What You Would Have Seen

On Saturday, if you had spent the weekend with me, you might have slept in. Or you might have woken up when I did, early but already sunny bright. And maybe you would have come running with me, up the gravel driveway, past the summer 'cottages' with an old blue Packard and a new Jeep Grand Cherokee parked outside, along through piney woods or on a narrow crumbling old hot top road, with raspberry bushes overgrowing its shoulders. We would have wound along past a field that smelled like hay, past a big house and several driveways leading to bigger houses on the water. We would have gone into the land trust trail leading to Perry Creek, and if you didn't complain about the mosquitos (which don't bite me, amazingly enough) we would have jogged along soft mossy pine-needly paths, covered with lots and lots of roots, and wound past lichen covered granite outcrops until we had a view of Perry Creek, a long narrow, deep cove that serves as a great anchorage for boats bigger than you might expect. When we got back to the house you would probably have accompanied me down to the shore to snack on the early blueberries on the low bushes leading down to the dock.

Then, after breakfast on the deck and gossip with our hosts about the boats in the harbor and the people associated with them, you would have grabbed your duffel bag and schlepped it down with dad and me to the motorboat. I don't know what you would have been wearing, but I was wearing threadbare khaki pants, soft as flannel, rolled up to midcalf, a navy blue tank top, and my favorite flip flops. When we went to a neighbor's dock, tied up, and marched up to his house to find out about borrowing his lobster yacht to run the regatta, you would have accompanied me across the porch and peered in at the amazing living room. Maybe you would have stopped me from trying the door and sticking my head in, calling "Hallooo?" Or maybe you would have dragged me inside to find the owners.

On the race committee boat your job would have been to fire the cannon to signal the starting sequence. Dad was reading the time, and I was signaling with the horn. The two kids from the island were doing the flags. I think you would have enjoyed all the action -- the boats milling around the starting line, and the sort of rattly clatter of winches turning, a sound like someone dragging a chain along a driveway. The groan of sheets under pressure being eased as sails are let out. The people jumping up and down at the masts, pulling up halyards, and the big obvious mistakes people were making as they set their spinnakers for a downwind start.

The day might have turned out dull for you, because the wind died, but I don't think so. There were seals, and gulls, and cormorants, always cormorants. There was a thunderstorm that worked its way over Camden and Rockland, overtaking the distant blue hills with battleship grey. There are always the remarkable houses on North Haven to look at. I was reading up on old New Yorker magazines and you might have borrowed one of those if you hadn't brought your own book. I would have shown you how to use the head on the lobster yacht, a somewhat tricky pumping system with valves and a foot pedal and a lever. I would have had you help me calculate the course distances, and shown you how to read a chart, how to use dividers and parallel rules, and had you double check my arithmetic. I probably would have pointed out some of the islands -- Butter, and Great Spruce Head, and Islesboro -- and told you memories about those places.

I would have pointed out the differences in the competitors -- how you can tell one dark hulled boat from another. You might have wondered how my father and I have such good eyesight, or how on earth we could tell what was going on with boats far away. When you're looking at boats and you're not accustomed to it it's hard to tell one from another, except for colors. I have learned lots of little tricks to identify a bunch of different boats in a racing fleet. Obviously, there's hull color. The second trick is sail color. Traditionally, sails are white, but racing boats these days rarely have white sails. Instead they have sails that might be goldish brown (if they're made of kevlar) or grey (if they're made of "cuben fiber" or some other high tech material). I've seen orange sails and blue sails and yellow sails and red sails, but not recently. Anyway, in a typical racing fleet you'll see some combination of grey and brown and white sails, and that alone may be enough to tell one boat from another. If they're close enough you can also try to discern by the color of the sail numbers -- sometimes they are blue, sometimes black, sometimes red or green. And of course you can always read the sail numbers, but that's pretty obscure. One of the competitors this week had sail number "666" which made it easy to remember which boat he was. But if you can't read sail numbers or can't keep them in your head, there are other ways. Sometimes the sail, besides the number, will have a symbol on it that indicates what kind of boat it is. Boats made by J/Boats have a big "J" on them. So it gets easier to identify the J/Boats in a fleet by that mark. Another trick is to look at whether the forestay goes all the way to the top of the mast or only goes partway up. Some boats are rigged one way, others another. All of these little characteristics, and a hundred more (Is there a radar detector hanging on the back? How many spreaders does it have? Can you see windows? Is it a ketch? Is the stern plumb, or is there overhang?) are the way we can look off at a couple of dark hulled boats far away and say, "Hmmm, it looks like Pequot got by Reindeer, I wonder how they did that?"

And then at the finish you would have liked watching the boats come in, blazing downwind with their spinnakers full in a newly freshened breeze, sometimes seconds apart. You would have shot off the cannon for the first finishers in each fleet when my father said "Mark" and while I wrote the finishing times into my little black book. Maybe you would have helped haul up the anchor, dropping it with a splash back into the water a few times after you pulled it up to clean the smelly grey mud off it. And then a long boat ride back to Rockland, where you and I would have giggled together in the grocery store buying lunch food for the next couple of days. And then we would have driven up the coast from Rockland to Deer Isle, a gorgeous drive, to pick up my dad at the Benjamin River and proceed to another waterside cottage, this one on the tip of a rocky shore in a town called Sunset, where again we would fall asleep to the sound and smell of the sea on the shore.

Comments

[Hondo]

Sounds great! Sorry I missed it.