It always brings a wistful smile to my face whenever I see families out sailing and really enjoying it, even more so if the kids are involved in running the boat, and not just hanging on the pulpit getting splashed with powerboat wakes, fun though that must be.
It had been too long of an absence from the boat for my almost 16-year-old daughter. First high school, then the ubiquitous phone and internet appendages, friends, and the drama of love interests were too much competition for Paleolithic Dad and his hoary old 80s-era sloop with earth-tone décor and hank-on headsails but no television, Bluetooth stereo, or a USB port to be found. Clearly and inevitably I had lost her to the 21st century and all of the attendant trappings of whiz bang technology delivering instant gratification via satellite at the tap of a screen.
But there’s more to it than just that. Annie’s Rose doesn’t have a fully enclosed head, which proved to be a dealbreaker in the recent past whenever I would ask her to go on weekend cruises or even daysails. I get that. She used to sleep in the vee berth, a veritable stateroom compared to the quarter berth, except for the fact that the head was in it. When she stopped coming to the boat, I moved into the vee berth, but it doesn’t really bother me that the toilet seat is 18 inches from my nose. Except when it does.
I wish I could report how my kid loves the boat and has taken to sailing as a natural part of growing up, but as much as I wanted that, it hasn’t worked out that way. She learned her way around the boat when she was young, took sailing lessons at camp for a couple of summers, but never quite developed a passion for it in the way that I had hoped. I was admittedly perhaps too patient with her, never wanting to force upon her the notion that sailing is the greatest thing in the world, and darn it—you should consider yourself lucky to have the opportunity to be out there on the greatest body of water on the whole East Coast, you ungrateful little drain on Daddy’s boat fund, retirement dreams, and day-to-day anchor on keeping me glued to my chair in a gloomy office building taking orders from landlubber bosses who wouldn’t know a controlled gybe from the uncontrolled rage I harbor against them for not letting me out early on Wednesdays so I can get down to the boat in time for a night sail. Oh, did I say something wrong? Sorry for the digression. Good thing I’m balanced and grounded.
On this particular trip, I was happy just to have her along. A 26-foot boat with two people aboard gets smaller by the day, but she seemed to do alright, even if I wasn’t always amused by her propensity to generate a trail of clutter wherever she went in every part of the boat. Ensconced down below most of the time, she missed great blue herons taking flight from their shore perches, skates swimming in schools next to the boat, the unexpected beauty of a Choptank River vista as another bend was rounded. She preferred sailing rather than motoring, but she didn’t lend a hand with raising or lowering the sails, and except when I asked her to take the helm and go either in forward or reverse, setting and weighing the anchor was pretty much left to me while she busied herself in her world.
In silence, and perhaps with a bit of smoldering anger and disappointment, I feared for her future, and that of legions of her peers tethered as they are to email and Twitter and Spotify and whatever else the cool new communication tool of the day is in vogue. I desperately wanted her to soak in the Zen of sailing.
On the other hand, the kid could still row a dinghy. Paleolithic Dad hasn’t gotten around to equipping the dink with an engine, so after some prodding, she took to the dink for a row around the anchorage one night on La Trappe Creek. She had the oars again after we ran aground in San Domingo Creek outside St. Michaels. I thought, “Not many kids can do that, on average.”
Maybe I don’t ask enough of her. Maybe I’ve been too overzealous about my love of sailing and the good things it brings me. Somewhere along the line I can’t help but think that somehow I have failed her. All I can say is, when she gets a boyfriend, he better know how to sand the bottom of my boat.
by Steve Allan
