The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

Norwine once owned a twenty-nine-foot sailboat, back in his native Texas. After he sold it, he said, he joined a sailing club in Galveston Bay and soon noticed an interesting phenomenon: He was sailing just as much, but his expenses had plummeted. When he’d collect a group of friends to go sailing, they’d see him writing a check for the charter and feel guilty and chip in. That had never happened when he’d owned the boat. After that, wherever he moved, he’d join a sailing club. Before long it occurred to him that this was a pretty sharp business model. He moved to Seattle and bought Windworks in 1992.

  “Here’s why it works, both for us and for the members,” he explained. “If you charter a boat on the most expensive weekend day—say, a Saturday in August—and then multiply that cost by seventy, that’s what it would actually cost you to own that boat for a year. If we have a member who’s chartering seventy days a year, I’ll call him and tell him it’s time to buy a boat. But in fourteen years of business I’ve never made that call—because nobody’s sailing seventy days a year. The national average, even for people who own their boats, is about fifteen days.”

  I asked why. “Say you’ve got two weeks’ vacation. You’ve still got to use one of those weeks to visit the family in Kansas. On weekends you still have to mow the lawn, the kids have soccer games. If you plan to take your friends sailing on Sunday, you’ve got to go down to the marina and spend Saturday cleaning the bird poop off the deck. Real life keeps intruding on sailing.”

  We signed up for Windworks’ Basic Keelboat course and paid the club initiation fee, which together drained us of $1,000. It seemed spendy, but what number surrounding boats isn’t? When I had projected the cost of building my simple sailing dinghy, I figured I could build her for $1,500. By this point I’d spent $3,138 and I was less than half done.

  Basic Keelboat began in Windworks’ second-story classroom overlooking Shilshole Bay Marina, a pincushion forest of white masts encroaching on Puget Sound. More than 1,400 boats live here, most of them sailboats. On this April Fools’ Saturday, many more owners appeared to be working on their boats—cleaning, varnishing, performing assorted surgeries—than actually preparing to sail. It was an illustrative backdrop for our class. As we got underway with introductions, one of the fifteen students reported in as a “recovering motor boater.” Our instructor, Jim Thomson, laughed agreeably and said that last weekend he had skippered a small group from Shilshole Bay to Port Townsend and back on a twin-engine motor cruiser, a round-trip of ninety miles. “I warned them the fuel bill was going to be a little stiff, but they were still surprised when we filled up at the end of the trip,” he said. “It was $350.”

  Over the next three hours, Thomson introduced us to the basic physics of sailing and the mechanics of the boats. He was genial and patient, with silvering temples and eyes the color of sea on a bright spring day. He looked like a sailor, only there wasn’t a beard or a hint of crustiness about him. Among Windworks’ several instructors, we learned he’s the one most likely to concoct a midnight emergency on board, like an open seacock valve that floods the bilge with water, to see how well the student sailors would respond. That would come several courses later, not in this one, I thought with relief.

  I found that I easily grasped the physics of sailing, how wind flowing across a sail makes it act as a vertical wing, pulling the boat forward through the water. But I couldn’t seem to get the hang of even the simplest knot. It’s another dimension of that spatially challenged disability that caused me to build the pulley system in my garage three times and still not get it quite right. It’s a good thing I’m not a choreographer for the Flying Wallendas.

  Afternoon brought our first on-the-water session, and it seemed alarmingly windy. By the time we groped through the painstaking checklist and motored out of the marina with the Catalina 25’s eight-horse Yamaha outboard, the wind was blowing out of the south at a steady 20 knots and Puget Sound was frosted with whitecaps. We had different instructors for this round. Mine seemed no less patient than Thomson but less organized in his teaching. Patty was on another boat. Many schools think it’s a good idea to split up couples during lessons; it’s a bicker contraceptive. My instructor said we should reef the mainsail at the outset rather than hoist it to its full height. “Reefing” means bunching the bottom foot or two of sail around the boom to reduce the sail area so the boat remains manageable in a strong wind. “The rule of thumb is, if you’re thinking about reefing, you should be reefing,” the instructor said, which struck me as a perfect lodestone of advice: memorable and unambiguous. The problem was that the wind was already too strong for any of us ham-handed students to undertake the reefing procedure, so the instructor did it himself. I watched intently but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to repeat it on my own. There seemed to be a lot of arcane steps with lines and hardware whose functions I was unsure of—pull this, hook that, tighten these.

  The instructor kept me at the tiller through most of the lesson. Since I wasn’t quite a beginner, I didn’t have any trouble steering the boat. The three other students aboard were having difficulty making the counterintuitive leap that to turn the boat right, you have to swivel the tiller left. The instructor saw that I was able to keep the boat out of trouble when the wind was behind us—I had a healthy fear of letting the wind snatch the sail on its trailing edge and whip the boom around in an accidental jibe. That’s dangerous because if a human body happens to be within the boom’s radius, it’ll crack a rib or a skull. The other students needed the practice, though, and they weren’t getting enough. The instructor was taking the path of least resistance, which I recognized from my own experience in teaching: call on the student who already knows the answer, because it saves you the effort of guiding someone who’s stumbling. But it’s not the most effective teaching.

  On days like this, Puget Sound essentially functions as a geographic wind tunnel, squeezing and accelerating the Pacific breeze between the two mountain ranges straddling it, the Cascades and Olympics. By mid-afternoon the wind was gusting up to 25 knots, clawing and tearing at the sails while the waves heaved and kicked the hull around. It also began to rain. It occurred to me that there may be no human endeavor in which nature can assault a person in more ways at once than sailing. The next morning my body felt like I’d spent the day in a wine press. My arms, shoulders, legs, back, and neck ached fiercely, and a purple bruise the size of a cell phone decorated my thigh where I’d been bracing to hold the tiller against the weather. I felt beaten up and flummoxed. How could sailing be so much work? And why was I doing it, since its main products so far appeared to be anxiety and fatigue? I wondered if I was in love with the idea of sailing rather than the reality, and what I was going to do about it.

  I had one thing going for me as a beginning sailor: several thousand miles under my butt in a sea kayak. Although there aren’t any boat-handling skills that obviously transfer from kayak to sailboat, I’d at least learned to read the water and a marine chart, and I knew the basics of navigation. If a Washington State ferry in my vicinity were to bellow five times, I would know precisely what the signal means: its skipper thinks my dinky boat is in his way, and he’s not happy about it.

  But I suspected I had a bigger liability stacked against me: an innate physical ineptitude that has dogged me all my life. I’m a distinctly ungifted athlete—short, slow, clumsy, and cursed with tangled brain wiring when it comes to memorizing any sequence of motions. When I was a kid I tried baseball and basketball with humiliating results. I played table tennis and worked hard at it for more than ten years, and by the time I got to college I was actually pretty good. One semester a student from India who lived in my dorm showed some interest in the game, so I taught him what I knew. A couple of months later I entered the all-college tournament and by fate drew him as my first-round opponent. He slaughtered me. Decades later, around the time I was starting to feel reasonably competent in a kayak, I took a friend out on Lake Washington to give him a first lesson. After three hours he could handle the boat as
well as I’d been able to after three years.

  There’s a perfect word for this: klutz, which comes from the Yiddish for “wooden block.” You mostly hear people using it in self-deprecation, painting themselves as singularly inept. Yet, the objective evidence is that most of us are klutzes at most endeavors, and we sail through life feeling inferior because we’re always comparing ourselves to some exalted standard. George Plimpton, who fashioned a unique journalistic career out of trying things like bullfighting and NFL quarterbacking, wrote in his final book, The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair:Everyone must wonder wistfully if there isn’t something other than what they actually practice in their lives (playing in a yacht-club tennis tournament) at which they would be incredibly adept if they could only find out what it was—that a paintbrush worked across a canvas for the first time would indicate an amazing talent.... If an idiot savant could sit down at a piano and suddenly bat out a Chopin étude, wasn’t the same sort of potential locked up somewhere in all of us?

  Actually, no. The one potential locked up inside all of us, I think, is the capacity to accept our limitations and live contentedly with them. But most of us never get there because our culture conditions us to want to excel, to win.

  On two more successive Saturdays Patty and I completed the Windworks course, and after our final lesson the genial Thomson ushered us into an empty classroom and administered the “Basic Keelboat” final exam, a multiple-choice written test that took about an hour. There were sections on seamanship, rules of marine right-of-way, and diagram questions in which we had to predict the movements of a boat given certain combinations of wind, sail, and rudder. Those were the hardest for me because they required that conceptual shift between two and three dimensions. There was also a section on naming the parts of the boat, and in that subdivision I was fully competent: an idiot savant in his element, finally.

  To our surprise, Patty and I both scored in the nineties, which meant we were now certified to sail Windworks’ Catalina 25s without an instructor aboard. Without anyone aboard who might know what the hell he’s doing.

  The marine weather forecast was pretty decent: sunny, low eighties, north wind 10 to 15 knots. Patty seemed readier than I was; she was preparing for us to stay out on Puget Sound all day. I was worrying that the unseasonable May warmth would kick up an onshore breeze in the afternoon, as the sun heated land more than water. I was still thinking like a kayaker: don’t want no stinkin’ wind. The recollection of that 25-knot lesson remained too fresh. The boat was a bear that day, and we didn’t feel even remotely qualified to wrestle that much wind without expert help.

  I’d proposed an article on our first “solo” to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer , so they were assigning a staff photographer to join us. I had asked the photo editor to designate someone who wasn’t a sailor himself so we wouldn’t feel additional pressure from a knowledgeable critic laughing himself silly at our beginners’ bungling. As we arrived at Windworks’ charter office I was already second-guessing that tack: might have been smarter to ask for someone who could help out, even at the risk of additional humiliation.

  The photographer turned out to be Dan DeLong, who’d had experience with hazardous assignments—he’d gone to Iraq twice to shoot for the P-I. But he’s no sailor, he assured us. He told us he once got sick on an assignment involving a shrimp boat back East.

  Windworks’ relentlessly cheerful office manager, Laura Barry, signed us out on one of the twenty-five-foot Catalinas. It was Serenity, the same boat that had pitched and lurched me through that first lesson. Serene like Snorto the Bull.

  We heaved our gear aboard and begin working the checklist. We had to review everything from the anchor (is it tied to something on the boat?) to the outboard (will it start?). This ate forty-five minutes, during which the wind seemed to rise ominously. I asked David White, Windworks’ dockmeister, to help us reef the mainsail in advance. He deftly did it himself while Patty and I fumbled at the confusion of lines snaking about the sail, mast, and boom, pretending to help. We still didn’t learn how to do it.

  With Patty at the bow helping fend us away from neighboring boats, I backed Serenity out of her slip—and began pinballing back and forth in the fairway as I tried to get the boat pointed out of the marina. I was trying to move slowly enough that the three-ton sloop wouldn’t slam into another boat, but at such a meager speed the rudder didn’t have much bite in the water and the wind kept shoving the bow in directions we didn’t want to go. White shouted from the dock that I should swivel the outboard to help steer. “I know, I’m trying; it’s stuck!” I yelled back. I was fairly sure there was an adjustment somewhere but I was too busy dodging collisions to look for it. I had a sudden and vivid flashback to age fourteen, trying to parallel park for the first time in a manual-shift car: lurch/stall/lurch/vrrrooom. Happily, it was a Monday and there weren’t many spectators. There was, however, Dan DeLong, who had been lying belly-down on the cabin roof, firing his Canon at my face, documenting world-class buffoonery.

  We finally burbled out of the marina and hoisted the sails. The reefed main looked awful; two feet of sail were hanging under the boom like a beer gut spilling over a belt. We thought we should do something about it but didn’t know what. The wind was strong enough, though, that the lousy sail wasn’t slowing us down. We were sailing!

  That Zen-like oneness with nature, that feeling of being in tune with not only the physics but even the spirit of the wind and water, did not descend upon us. Seawater did, as waves began to slap over the deck. Patty took the helm while I climbed onto the cabin roof to try to double-reef the sail. Serenity was pitching around so vigorously and the sail flapping so fiercely that I was afraid of getting bucked off the boat—and we’d already decided not to practice our dummy man-overboard drills because the water was too rough. I decided the freakin’ sail could fend for itself. When I took the helm again, Patty went down into the cabin for a bottle of water. A wave broadsiding our windward beam threw her into the galley so hard I thought she had broken a bone. But she got up, gamely fending off tears, and came back out to the cockpit.

  “I think I’ve got plenty of good pictures already,” DeLong suddenly announced. “I’d kind of appreciate it if you could take me back to the marina.” I looked at him with dismay, apparently, registering on my face—this meant we’d have to douse the sails and dock the boat an extra time. “Actually, I’m feeling kind of sick,” he confessed. “Looking through the lens with all this motion—”

  We returned DeLong to the least congested dock in the marina, then considered our next move. I wanted to abort the afternoon. The wind was way beyond my comfort zone. I was tired, confused, worried. Fifteen years ago in Arizona Patty and I had a pivotal moment like this on a volcanic neck 1,500 feet above the desert floor. It had started out as a casual day hike, but near the end the trail had turned into a near-vertical whiteknuckle ascent. Fifty feet from the summit I asked Patty if she was having fun. I was being facetious, but she replied “No!” so emphatically that I just decided to tell the truth myself. “Me neither,” I said. “Let’s go home.” Which we did. And on reflection a few days later we realized what a reward it was to have a relationship where neither of us feels any need to posture, to keep going just to save face. I wouldn’t trade that for the summit of Everest.

  But these circumstances were different. It was painfully obvious that we needed the sailing practice, and waiting for ideal conditions—a 10-knot wind, less than half of what we were now facing—confounds the essential spirit of sailing, which is to work with whatever Nature chooses to provide, within reason. And we weren’t actually in danger. It wasn’t a storm, and a heavy keelboat like this doesn’t capsize in a 25-knot wind with moderate inland waves no matter how ineptly it’s sailed. We were just going to look bad and get ourselves whipped.

  For the next three hours we thrashed across Puget Sound, trying to apply at least some of what we’d learned and gain a few shreds of confidence. We tacked and jibed, changing direction
s through the wind, with no mishaps. Then we tried heavingto—stopping the boat dead by forcing sails and rudder to work at cross-purposes. Again and again, we failed preposterously. Serenity determinedly plowed in circles, like a cat orbiting the spot where it’s considering a nap.

  By mid-afternoon we were fried. We doused the sails and began motoring back to the marina. When we were about a quarter-mile out, the boat took an odd lurch that seemed unrelated to the waves slurping at our bow, and the propeller sounded as though it had taken a gulp of air instead of water. I gave some throttle. Serenity didn’t seem to move.

  For some reason, the obvious explanation didn’t register until Patty pointed it out. “I think we’ve run aground,” she said.

  We had indeed. I peered over the transom and could study the geography of the bottom, very close at hand. We were a quarter-mile offshore but it was near low tide, and Serenity sported a five-foot draft. Once again, I’d been thinking kayak, where three inches is all we need.

  Running aground hadn’t been covered in the Basic Keelboat course, so we figured we’d better ask for advice. Patty descended into the cabin to hail Windworks on the radio. For some reason, nobody answered. She tried calling on her cell phone. No answer. A video involving tugboats, derisive laughter, and checkwriting started to coalesce in my head, and I was suddenly very happy Dan DeLong had gotten sick and was enjoying a dry-land assignment somewhere far away.

  When we hit bottom it had felt like soft mud, not rocks, so I figured there hadn’t been any damage to the boat. If the keel had plowed a furrow, we could maybe back it out the same way. I waited for a wave to lift us a bit, then revved the motor in reverse. No movement. I kept trying. On the third try the boat finally grabbed enough water and began to move. We backed out to safety, then motored timidly to the marina.