Bad weather turns plans into uncertainties
Issue 58 : Jan/Feb 2008
I was coiling the Shorepower Cord on the pier at Prince Arthur’s Landing Marina in preparation for getting under way. Conditions were cold but otherwise benign in the marina. I had learned that the conditions in that marina don’t tell you much. I thought back to another occasion when the water inside the huge breakwater that defines the port of Thunder Bay was quiet but the bay itself was rough and windy. I tried to remember where we were going at that time . . . we must have been going to the Slate Islands, 150 miles to the northeast.
It seemed odd to me to think of the Slates as a destination. We’d gone to so many other places since then that the Slates seemed more like a waypoint on a route to . . . to where? Prince Arthur’s Landing Marina I supposed, but here we were, leaving again, this time for Superior, Wisconsin, so maybe the Slates were truly a waypoint on a route to the twin ports of Duluth/Superior. That would close the circle of our 2007 season, returning our beloved Mystic to the hard at Barker’s Island Marina, whence she’d come in the spring.
But did that circle make a route? It is easy to look backward if you keep a log, but there is nothing in the log that lets you look forward. Where will we go next? As I write this, we are weatherbound in a small bay well short of yesterday’s objective on the route to Barker’s Island Marina. We’d had a plan with at least two variations, but rough weather caused us not to follow either of them.
As I look back on the 65 years of my life, it has been like that. I’ve had goals, plans, objectives, and destinations. Some I’ve reached and some I’ve abandoned as not possible, practical, or even desirable. Rough weather, or life’s equivalent of rough weather with all of its uncertainties, played a part in these routes to . . . to where? To the place where I am now I suppose, here in Jarvis Bay, north of the border between Canada and the United States, waiting for the wind and seas to go down.
The uncertainties are the things that prevent me from writing the whole log at one sitting and then just closing the book; not that I would want to do that. Maybe it is just as well that it’s not even possible.
By the time I had the shorepower cord coiled and stowed, the docklines singled up, and the engine mumbling in the bilge, I sort of understood the thing: I can make plans, some of which I’ll follow, and I can set waypoints along the route, but I’m sure now that I don’t really know where I’m going. Not really. Perhaps that is why a life must be lived, not just speculated about.
Karen freed the last dockline from the cleat and we jumped aboard. I shifted into reverse and bade the little red beast in the bilge mumble louder and faster. As Mystic backed out of her slip, I had a clearer picture in my mind of where we might be going . . . or not . . . and why I could never be sure.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
