Second Wind: A Nantucket Sailor's Odyssey

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Dancing with Seals

  BY THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY almost all traces of the previous week’s flooding were gone from the town waterfront. A mild southwesterly breeze and blue skies made it the perfect day for a December sail. It also made it a perfect day to go seal watching.

  Every fall, harbor seals from the north come to Nantucket for the winter. Sometimes you can see them lying on the beaches in the sun, but their favorite hangout is the jetties at the harbor mouth. I’d seen the seals plenty of times from the deck of the ferry. Now I wanted to find out just how close I could get in my Sunfish. Besides, after the defeat of Pondman in Polpis and my funerary voyage to Coskata, I didn’t need any more lonely sails. But would the seals be willing to socialize?

  It began, at least, in a crowd. Down at Children’s Beach, where the launch ramp is one of the few places that offers public access to the waterfront, scallopers who had taken their boats out for the storm were putting them back in. Melissa helped me unload the boat, then agreed to meet me back at the beach in exactly an hour. No more long, unending adventures in solitude for yours truly. From here on in, each sail would be short and sweet.

  Indeed, it felt good to be rushed as I sailed past a flotilla of scallop boats moored just off the ramp. At the Coast Guard station at Brant Point, a couple of guys were working on one of their boats. They looked up and waved.

  At the base of the East Jetty is a gap for boats to cut through on their way toward Great Point. My plan was to sail through the cut to escape the incoming tide and follow the jetty all the way out, then head back through the harbor entrance. I hoped I could make the circuit in under an hour and, of course, see some seals along the way.

  The tide was very low. After grounding on a shoal and having to jump out and drag the boat clear, I sailed through the cut. I’d never been this close to the jetty before. It was huge, a massive wall of boulders that radiated the same sense of man-made might that I had felt when walking the decks of an aircraft carrier. Humans might be puny, but we can sure make an impact; we can create worlds.

  I sailed down this artificial peninsula of barnacled rocks where the waves slopped and slurped as ducks and gulls swam and preened. On a dead run with the boom pointed out toward Great Point, I could sail within a whisker of the jetty in my search for seals. When my rudder popped up on an unanticipated rock, I might have rounded up and crashed if a desperate roll to windward hadn’t kept me on course until I had time to get the rudder back down.

  It was then, after I’d pushed the rudder into position, that the rocks began to move. What I had taken for rocks were actually seals that were almost the same gray-brown color of the jetty and nearly six feet long. First they’d lift their heads and tails into the air and begin to rock like hobbyhorses before rolling their sausage-like bodies off the boulders and into the water on the other side of the jetty. Just ahead of me a small pup panicked, rolled the wrong way, and plopped into the water beside me. As I watched him skitter away, I discovered that a group of seals was following me, about fifteen yards back.

  By the time I reached the end of the East Jetty, where a lone harrier hawk presided over a flock of cormorants drying their wings in the cold December sun, I had left this first group of seals behind. But I had hopes of finding more of them on the West Jetty. The wind was perfect for sailing upwind, just enough so that I could sit out on the deck and even hike out a little bit in a puff. Even though it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was already low in the sky, and the mast cast a shadow across the yellow light filling the sail.

  I sailed to the buoy just off the West Jetty, which I had rounded in very different conditions on my way to Capaum Pond, and maneuvered so that I was heading directly toward the jetty. Suddenly the entire sweep of the jetty came alive with seals, rocking and then rolling into the harbor. This time, however, they remained on my side of the jetty, swimming underneath my boat and then popping up behind me.

  At first I had a difficult time figuring out where they were going to appear next. Finally I realized they were operating as a unit. If I sailed into the midst of them they would inevitably reassemble behind me. In order to stay as close as possible to them, I began sailing in large circles, swooping back toward them after they had dived underneath the boat.

  Once they understood that I didn’t bite, they began lingering longer and longer, extending their heads a few feet above the water, until I was almost on top of them. We all seemed to be thoroughly enjoying ourselves.

  I soon realized that I had only fifteen minutes to get back to Children’s Beach. Reluctantly I tacked up the channel with the tide pushing me along. It was the first time since I’d started my training that I’d had what I considered to be the ideal breeze—light enough to use my body weight to control the heel of the boat but not so light that I was forced to sit in the cockpit. The boat began to feel like an extension of my body, a thing to be manipulated, not driven or hung on to. This was the feeling that had been missing all fall, a sense of the boat as an alive and ethereal being, the rudder and mainsheet parts of an interactive game with the sea and sky. D. H. Lawrence had described it: “Beautifully the sailing ship nodalizes the forces of sea and wind, converting them to her purpose. There is no violation . . . only a winged centrality. It is this perfect equipoise between them and us, which gives us a great part of our life-joy.” Lawrence clearly knew the Zone.

  Sailors have a word to describe the sensitivity required to achieve “this perfect equipoise”; it’s called feel, and to a certain extent either you have it or you don’t. I’ve seen a professional baseball player, a superb athlete with absolutely no feel, become so disoriented during a routine day sail that he slipped and fell out of a boat.

  I’ve seen a fifty-eight-year-old woman with a bad hip step into the same sailboat that gave the baseball player such trouble and be immediately at home. Instead of unnerving her, the unsteadiness of the water and the flukiness of the breeze liberated her from the cruel grasp of dry land and gravity that forced her to walk with a cane. She intuitively understood and was delighted by the way sailing reinvented the playing field. The athlete, on the other hand, wanted no part of it.

  More than anything else, feel is a matter of empathy with wind and water. Whereas most sports deny nature altogether, a sailor cannot escape it. As long as the wind fills the sails, he or she is consorting with a force beyond human control. But feel doesn’t emanate from a higher, spiritual plane. On the contrary, it is primitive, elemental. Feel reaches back into the marrow and the synapses, into the brine of the bloodstream. Everything is reduced to instinct. As I sail, I am a throwback to an earlier evolutionary stage; I am very like a seal.

  On that December afternoon as I sailed around Brant Point, I owed the seals a debt of gratitude. With their help I had begun to feel once again like a sailor.

  PART II

  This Is Only a Test

  There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. . . . That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of a general joke.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  Details

  BEGINNING WITH THE Hundred Year Storm in December and continuing until the end of February, a string of fourteen consecutive three-day nor’easters buffeted the island, so that when the ponds weren’t frozen, the conditions were virtually unsailable. Still, before the Midwinters in March I was able to get in two cursory, cold, and, for the most part, unsatisfactory sails. The first one was on the waters of Hummock, a long and lean pond extending down from Head of Hummock to the south shore of the island. Where Head of Hummock had
been a hamster wheel, Hummock itself had been a flurry of tacks between two converging shores. Then there was Long Pond, a narrow squiggle of brackish water on the western end of the island that served as the boundary between a housing development and the mountainous town dump.

  Perhaps it was just as well that I had only two more chances to sail before the Midwinters. By February I had begun to panic about the equipment I needed if I was going to be competitive in Sarasota. A lot had happened to the class since I had last raced in a regatta. A new, larger sail had been adopted, and other modifications had been legalized to make steering and hiking out easier. New ways of rigging the boat made it much easier to adjust the shape of the sail.

  I was terrified. The Sunfish that I had known and loved was now a different boat. Why did I wait till I was on the verge of my first regatta before I began to update my equipment? In my heart of hearts I had held to a conviction that the changes were fairly superficial. Certainly the new sail would take some getting used to, but a Sunfish should be a Sunfish. By the middle of February I began to realize the price of denial.

  Using a Sunfish rigging and tuning guide that had been recently reprinted in the class newsletter, I assembled the equipment that I would need to prepare the boat I was chartering in Sarasota. Over the next few weeks a green duffel bag dating back to my college days began to fill up with line, blocks, tools, and duct tape. I sent away to the class headquarters in Michigan for some sail numbers and applied my old, tried-and-true number 47036 to a stiff, crackly new sail.

  Besides chartering a boat for the regatta, I also had to find accommodations. One of the regatta organizers found me a free place to sleep on a cruising sailboat kept in a nearby slip. Then there was the plane ticket and the rent-a-car, and suddenly it was 8:00 a.m. on a Thursday in March and I was saying good-bye to Melissa and the kids.

  I wasn’t prepared for the overpowering sense of guilt that swept over me after walking Jennie and Ethan to their bus stop. I’ll never forget their sad, hurt looks as they waved to me through the side window before the old yellow bus lurched into gear and was gone.

  At the airport Melissa could tell I was having second thoughts about the trip. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Why am I doing this?” I blurted.

  “You’re asking me?”

  “I’m going to get my ass kicked. I’m not going to know anybody. It’s going to cost too much—”

  “Forget about the sailing, just enjoy being in Florida. You need a break.”

  I smiled wanly and nodded.

  “And Nat,” she said with a coy, girlish grin that dated back to the early days of our relationship when we developed our own nautical variation of the old Broadway good-luck line, “break a stay.”

  Soon the commuter plane to Boston was giving me a bird’s-eye view of the island and its ponds. There they were: Gibbs, Sesachacha, Coskata, Miacomet, Head of Hummock and Hummock, Long, Capaum, and, of course, the Creeks. I remembered the time I’d seen someone experiencing a similar view of Nantucket’s ponds. I’d just pulled into a parking lot at Sanford Farm overlooking Hummock and Head of Hummock ponds. Walking painfully up a nearby hill was a friend of mine, a local sailor reaching the end of a battle with cancer. His body looked as if it had been crushed, and yet there he stood, gazing out over a wide valley and a necklace of ponds that stretched to the sea. After less than a minute, he turned and started down the hill to his car. At the time I’d hoped the ponds had provided him with a momentary distraction from all the pain and dread. But deep down I knew differently. Instead of seeking relief, he had climbed this hill to say good-bye.

  A Different World

  ON THE PLANE from Boston to Sarasota the in-flight movie was Forever Young. When not watching Mel Gibson turn into an old man, I spent the flight attempting to get a grip on my doubts about Sarasota. If I wasn’t prepared as a sailor, at least I could be ready as a historian, and I pored over a small pile of books and pamphlets sent by my in-laws, who’d recently bought a condominium near there. On a map the area bore a distinct resemblance to Coatue, the peninsula along the outer edge of Nantucket Harbor. Nantucket’s historical heyday ended in the mid-nineteenth century, just as Sarasota’s was beginning.

  A handful of Scots were the first Europeans to make a go of the place, building what some claim to be the country’s first golf course. By 1920 Sarasota was poised to take off, transforming itself almost overnight from a sleepy three-thousand-person fishing town into a hopping resort of more than eight thousand by 1925. Sarasota marketed itself brilliantly to northerners, calling itself the place “where summer spends the winter.” The chamber of commerce even had its own radio station that could be heard as far away as Chicago. As many a northerner bought and sold land that he had never even seen, prices in Sarasota went through the roof.

  I was familiar with the scenario. When we had first moved to Nantucket in 1986, the island was in the grip of just this kind of real estate feeding frenzy. Property values were increasing by 25 percent a year. A person would buy a lot in the morning and sell it by that afternoon and make a 30 percent profit, a process that came to be known as “flipping.” And just as had happened on Nantucket in the late eighties, Sarasota busted as quickly as it had boomed.

  But in the early sixties the cycle began again. Developers moved in, transforming the keys along the edge of Sarasota Bay into a series of beachside resorts. In 1950 fewer than thirty thousand people had lived there; by 1980 there were nearly seven times that many.

  Things certainly looked prosperous as I drove down the long causeway that connects Sarasota to its keys. The roads were clean and newly painted, full of white rental cars. The quality of the light was entirely different from New England’s. There was something dreamy and ethereal about the blue-green waters and the sugar-white sand. The pelicans, egrets, and sandpipers looked more like special effects from Disney than things of this world.

  Halfway down the causeway, I began to notice sailboats—a fleet of Sunfish returning from a practice race. There must have been twenty, maybe thirty boats out there. When I had sailed in my one and only Midwinters in 1979, it had been a most informal and sparsely attended affair. Now, fourteen years later, there were more Sunfish sailing a practice race on Sarasota Bay than had attended the entire 1979 event.

  A light-to-moderate breeze was blowing, and the watery, otherworldly quality of the scene—bobbing boats with white sails gliding over an aquamarine sea—had a devastating effect on me. Those Sunfish out there looked so much more graceful, so much faster than they had in my youth. The regatta hadn’t even started yet, and I already felt like a has-been about to make a landlubberly fool of himself.

  Soon I was bouncing down a sandy path that snaked its way through a ragged field full of bleached-out sailboats. The race headquarters, the Sarasota Sailing Squadron, was a brick bunker amid the palms, so small and nondescript that I initially passed it by. Sunfish, some with their sails still up, were scattered around the lawn and docks. Many were just arriving on car roofs and trailers. It was already late afternoon, and with darkness fast approaching, I needed to devote as much time as possible to preparing my chartered boat for tomorrow. Not far from the clubhouse I found my boat. The hull had been used only once before, at a recent World Championship in Aruba. Since I had brought my old, trusty daggerboard and rudder with me and fittings were already in place for the other modifications I needed to make, most of what I had to do that evening involved attaching my brand-new sail to the spars.

  I was eager for all the help I could get, and a local ace named Jeff Linton took the time to show me how to create a system that made adjusting sail shape a thing of almost fingertip control. Although Jeff couldn’t have been more helpful, I was feeling less like a champion and more like Rip Van Winkle. In the last decade and a half, not only had the Sunfish become more high-tech, the scene around the parking lot had also changed. Vans with logos on them were everywhere with all sorts of
stuff to sell, from hats to tiller extensions to sunblock. Since I was fast discovering that I hadn’t brought everything I needed, it was great to have the equivalent of a marine hardware store at the regatta site. Nonetheless, it was a much more commercial scene than in the old days. As night came on, I retreated into the fluorescent glow of the clubhouse to register and find out where I was going to be sleeping that night.

  Inside, the Sarasota Sailing Squadron was as unpretentious as it was on the outside. The floor was poured concrete. There was a television, a drinking fountain, and a bar and grill where you could buy a beer and a hot dog for a dollar each. This was definitely a sailing club that had its priorities straight.

  I soon met Cindy and Charlie Clifton, two locals who had helped organize the regatta. They immediately impressed me as people I wanted to get to know. Their teenage son was an up-and-coming junior champ, and their daughter was a track star on the verge of college. A warm and welcoming sailing family, they reminded me of my own.

  Although my parents had not been as outgoing, they had created a similar environment for my brother and me once it had become clear that sailing was to be our destiny. At first they simply drove my brother Sam and me to regatta after regatta. Then, soon after I got my driver’s license, they bought two boats of their own, and we were a family of four Sunfish racers, often driving to regattas in convoy, each car trailing two Sunfish behind. It was great to see that this tradition was still alive in the nineties.

  My home away from home turned out to be Spars and Bars, a thirty-foot racing sloop that had been dismasted a while ago and now appeared to function mainly as a floating dormitory for visiting sailors. After reserving one of the bunks with my duffel bag, I spent a pleasant hour reintroducing myself to a dizzying assortment of friends from the old days, then had dinner at a glitzy fern bar nearby. By midnight I was back on Spars and Bars, where I lay wide awake for more than an hour, drinking in the sensations of this semitropical night: the rhythmic beat of halyards against masts, the slurp of wavelets against the hull’s side, and the rustling of palm trees in the wind. It dawned on me that this was going to be the longest I’d been away from home since Jennie’s birth, more than ten years ago. It was about time I’d done something like this, I told myself over and over again until finally I fell asleep.