Century Club: Jeffrey Halpern

As soon as New Years Day was 10 days out, I began intently checking the extended weather reports. Day after day the report stayed virtually identical. I spent that period lusting for a New Years Day sail in the predicted 5 to 10 knot winds of wind on the predicted partly sunny, 50 degree day. Even as late as New Year's Eve Day, the weather still looked promising.

But New Years Day, I woke up with a sore throat and a body that felt like the dog that chased a parked car. Outside, there was not a gap in the clouds, and the air was filled with a mist that was punctuated by an intermittent cold drizzle which quickly soaked through my clothing and chilled me.

My hopes of getting out on the water seemed dashed so I piddled around doing small chores on the boat and around the house, before settling down to watch a movie on cable with my wife Barbara.

As is often case, from the sofa, I kept an errant eye on the creek and noticed that the catamaran that lives at the next dock upstream was trying to beat up the creek. I knew that he never sailed that boat up into the creek, let alone tried bring her into dock her under sail, so I walked to the windows to take a look.

The wind and current were against them. Each pair of their frequent tacks in the narrowing portion of creek set the boat back further than the progress made on each pair of tacks.

I suited up and went down to the dock, and shouted out to them to see if they were okay. Sure enough, as I suspected, a furler line had gone over the side and got wrapped up in the prop so they didn't have an operating engine. Standing there on the dock, watching their backwards progress, it looked pretty unlikely that they would make it into the slip under sail.

At their request, I un-winterized Synergy's engine and motored out to retrieve them. By the time I reached them, they were further back down the creek. A failed tack left them stuck with one bow on either side of a piling of a dock on the opposite side of the creek.

Pulling them out, getting them turned around, with sails down, didn't take long. Getting them lined up with enough speed to make a dead stick landing worked the first pass. I was able to spin Synergy out of the way without colliding with the catamaran, her dock, or my dock next door. The crew of the cat were able to grab a dock line and walk her into the slip. Before I knew it, I was back in my living room in dry clothing and watching the end of the movie.

So while I didn't get to make my longed for New Year's Day daysail, I at least had a little time on the water....

Back in the 1980’s, my mother and stepfather had a business building and importing power boats from Taiwan. I would help out when they had a boat in the Annapolis Boat Show handing out literature, fielding questions, and giving them a break when they needed to get off the boat. During a lull in the action on one of those days in 1987, a small group of high school students came aboard and was poking through the boat. They were just killing time, looking for something fun to do and we began to chat a bit.

One of the students said he wasn’t into power boats but wanted to learn to sail. I told him I would be glad to take him out sailing and teach him the basics when the weather warmed up in the spring.

He gave me his phone number and when the weather warmed up I gave Sean a call. For the rest of that spring, summer and fall, we did a lot of sailing on the Kirby 25 that I had at the time. Occasionally, over time Sean would sail with me when he was home on vacation from college, and randomly thereafter once he had graduated and started his career and first marriage.

When his first marriage crashed, I took him cruising and bestowed a couple days’ worth of all of the clichés, hackneyed aphorisms, and proverbs that I could drum up to cheer him up and help him understand that it was not as dark as it seemed, he would still have good life ahead.

Sure enough Sean landed on both feet with a wonderful life, a great wife (who he met taking more advanced sailing lessons on a J-22), a couple children, and a career he enjoyed. Other than desiging a remodeling project on his home, I didn’t see much of Sean over the years as his family life settled in.  

But earlier this year, we ran into each other in a restaurant and later he gave me a call during which he said that he and his wife wanted to get back into sailing. (I warned you that this was a long story.)

 So, today we went sailing. It was a great day to be on the water. It was little nippy, but there were great winds and clear enough skies. Maybe the conditions were everybody’s ideal conditions since we were the only boat that was out there, but we made a fast trip down to the mouth of the West River then home again.

By the time we got to the mouth of the Severn, the conditions had become a little challenging with large downdrafts of the type that was likely to result in a nomination for “Best Drama during a Knockdown, Cabin Sides in the Water Shorts”.  But all Synergy came through it with her dignity intact and brought the entire crew home with all of their fingers and toes and lots of great reminiscences.

There are days when even I wasn’t about to sailing. This was one of them but I used part of the day doing maintenance projects onboard Synergy reworking the GPS and network wiring and then upin the workshop.

We were scheduled to visit Michael, my stepson and his wife this weekend. That is always a joy for me. But Michael was feeling ill and we decided that it probably made sense to come up another time. Maybe ‘reprieve’ is not the right term since I was really looking forward to seeing them, but that left me free to go sailing. And that is what I did.

It was a good day to be on the water, not to cold, not too windy, just about perfect for a short ingle-handed day sail. The winds began to build as I was heading home, but too bad, not too badly at all.  

It was a short sail so this is a short log post.