Learning to Sail

(Originally published in 2012)

Back in 1993, after our third trip to the Caribbean, our second camping trip in Tortola where we once again went on a charter trip with Captain Paul aboard the Island Girl, his 44 foot CSY cutter, Annie and I came home with a mission. It was time to get a sailboat. It wasn’t an obsession but it had at this point certainly evolved into some sort of fixation. Our only sailing experience: my one brief little out-and-back trip on a Hobie cat on a beach in Grenada when we were on our cruise three years before, and our two little six-hour daysails with Captain Paul during our Tortola trips. But we came home ready to go for it.

Since our Caribbean vacation was always in March, we had to deal with a reality check when we got home each year. This year was no different. Winter keeps its grip on Michigan for a lot longer than in states to the south. The peninsulas of Michigan are surrounded by water that is supercooled over the long cold northern winter and like a gigantic air conditioner that cooling effect lingers well into the spring. Any thoughts of sailing in Michigan had to wait a few weeks until the weather warmed. Nonetheless, since the weather was still cold and we didn’t yet have a boat, AND we really didn’t know how to sail anyway, we decided to pursue things in some semblance of a logical order. We looked into the possibility of taking sailing lessons.

When we started investigating the prospects of some sort of actual sailing instruction we were surprised to find that Delta College, a local community college near Bay City, offered introductory sailing classes. We contacted them and signed up and, low and behold, we were on our way! Now we could actually start to learn a little about how to sail. The classes were held in Bay City two nights a week for eight or ten weeks, and were taught by a licensed captain, and we were pleased to find out at the first class that it was a popular offering. There were at least a dozen of us in the class. Each class was divided into two sessions, an hour or so of classroom teaching followed by another hour or two out on the water in the mouth of the Saginaw River in nice, sleek little racing style boats with roomy cockpits, probably J-boats of some sort – two of them, so we could challenge one another. We sucked up the information like sponges sucking up water. Annie and I split up in the classes so that we were never in the same boat. That way we were not distracting each other. Classes did not start until May or June, when the weather was reasonably warm, but we were happy simply to be finally navigating our way along toward our goal.

Captain Larry Maples did a great job teaching us the terminology – bow, stern, port, starboard, windward, leeward, running versus standing rigging, different types of cleats, winches, sails and how to balance a boat, the points of sail and the points of the compass, and more. He did a great job of instilling the fundamentals of sailing and then took us out on the boats and taught us to apply what we had learned in the classroom. All great fun, and a great foundation for my continued nautical education on up to and including, several years later, my USCG masters license.  Each session we went out on the river for the last half of class and sailed our little sailboats up and down the river, half the class in each of two boats, learning to come about (“coming about!”) and to jibe (“jibe ho!”), and learning to prepare for the swinging across of the boom, learning to point into the breeze and raise sails, and a whole slew of other details that I now take for granted but were all new and exciting at the time.

About two weeks prior to the end of the class they were holding a boat show in Detroit at Metro Beach and Annie and I decided to drive down on Sunday morning and check out what was available in the way of used small sailboats. The drive from our house was about a hundred miles so Annie took the Sunday paper along and poked around in the classifieds on the trip down. At one point she was reading a sailboat for sale ad to me and as she read off the location I noted that, shiver me timbers, a freeway sign was saying that very exit was one mile ahead. Naturally we took that as a sign more significant than the road type. She called the owner and got directions, and a matter of an hour or two later we were headed home, proud owners of a 24 foot Laguna Windrose sloop, complete with outboard motor, trailer, and full suit of sales. We never did make it to the boat show.

We did okay on this one. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment purchases that are a characteristic quirk shared by both Annie and myself. When the mood strikes, boom! That’s it. This Windrose was quite a nice little boat with a cast iron swing keel, an enclosable pop-top, and a 9 horse Johnson outboard hanging on a drop-down bracket on the transom. The rudder was transom hung with a very nice wooden tiller attached. It had a huge cockpit and came with a mainsail, a Genoa, a standard cut jib, and even a spinnaker. The gentleman who sold us the boat was very British which made this boat seem even more special. It had a nice size v-berth, and a nice little galley space amidship with a sink and a shelf for a portable gas stove. Inside it reminded me a lot of the pop-up camper I pulled all over the country out west on vacation with my parents when as a kid I was learning to drive. When we got it home we parked it in the driveway and immediately called up our friends Pat and Ralph and invited them over to see our new toy. We had been supposed to be playing golf with Pat and Ralph but our newfound passion for sailing, sailing classes, and boat hunting had bumped them out of the picture (and not for the last time, but they were and still are the best kind of friends who are resilient and understanding of their friends’ foibles). We started talking about naming the new boat as we all sat in the cockpit with our glasses of wine, ruminating over the possibilities. Pat came up with the new unofficial favorite name (We never did get around to actually naming that boat.) – Notayachtyet– because even then we all knew it was just a stepping-stone. It still remains one of my favorite boat names.

We bought that little sailboat with the intention of taking it with us down to Florida. After all, it came with a trailer and was made to be towed. With only two weeks left in our sailing class we were now so educated in the art of sailing that salt was dripping from our sea legs. We were ready to cast off and ghost away silently into the sunset. All we needed was to practice and we’d be ready to head out.

So we spent the spring and the summer practicing every chance we got. We drove the 50 miles up to Saginaw Bay sometimes two or three times in a week to go for a sail. We continued our learning curve. One of my most memorable lessons from that period was when I learned not to leave a deck hatch open when you are walking around on deck. We had actually been taught that one in class but it didn’t really hit home until — it actually hit home – looking up the mast while stepping back, one leg went down the hatch, so to speak. I never did that again. One afternoon with our six foot keel dangling beneath the boat we bounced across a couple of muddy/sandy shoals out on the bay, Annie screaming while I was in a panic, and our daughter Katie was wondering what part of all this was supposed to be fun. And then there was the day we saw a squall approaching and every boat in the Bay was heading in to shelter, but I felt we were finally ready for some real wind. We got blown down, literally, almost flat on the water. I thought all I had to do was point into the blow and all would be fine. Trying to get the sail down, I forgot the ties, ripped the belt from my pants and used it to cinch the sail. When all was said and done and the sun shone once again, my beautiful mahogany rudder had split right down the middle and we were out of action for a week or so while I had my first lesson in fiberglass epoxy repair. Gougeon Brothers factory, makers of West System epoxy, just happened to be located right across the river from our boat slip and their product did a fine job of repairing and reinforcing our broken rudder. I’ve been a huge West System fan through the years since then for lots of jobs nautical and lubberly.

By the end of the summer we were beginning to feel a little more comfortable with the boat. We had learned to launch the her and raise and lower the mast and we had learned to enter and leave our slip with virtually no destruction of any part of the boat or the dock. When the end of the season arrived it was time to load the boat onto the trailer and haul it home. Everything went well. With our little S-10 Blazer, I backed the trailer down the ramp at Brennan Marine in Bay City. We loaded the boat without much of an issue and dropped the mast and drove home. All the way home I was white knuckling it. Not only in the rear view mirror but even standing outside and looking at it, the boat seemed to dwarf the car. When I was driving I felt like the boat was pushing the car down the road, instead of my towing it. I could see the writing on the wall. I either needed to shell out another twenty or thirty thousand dollars to get a proper towing vehicle, or the Florida Keys were going to fast fade away into a foggy dream. We made it home and I parked Notayachtyet in the yard. The season was nearly over, but a change was in the air.