soon the pebbled tortoiseshell bottom vanishes from view. The deeper blue-black water crinkles in a gust, sending Petrel’s halyards rapping.
I pass two cormorants standing atop separate rocks and move beyond the lee of the shore into the wind. Another gust scoots the dinghy toward our mooring as if goosed, and when I round up, we sweep past. I lunge and grab the pennant. I pin the line under my arm while I uncoil the loops from the eye, thinking that I’ll let it dangle in the water. I reconsider. Why let it become an algae, slime, and barnacle farm? I coil it up again and drape it over the eye.
I release the mooring as a gust catches us broadside and we speed toward Petrel. As hard as I row, I cannot stem the drift. Petrel cuts back and forth in another gust, looming closer. I stroke too hard and the starboard oar skips off the water, the splash whipping downwind. Then the wind inhales, and I dig the oars in once, twice, and inch forward. I claw crabwise to regain the ground I’ve lost.
Soon I’m back in the lee of the beach, cruising across the sunlit shallows to meet Ellen, who has walked to the far jetty. I ship the oars and we linger, I on the water, she ashore. I wonder what runs through her mind on this last day before she begins a voyage into waters for which we have no chart, no star to steer by. Life and the sailing season don’t always align
“I found a piece of sea glass,” she says. She weighs it in her hand, then tosses it into the water. “Not ready.”
She turns back, and I take one stroke to pivot the dinghy, then rest on my oars. The wind carries me at the same pace Ellen keeps as she walks along the water’s edge. I want to stay on the water, to coax Ellen into the dinghy for a row to Rand’s Harbor, or even venture around the breakwater and up the channel into Squeteague Harbor, where we might have sailed Finn on this drafty day.
I backstroke to slow our drift as we reach our jetty. I know we must go. Ashore, my wife turns for the path. I land with a crunch and haul the dinghy back up the beach.
I pause to catch my breath and cast a look back out at our mooring. My hands tingle from handling wet rope and roughened oars. A vision of our little yacht comes to me, her sail breasting taut as she falls off the wind and carves a course toward the open water. I inhale the scent of brine and wrack and rose, then tear my eyes away and take the path through the dune after my wife.
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.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
