A logbook by lamplight and a flood of memories
Issue 112: Jan/Feb 2017
I’m an old man with an old boat moored not far from my old house. My desire for new things has waned into a dying moon sliver with the passing of this 70th winter and my 52 years spent on, around, and sometimes in the salt waters of the world. I say to my wife, “. . . going down to get some heat in her,” and she knows I’ll be gone awhile.
Most things I do aboard are menial. I start the engine, check the batteries, and percolate some coffee. I rub my special blend of teak oil and pine tar here and there to shine things up a bit and renew Avanti’s special boat smell. I check the bilge water with a drop on the tongue to see whether it’s rain or salt water. After taking care to get my mug-o’-Joe just right, I sit down and break out a palm and needle to put whippings on an old halyard cleaned new again in the washing machine.
A small rain begins when the shadows of the Olympic Mountains swallow the dim winter day. I light Avanti’s fireplace and lamps, refresh my coffee, then open the ship’s log. I put in the date, the weather, and write “done” at the end of “replace main halyard” on the work list. There’s something about writing the ship’s log by lamplight that floods the mind with long-gone memories.
I mused about being a sailor long before I saw my first boat. Born a Midwesterner who would never see the ocean as a boy, as a barefoot lad I still saw every tree climbed as a mast, every swing a ship. In school, I inspected globes pole-to-pole and searched geography books for maps.
Hindsight makes it easy to see now how all my voyages really began the first time I heard the word “ocean.” I was young, very young. My mother, the teacher ever ready to open doors of the world to children, put a seashell to my ear and said, “Listen, that’s the sound of the ocean.”
Old boats spark good memories and in them I find my very oldest. It is of my mother taking me from bed and wrapping me in a blanket, saying, “We’ve got to go, there’s a cyclone coming.” And went we did, quickly, I remember, to the communal storm cellar in the schoolyard of the little Oklahoma town where she taught eight grades in one room for $75 a month. It was 1949-ish and it was there I saw my first kerosene lantern, watched its flame, smelled its fumes, and waited out my first storm, the first in a long, long line of storms.
Also interspersed among these memories is one of the summer night when my oldest brother pointed skyward and said, “Look! The Dippers.” I did look and my small paradigm rumbled, shook, then shifted, never to shrink again. I came to know those stars by their names: Polaris, Kochab, Dubhe, and more. I learned the sextant, chronometer, compass, and spherical trigonometry. I know how to fix my position on any ocean of the world.
The rain turns harder as the darkness deepens. I put down the pen to search for leaks around the ports and in this locker and that. As expected, I find some, leaks being a way of life for old boats and old men, but the only thing to do now is add them to the work list. One job done, two more to do.
Outside, nightfall chills the air. Inside, the fireplace warms the cabin. I think about all the ships and all the boats. I think about the seafarers I’ve met and anchorages I’ve found. I think about the money too . . . all the money I’ve spent on moorages, fuel, boatyards, and busted gear. And in a moment of delicious solitude, I come to a conclusion: I’d rather have had a boat than money. I’d rather have had this boat and the memories of all the boats I’ve owned than all the money I’ve ever earned. Money means so little now compared to the boats that brought my childhood dreams true.
Tommy Cook sailed professionally and for pleasure for 50 years. He has owned eight sailboats from an AMF Mini-Fish to a Corsair F-31UC. Over the course of a 24-year career in the U.S. Coast Guard and a 26-year career as a merchant marine captain of ocean vessels to 1,600 tons, he has sailed every ocean of the world. In all those thousands of sea miles, no adventure was greater than his ongoing quest to sail the Northwest Passage singlehanded. He’s crossed enough oceans to know that coastal cruising is the most fun.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
