Over the Bounding Main

After reading The Guy Who Writes This' blog about sailing today on Astoria Rust I had an extreme nostalgia attack about the summers of my mis-spent youth.

My parents were sailors. I mean, they were insane, obsessed, and lived and died for sailing. Personally, I never saw the joy in zig-zagging to get somewhere, much less being at the mercy of winds and tides, when you could sensibly putt-putt somewhere in a straight line.

However, despite my objections, sailing instructions began at the age of 7 in a small boat with a squared-off bow. It was bigger than a dory at 12 feet, but a hell of a lot heavier and less useful. The sails were canvas, and a pain in the ass. After every sail, they had to be hauled out of the boat and onto the lawn, hosed off, and left to dry in the sun.

I spent ruthless, and seeming endless, hours learning to trim the one sail to the wind, raise and lower the centerboard as needed, tack, learn the currents and tides, and land smoothly at the dock with a "ready about" instead of crashing head-on into said dock.

Then there were the hours spent in the water, in my bathing suit, scrubbing seaweed and barnacles off the bottom of the boat. Learning to tie bowlines (no, I never did get it right), and other knots (no, I don't remember them now).

If friends invited me over, and they happened to live on an island, I had to figure out how the hell to get there even if the wind and tide were against me. Sometimes it meant rowing. And then, how the hell to get home, although sometimes I could get a tow, or was lucky enough to be able to sail down wind right home.

I also spent many hours crewing on sailboats in the Sunday morning races (at my parents' insistence), always as mate to some friend's brother, who was always some adolescent hyper-testosteroned Captain Bligh-in-the-making who knew less about sailing than I did.

I will add, with more than a dash of unseemly malice, that I was delighted one Sunday morning when I was not forced to crew (thereby forestalling a mutiny) because the mini-Bligh of the week had poured an entire cup of boiling coffee on his nether regions.

The most pleasant times I had sailing were with a couple who had absolutely no idea how to sail, and who didn't care in the least. They had an old wooden Lightening sailboat, and they would pack up their 3 kids, and me (the babysitter), and we would go out for a sailing picnic. There would be paper-thin sliced Genoa salami, crispy crusty French bread, Brie and Camembert cheese (ripened to perfection), red wine for us, and juice for the kids.

Winters were spent stripping the boat, sanding, caulking, repainting the boat and its duck-boards, and varnishing, varnishing , varnishing while the boat stood on saw-horses in the basement. Rolling it back out in the spring, with the help of several neighbors, getting it into the water at a good high tide, stepping the heavy wooden mast - all the spring rituals.

I haven't sailed for more than 30 years, although I sometimes dream about it. My parents sailed until they just couldn't any more. My mother quit in her mid-70s when it was too hard to navigate the rocks on the dock to get to the boat. My father quit in his mid-80s when he got lost one day sailing behind the house, and got so befouled he wound up in the drink, utterly confused. Some islanders rescued him, brought him home, and towed the boat back to our dock.

The boat was put up that winter, pushed on rollers up to the cubby-hole under the house, and was never put in the water again.