sailing with Rolf

Some human activities are incalculably stupid. I am not here talking about large scale follies like war, Presbyterianism, and Kevin Costner movies. No. I’m talking about human social endeavours that are so ruinously expensive, mindnumbingly dull, utterly pointless, or profoundly wasteful that future generations will look back at them the way we look back at alchemy and phrenology and conclude that our century was in the grip of a special form of madness. I’m talking about activities like golf ("I hit a ball with a stick!" "I hit my ball fewer times so I win!") and line dancing. I’m talking about beanie-baby collecting and bird watching ("Look! A bird! Look, another bird! That makes TWO birds!!"). And today I’m talking about sailing.

A bit of history: my father-in-law, Rolf, likes to buy vehicles. A few years ago he had in his possession (no exaggeration) three cars, one truck, two motorcycles (a Harley and a trail bike), a sea-plane, a half-interest in another plane (a WWII trainer), a motor boat, two lawn tractors (only one worked at a time), two ocean-going kayaks, and two bicycles. I pressured him to buy a hovercraft but he couldn’t find one in a colour he liked. Anyway, since he is now partially retired, he’s gotten rid of the motorcycles, the planes, and the power boat. And he’s bought a sailboat. A thirty-six foot sailboat. That was not a typo. Thirty-six feet. It sleeps seven.

Now a bit of context: the boat is kept at the family cabin. "Cabin" is a funny word. Where I grew up, if someone said, "hey, let’s go to the cabin for the weekend," you got out your sleeping bag, bought a bucket of bug repellent, and made your way to a wooden shack in the woods. But this is British Columbia. The province that’s seen it’s third premier in a row resign in disgrace. Things are different here. My in-laws’ "cabin" has (I do not make a word of this up) five bedrooms, three bathrooms, two driveways, a built-in vacuum system, cable TV (for the TWO televisions), a chest freezer, fridge, dishwasher, microwave oven, stereo system, and automated sprinkler system. It is easily twice the size of my "house" and infinitely better appointed. What you do with it is this: drive up there in your luxury car, let yourself in, put a CD on the stereo, take a designer beer out of the fridge, nuke a microwavable pizza, then sit out on the deck and say "This is the life." Roughing it B.C. style. Actually, I’ve sort of gotten used to it and I do try to take the family up to the cabin every summer, especially if the in-laws are out of town.

Anyway, this summer we went up while the in-laws were there so that we could ooh and ah over the new boat, which is called, by the way, The Oceanus III. Bad name, but it came with the boat. If I had the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to buy a boat I would name it something appropriately obnoxious: H.M.S. Blow Me; Fat Rich Guy; Chick Magnet; Drunk Again. Or, if I was a single guy, I’d call it After You; then I could meet chicks and tell them "I named my boat after you...."

Now, here was the plan: we’re going out in the boat to Thornamby island to go swimming. Alright. Thornamby island is a beautiful island in the strait that is unusual in having sand cliffs and a beach shoreline. In fact, the two larger sections of the island are joined by an isthmus of sand that forms, in effect, a double-sided beach. And because of the different depths of water on either side, one of the beaches has very warm water, the other very cool. Add in the eagles circling over head, the total absence of biting insects, and the view of the mountains of Vancouver island, and you have, well, heaven. To get from the cabin to this island in a power boat takes fifteen minutes, tops. In a thirty-six foot sailboat, it takes almost three goddam hours.

Before we go any further, let’s ponder those numbers: fifteen minutes in a powerboat, three hours in a sailboat. Ignoring for the moment that it is also infinitely easier to run a powerboat, those travelling times should tell us something right away: sailing is incalculably stupid. It is one of those endeavours, like making your own paper, that has perverse cultural cachet only because it is anachronistic and inefficient. Its pursuit is designed to declare to the world that you have so much money and leisure time that you can squander both with impunity. It’s like fox hunting. Nowadays when rich yahoos conduct a fox hunt, they don’t even use a real fox: they follow a trail of urine that has been laid down by some menial. Figure: you spend thousands of dollars on a horse, hounds, stables, and freakish clothes so you can chase a line of piss across a field. You must be very rich. Poor people rarely chase pee. They make their own.

Same with sailing. It declares its fashionable marginality not only by impracticality (three goddam hours) but by jargon. Now, I understand that every technology generates and even requires a jargon. Fine. But the jargon of sailing is insane. Figure this: there are a lot of ropes on a sailboat. So many that I could not for the life of me figure where half of them went. Maybe nowhere. Maybe they were circular, put there for decoration. I dunno. I chucked a few overboard because they were in my way; it didn’t seem to effect the performance of the vehicle a whit. I surreptitiously cut a few when Rolf wasn’t looking: no prob. Yet. Anyway, I did find out that you never call a rope a rope on a sailboat. It is always a "line." So when someone shouts "throw me a line" on a sailboat, you do not respond, "Who was that lady I saw you with last night?" No. You throw a rope. But it’s not even as simple as that: the rope on the front of a dingy is not a line, it is a "painter." When you fold a rope into a neat little pile, you are "hanking the line." At one point on our trip Capt. Rolf started shouting at me, "Hank the painter!" I responded, "Joe the butcher! Ted the fireman!"

Or how about this. The first time Rolf took his wife Marlene out for a long sail she took the wheel while he did something complicated with the stinking lines. He then started shouting at her, "Come up on the gust! Come up on the gust!" She, terrified that she was going to do something wrong, left the wheel and went searching for the gust. Where was it? In the galley? How do you come up on it? On tippy toes? With a net? Forty-two years of marriage almost went down the drain.

But back to the story. We pack a lunch, I pack some beer, we grab the kids, and we all start to pile onto the boat. Wait a minute!! I’m not allowed to wear the sneakers that I have on! They might scuff the surface of the boat! I should have deck shoes. Deck shoes, as I’m sure you know, are leather loafers with a white crepe sole. I never understood why you’d wear them on boats: because they’re leather, they’ll stay wet for hours and, if they get really soaked, they’ll shrink, cut off the blood circulation to your feet, and you’ll get gangrene and have to have your feet amputated. Pirates have peg legs because they got their deck shoes wet. As it turns out, you wear deck shoes so that you won’t scuff the deck of the boat. Got that? You can be uncomfortable all day with soaking leather on your feet, you may even lose a limb, but you won’t scuff the boat. Priorities.

I got on barefoot.

After much swearing, chucking of lines, jockeying for position on the deck (even though this is a big boat, there’s no room–that is true of all boats), Rolf fires up the diesel engine to get us out of the harbour and we start chugging away. First thing I do? I cut my bare foot on some winch-thing on the deck. Fine. Go down in the galley to look for a bandage. I find food, wine, a CD player, books, stove, sink, toilet, GPS system, radar, marine radio, fish-finding sonar, marine charts, electronic gadgets that I cannot recognise, kitchen utensils, tools, a Scrabble game, but no bandages. Not a one. Fine. You don’t want me to scuff your boat? How about I bleed all over the fucking thing? I go back up and walk around the entire boat several times, trying to smear so much blood on the deck that it will look like a floating slaughter house. Finally Marlene gets me a paper towel. Great: now I’m limping around with a paper towel tied in a huge knot around my big toe. Very dignified.

By now we’re out of the harbour. The diesel engine on the boat is not very powerful so this has taken quite a while. We were passed by people in kayaks and children in paddle boats. An old woman swimming with a flutter board gave us a good run for our money. Figure: if we had the powerboat, we would already be at Thornamby, but as it was, the ordeal was just beginning.
Once we get out of the harbour, Rolf cut the engine. Time to raise the sails. Now, the terminology involved here is so complex and pointless that I’ll simplify it for the sake of expediency. Essentially there are two sails: a big one and a little one. Both sails are furled and unfurled by ropes, uh, lines that run around various winches and end up near the back (stern) of the boat so, in theory, the guy (uh, captain) at the wheel (wheel) could control the sails by himself.

Yeah, right.

In practice you need three strong men, who do not care if they lose their fingers, all pulling at the same time while trying to keep their balance on the crowded and tiny deck. Not only that, they have to spring into action instantly and in perfect synchronicity if the sail-controlling process is going to work at all. We did not have that. What we had was Rolf bellowing incomprehensible orders to me, who was stumbling around the gore-smeared deck with a paper towel around my toe, tripping over frantic children, trying not to injure my musician’s hands. The result was chaos:

-Capt. Rolf: Stow the fo’clse!
-Me: Wha?
-Cpt. Rolf: Bellay the jib irons!
-Me: Huh?
-Capt. Rolf: Hoist the mizzenspot!
-Me: Fuck this noise. I’m getting a beer.

After fifteen minutes of undignified shouting, cursing, and sweating the sails were unfurled.

And nothing happened.

The boat came to a complete standstill in the water. This is where the true hell of sailing comes in; it is entirely dependent on the most unpredictable and untrustworthy of meteorological phenomenon: wind. If you designed a boat that was powered by sun, rain, even humidity, it would be easy to predict sailing conditions and you could actually make sensible travel plans. But wind is utterly capricious. More than that, it’s perverse. The few times in your life when you might need it, when you’re flying a kite or stuck on a goddam sailboat, it will disappear. For days. There was so little wind that as an experiment I took a scrap of bloody paper towel off my toe and dropped it from chest height. It fell straight down like a stone.

So there we sat. A point of stillness in a world of motion. Power boats streaked by. Eagles and gulls wheeled over head. Fish leapt out of the water and laughed at us. The old woman on the flutter board blasted by. The sun rose in the sky. Everything moved except us.

This, Rolf informed us, was sailing. Okay. Fine. By that token the rock over there sticking out of the water is a sailboat; it’s travelling just as fast as us. Actually, faster, for as the tide started to go in we began to slowly move backwards.

How long did we sit there, motionless, in the blazing sun? I don’t know. But I do know that while we were enjoying the "sailing" I was remembering some useful nautical jargon: cabin fever; scurvy; abandon ship; man overboard; mutiny. The children, of course, became hysterical with boredom. The wives fell asleep. Rolf grimly kept up the pretence that the boat was actually doing something until it became clear that in a few hours we would wash up on the shore. He then decided that there would be more wind (more?) further out in the strait. Fine. That meant that the sails now had to be taken down so the engine could be started again. Taking the sails down, it turns out, is just as much work as putting them up. That doesn’t seem fair somehow, but it’s true. So down they came, amidst much swearing and confusion, so the engine could be started and we could begin our comically slow puttering across the water. We putter for half an hour, Rolf decides that the wind is rising, so the goddam sails have to go up again, the engine has to be turned off, and we sit perfectly still again. I’ve felt more wind in a phone booth. It’s probably windier inside a ping-pong ball.

We did this for two hours: puttering, stopping, putting up sails, sitting like idiots for 15 minutes, taking down the sails, puttering some more. Two goddam hours.

Then, finally, through the binoculars, I spot Thornamby Island. Was Columbus this happy when he spotted America? I doubt it.

There it was: the beach. Happy children gambolled in the shallows; beautiful women strutted their stuff in bikinis; handsome men played with both and drank from frosty bottles.
But me? I was on the fucking sailboat. Still, much less than two miles from shore, I thought our ordeal was almost over. Soon we’d be ashore, soon we’d be free.

No such luck. The end of our torture was not in sight because, horror of horrors, the wind began to rise. Not a real wind, mind you, not a gust. Just a barely perceptible movement of the air. But it was enough for Capt. Rolf to start shouting those cursed words, "Unfurl the sails!"
Here we go again. And, strangely, it was actually worse now that there was a wind. See, the wind was not blowing from behind. No sir. That would be too easy. Instead the wind was blowing AT us. That meant we would have to tack. What this means is that you zigzag back and forth several miles at a time so that you can move a few feet forward. So, once the stinking sails are up, we started to tack to the south. For an interminable length of time. All the while I have my eyes on the beach which was getting farther and farther away. Then Rolf started shouting, lines had to be pulled, sails flopped over, the wheel swung around, and now we’re were going in the opposite direction for an interminable length of time. To travel one mile forward we have to travel something like 20 miles back and forth. The children were weeping, I was cursing, the women went below and fell asleep again.

This went on for an hour. A full hour. Then Rolf told me to drop anchor. I thought this was funny. We were still a good distance from the shore. Good joke, Rolf. Ha ha. But see, Rolf did not want to risk running his new sailboat aground, so we had to anchor a mile or so from the island. Never mind that there were bigger boats so close to the shore that people could jump of the decks onto the beach, we were taking no chances and so the anchor was dropped and the sails refurled.

Now, to get from the sailboat to the shore meant that we had to use the dingy. Rolf was lucky when he bought the sailboat; he already had a dingy and so he didn’t have to spend the extra money on a new one. But here’s the problem: he bought his dingy years ago for his seaplane. And because seaplanes are crowded and weight-sensitive, he bought the smallest dingy that has ever been commercially manufactured. I’m sure there’s a picture of it in the Guiness Book of World Records. Fully inflated, the thing looks like an orange sombrero. When Rolf, who must tip the scales at some 230, gets in the thing, various laws of physics have to be suspended so the thing will stay afloat. Rolf’s plan was that he would ferry people, one at a time, to the beach. Him and another person in an inflatable boat only slightly larger than a frying pan.

I decided I would swim. I put on swim fins, a mask and snorkel, and jumped in.

Bad idea, for three reasons. First, when I was young, I was water crazy. Skinny and fearless, I swam like a sea otter. I am no longer, uh, skinny. Now I swim like a sea ox. Second, remember how I said there was a cold beach and a warm beach on this island? We were on the cold side. Real cold. Pacific cold. End-of-the-movie-Titanic cold. This is not the sort of cold that you experience when you first jump into a lake, the type that disappears after you’ve made the transition and splashed around a little. No, this was the type of cold that shocks the breath out of you and then, no matter how much you flail around, gets colder, slowly constricting your chest and pushing you into the hallucinations that presage hypothermia. So, figure, I was flailing my stocky body through the ice-cold water while hallucinating. Which brings us to Three: what do you hallucinate when about when you’re swimming in the ocean? That’s right: being eaten alive by some form of killer shark, octopus, or haddock. Totally irrational, right? Figure this–after a few minutes of swimming, the salt water seeped into the cut on my toe. Instant pain! Christ! I’ve been bitten! I’m being attacked!! Help! Call Roy Schneider! I reach down my body expecting to find a ragged stump where my foot once was. I’m relieved to find my foot still attached, but then I remember the cut. My frozen brain kicks into overdrive: I’m leaving a trail of blood in the water! A shark can smell blood two kilometres away! Quick, swim for it!
I think I set a new speed record for middle-aged, stocky swimmers. I mean, I left a wake in the water. I dug a trench into the beach when I finally hit land. Children on the island were weeping and running to their parents, afraid of the "water boogie" that had come careening out of the ocean, panting and swearing. But did I care? No sir, I fell on my knees and, Pope-like, kissed the ground. I had made it. I was off the boat.

The next few hours were great, but at the same time, spoiled. Spoiled by the knowledge that at some point we would have to get back on that boat and make the three-hour trip back to the cabin.

So, the trip home. As soon as we got back on the boat and fired up the deisel (the wind having disappeared again), I remembered the bottles of wine that I had seen in the cabin downstairs. Better uncork those babies. Problem: they were homemade by Marlene’s brother-in-law. Now, we all know someone who makes his own wine. He goes down to the U-Brew every couple of months and make up a batch of red or white, and maybe even puts cutesy labels on the bottles. Then he brings it to parties, or whips it out when you have guests over for dinner, and explains how it’s just as good as the stuff you can buy from the store only so much more economical.
Let me explain something: these people are out of their fucking minds. They are delusional. They should be put down like rabid dogs.

I hope I made that clear enough.

U-Brew wine is evil in a bottle. It is not, really, wine at all. It’s grape juice that’s been fermented and allowed to age for, like, three weeks. I have, in my years, been confronted with dozens of such wines and the highest praise that I have ever been able to muster for one (and this only once) was, "If I had to, I could drink this." Not WANT to drink this; not LIKE drinking this. But COULD drink his, if I had to, if it was an emergency, if being hammered was more important than respecting all my senses, if I needed to dull some terrible pain, if I was undergoing field surgery, if someone had a gun to my head.

Or if I was stuck on a sailboat.