April Cushing is the Adult and Information Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column published in the October 23, 2014 issue of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.
I spent a week in the winter of 2012
cruising the BVIs on a friend’s
54-foot yawl—which, I soon learned, is your basic sailboat with two masts.
Sunny skies, warm trade winds, rum drinks sprouting paper parasols; it was
paradise.
Don’t misunderstand--I enjoy watching
the flotsam and jetsam float by as much as the next non-sailor. The issue wasn’t the Caribbean, it was the
captain—and his wife who thought she
should be captain. Like the breeze, the bickering was constant, and we couldn’t
exactly walk away. As my sailing companion summed it up, those eight days felt
like eight minutes…under water.
I figured that was it for my sailing
career. But this past summer we were invited back, to crew in a New York Yacht
Club race from Newport to Nantucket. It all sounded very chi chi, but the fact
remained I still had no clue how to sail, slow or fast. I was assured I could just sit back and soak in the
sights. The captain had jettisoned his former first-mate in favor of the ribald
Roberta, a bona fide boat captain herself from the Louisiana bayou. Plus, my
partner was extremely persuasive. I was, somewhat reluctantly, on board.
Knowing my aft from my lee bow, so to
speak, might help maximize the maritime experience—and make me just a bit less
of a landlubber. What better place to bone up on boating basics than the
library? A couple of books on display in the Reference area caught my eye.
Steve Sleight’s
“Sailing Essentials: All You Need to Know When You’re
at Sea” made me
smile, wondering if the double entendre in the subtitle was deliberate. I
zeroed in on “Cooking on Board” with its color photos of the miniature kitchen--er,
galley--one place I might be marginally useful yet safely out of the way.
The 797.124 section of the stacks
contains more nautical know-how than I could possibly digest. Drawn to “Sailing
for Dummies,” “The Complete Idiot’s
Guide to Sailing,” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Boating and Sailing,” I
faced some tough choices. The last one clinched it with headings like “Let’s Do
Launch” and “Where the Buoys Are.”
The stack of sailing tomes on my bedside
table grew, along with my anxiety. My
head was, in a word, swimming.
The cruise had been underway for two
days when I joined the crew in Dartmouth. It had been raining non-stop. Armed
with slicker, sweats, warm socks,
and the few sailing terms I’d managed to memorize, such as “tack,” “jibe,” “hove
to,” and my personal favorite, “ready about…hard alee,” I climbed aboard. After
stowing my duffle in the cozy quarter berth I returned topside, ready to observe
my first race.
I was in for a surprise. It seems the captain
got his signals crossed because I was immediately assigned a task that actually
resembled sailing: trimming the mizzen. That, of course, would be the smaller
mast, in the stern. I glanced back at the receding harbor but it was too late
to bail. Recalling one of the titles from Patrick O’Brian’s popular “Master and Commander” series,
“Blue at the Mizzen,” I could totally relate.
As we navigated from Buzzard’s Bay past
Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, the sun finally came out. After
ramming a submerged boulder that miraculously didn’t sink us, we started to get
our sea legs and get more comfortable with each other. What we didn’t do much
of was race. We were, as they say, becalmed, with barely a gust to disturb the sails.
When the final race was officially aborted, the entire fleet had to “fire up
the iron mainsail” to get back into port. I was thus relieved of my watch, and
relieved I was. My clumsiness cranking the winch had earned me an earful or two
from the captain, but before I completely embarrassed myself by breaking down, my
kind crewmembers came to the rescue.
If you like stories of adventure on
the high seas there are a few I can personally recommend. And a couple of
classics, namely “Moby-Dick” and “Two Years Before the Mast,” that I cannot. At
least not yet. I veered way off course while skimming through “Three Ways to
Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat”--Chris Stewart’s hilarious tale of the
summer he captained a sailboat in the Greek Islands with about as much sailing
savvy as this writer. On a scarier note, “Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World’s
Most Dangerous Waters,” by Derek Lundy, is the hair-raising account of the
fourteen men and two women who endured hurricane-force winds, six-story waves,
and icebergs in a race to circumnavigate the globe. And for the practical
sailor who prefers non-print media, may I suggest the DVD “100 Sailing Mistakes
& How to Avoid Them.” I know a surefire way to accomplish that, by steering
clear of anything that floats, but I might be missing the boat on that one.
