A sailing boat's previous skipper and her new one become one family.
My phone chirped. A notification read “New text message from Chris s/v Luna.” I slid the screen open with my thumb and looked, but there were no words—just a photo of a brown cardboard box with my name on the front. I had a package awaiting me at my friend’s office.
After dropping my dinghy Margot into the water, I rowed in and walked the few busy West Palm Beach blocks to a tall, white office building. I flip-flopped my way across the mirror-clean tile floor of the building’s main foyer and sprung up the stairs to the second floor, two at a time as always. As I poked my head in the door of my friend Chris’s office, he motioned me in.
We chatted for a few minutes about those things that cruisers chat about: pretty new boats in the anchorage, drama on the docks, comings, and goings. I knew he was busy, so after a few brief minutes I stuffed the delivery box into my backpack and offered my farewell.
“Please tell me this will be in the book someday,” Chris said with a grin. I assured him it would.
The package was from Ave del Mar’s previous owner Marjorie Bryson, the wife half of the husband-and-wife team of Jamie and Marje Bryson. It contained a portion of Jamie’s ashes. He had died not long prior, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. That battle had left his physical health in steep decline, but his spirit had remained as big as the Alaskan skies he navigated in his small plane. His ashes had been divided into thirds, with one lot sent to rejoin him with his Alaskan home, one lot sent to rejoin him with his first wife, and a third lot sent to me so that Jamie could have one last voyage aboard his beloved sailboat, Ave del Mar—this time with me at the helm.
I think Jamie would be proud of me at the helm, even if he might scoff at a few of my improvements to “his” boat. I think he would rib me about my LED light fixtures and that he would feign disgust that the top stripe on the hull has been changed from blue to marine green and finally to white. He would grumble about his cassette tape collection being discarded or that there are food bins in what was a paperback bookshelf for him. But he wouldn’t actually care, and I wouldn’t bother to defend myself to him anyway. We would stand there, face to face, old regime and new regime in a courtship of mutual respect.
In the 1980s, Jamie and Ave circumnavigated the world with Jamie’s wife Marje and their son Stuart. Years later, thirsty for more, Jamie set out singlehanded, conquering the gold standard of sailing: the rounding of Cape Horn on South America's southern tip. Jamie and Ave del Mar both had pedigree. They had chops. I had dreams. I couldn’t even see chops from where I sat.
Jamie had become a fan of mine. We stayed in regular touch over the years, Marje handing the phone off to him when I called and Jamie’s voice sparkling to life through the speaker. Marje and I offered faint debate as to who among us benefitted more from the calls. We never did settle that. I still think it was me. She thought it was her, because Jamie always perked up dramatically when I called. Whether or not Jamie thought it was him we can never know.
In the beginning the calls were of mysteries unfolding on the boat, advice about systems or hardware, or requesting Ave’s former-captain's input on pending decisions. As time wore on, the tenor of the calls changed, as Jamie grew more confident that I was the right person for Ave and as I grew more confident in my own decisions and my own voice. One warm early-winter day on the Chesapeake Bay, as Ave del Mar and I were underway southbound, we had a particularly good phone call. Jamie heaped praise deeply and sincerely onto the decisions I had been making while sailing along.
“Skipper,” he said to me at the end of that call, his voice calm and lighthearted, “you’re like a son now. I am going to call you Adopted Son Number 3. You know what that means, don’t you?”
From Jamie Bryson, a question like this was a setup line. You weren’t really supposed to guess. “Tell me,” I offered.
“It means you can’t screw up, because you have me as family to answer to.”
To this day I can still see him scowling at the changes I made to his boat. But I can see a sparkle in his eyes, too, and the hint of a smile on his lips. He really would have been okay with it all, in the end.
We never met face to face, but I sure felt the sting of his passing when I got that phone call letting me know that the end was upon him. Not long after, Jamie and I finally sailed together. On a crystal-clear day in the Atlantic, with Jamie’s beloved Ave del Mar sailing under a brisk broad reach and no land within sight, I said a few words, thanked him one last time, and rejoined Jamie with the sea.
by John Herlig
