Caught by the Sea (2 page)

2

First Boat

I bought some
magazines and looked in newspapers at boat ads and found that my ignorance was worse than I’d thought. There were sailboats for sale ranging from three hundred dollars to four or five million dollars.

I was living on less than four thousand dollars a year, so that pretty much wiped out the four-million-dollar boats.

I would not just need a sailboat, I would need a cheap sailboat. This was my first mistake. There is an old Chinese proverb that states something like “Cheap isn’t really cheap, expensive isn’t really expensive.” The concept is that when you think you’re getting something at a very low price, usually you have to spend so much to fix it that it would have been better to buy the more expensive one in the first place.

Then too, looking for a bargain boat is like playing Russian roulette. If the boat is cheaply made, and run-down enough, it can actually kill you. This is a fairly common occurrence, much more than people generally realize. A single fitting can let go and a boat will sink; a bolt can shear and carry away rigging and take someone down with it. I know of a man who died when a pin let go in a snatch block (a kind of quick-use movable pulley) and the block blew off the line it was holding and came back with such velocity it drove through his forehead, killing him instantly.

Thankfully—or insanely—I did not know any of this. In my innocence and ignorance I put the papers and magazines down and drove up the coast north of Los Angeles and went to a harbor. There I found a yacht brokerage, stopped my old VW bug, walked into a small office where a man sat nursing what must have been a seismic hangover and said, blithely, “I want to buy a sailboat.”

The mistakes I was making were appalling. First, trying to save money and going to a “yacht” brokerage were two things that could never work together. Anytime the word
yacht
is used, the boat will cost too much.

Second, walking in and actually saying to a yacht broker that you want to buy a sailboat is like pouring your own blood into water infested with white sharks. You might as well just hand him a knife and tell him to start hacking away at your wallet.

Third, and perhaps most important, never, ever interrupt a man working through a really bad hangover.

He stood, slowly, and shook my hand while looking at me with a distinctly predatory glint in his eye, then proceeded to show me an old, wooden, thirty-two-foot Tahiti ketch that in all kindness should have been cut up and burned for the hardware.

“She’s salty,” he said, taking me down inside the dank interior. It was a bit like going into a sewer except the smell was worse: something between old sweatsocks, rotten meat and dead fish (I think all three were floating in the bilge).

“A proven sailor,” he said. “You could take her to the South Pacific tomorrow, and the beauty of a wood boat over fiberglass is that if you hit a reef and take a plank out, you can repair her right there in the lagoon with whatever wood you can find.”

He lied, cleanly, effortlessly, and I did not know that if you take a plank out of a wood boat it sinks. Fast. And that truly old wood boats, as this one was (much older than me), had a nasty habit of “opening up” while under way, popping planks off when fasteners let go, so that water would roar in and they would drive themselves beneath the waves. And sink.

But as he spun tales of the South Pacific, I saw dusky dancing maidens and balmy nights, sliding along with the trade winds caressing our naked bodies while we replaced planks with available wood and let the magic of the tropics take our cares away. . . .

Only a bit of serendipity kept me from buying the boat and sailing off to my doom. We were down inside the boat, which looked nicely nautical with varnished wood and white paint, and I was ready to sign the deal when I noticed a floor panel that seemed to be slightly open. I am ashamed to admit that I had not looked beneath the panels or inside the cupboards, and I leaned forward and pulled the panel up, my head still full of dreams of tropical nights. I was surprised to see water there, welling up. Not just standing in the bilge but growing while I watched, and then an electric pump kicked in and the water level went back down until the pump stopped, when it immediately rose again, pushing at the floor panels, and the pump started again. . . .

The boat would sink in a couple of hours if the automatic bilge pump weren’t working. Finally my brain woke up. I decided to look in the bilge and found that the frames holding the planking were so rotten the wood came away in my hand.

“It needs a lick of paint here and there,” the broker said. “And maybe tighten a few screws . . .”

I left him there and went to the next brokerage, and the next, finding boats either falling apart or way too expensive for my pocketbook, and quite often both.

I don’t know how long this might have gone on. I was there several days, sleeping in my car. I looked at scores of boats and couldn’t find anything that would work until I was in the Ventura harbor walking down the docks just looking at boats in general when I came upon a little twenty-two-footer with a tiny wooden bowsprit and a small cabin that had a faded sign hanging on the bow pulpit: For Sale by Owner.

It was a Schock 22, three years old. It was sloop rigged with a keel/centerboard that could be dropped when fighting against the wind, what’s called beating to windward.

She had a tiny cabin less than five feet high, a small wooden table and two bunks, a little alcohol stove, a head (toilet) up in the middle of the fore-peak; and (best of all) she was made of fiberglass. This was before soft cores and more flexible hulls, and she was handcrafted of fiberglass nearly an inch thick. In most respects she was nearly bullet-proof. Later, through ineptness, I ran her into a dock at four knots while trying to sail into the slip and all she did was dent the wood of the dock and bounce off.

I called the owner and he agreed to let me pay her off over time. I moved on board and slept in the boat that first night and dreamed of the South Pacific and the trade winds, and I awakened the next morning and made coffee and sat there in the cockpit thinking that all I had to do now was learn to sail and I was ready to go.

Just that, learn to sail.

No problem.

People did it all the time. How hard could it be?

Of course, there are many degrees of sailing ability. It is an art, most assuredly, and it is an art that you can develop for the rest of your life; you will never learn it all because wind and sails and water are different at all times.

Still, everybody must start somewhere. Had I known how truly ignorant I was, I think I would have given it all up as a bad job.

I had never sailed on the ocean.

I did not know anything about boats.

I did not know anything about the sea.

I did not know any of the terminology and couldn’t tell a block from a pintle. The first time somebody said something about the sheets, I thought they were talking about the sails.

But I had a boat, and thanks to pure luck and the honesty of the man who sold her to me, she was a very good boat, with seven different sails and a solid anchoring system, and all in all was in very fine shape, maintenance up to date, everything stowed clean.

So I sat on her that sunny morning in Ventura, California, and I felt a soft breeze on my cheek while I sipped coffee and I thought, I have to take her out sailing. Or, to be more accurate, I thought, I have to take
it
out sailing, because I had not yet come to understand how boats are alive and are always “she.”

I looked up at the mast. It was wooden and seemed exceptionally tall. (It turned out that she
was
slightly overpowered, which was very nice in light airs because she got a lot of power out of very little wind. But it was bad in heavy winds because she was so tender, that is, so sensitive to the wind.) There were lines and ropes and cables going all over the place: some kind of rope going up the mast and down to the front sail and then another kind of rope going up the mast and down to the mainsail and then two ropes coming from the front sail bag back to little round winch things in the cockpit and then a whole cluster of ropes and pulleys that seemed to control the back of the boom thing.

All right, I remember thinking, let’s start with what I know.

I knew the boom thing held the bottom of the big sail. Then I understood that the pulleys at the back of the boom controlled where it would go. Then I followed the rope that pulled the mainsail up and found where it would tie off on the mast. Okay, I could pull up the main.

I threw back the rest of my coffee, put the cup on the table down inside the boat next to my typewriter and started the proceedings that would lead to what I later termed the First Disaster.

The boat had a small outboard on the back, or stern, and I checked the fuel, found it full, gave the cord a yank. It fired straight off.

A good start.

Then I threw off the dock lines and pushed the boat back into the space between the two rows of docks and clambered back into the cockpit. I increased the throttle and she started to move forward. She had a tiller as opposed to a wheel, and I slapped the handle over and brought her nose out into the opening of the fairway that led to the breakwaters at the harbor mouth. I had little sense but enough to know not to put the sails up in the dock, and when we were in the open I stopped the motor, went to the rope, or halyard, that pulled up the main and yanked it up with all my strength.

How I got this far without a real problem is hard to understand, but it was about here that my ignorance really kicked in.

The main was much larger than the sail I had seen at Lake Arrowhead, and as soon as it was up it filled with the morning breeze and slammed over to the side. I had not loosened the sheet, and so the boat, light and quick, took off immediately, playing off to the left as the tiller swung over. I was working up at the right side of the mast and was dumped cleanly off the boat, falling through the two little lifelines into the muck of the harbor, where I treaded water and watched my new sailboat go off without me.

After sailing thirty or forty yards she plowed into the rocks of the shoreline, narrowly missing the right hull of a trimaran that was tied to the end of a dock just adjacent to the opening. I swam to my boat and climbed in and got her moving again, until I hit the trimaran—the Second Disaster. That was just three hours before I hit the million-dollar yacht—the Third Disaster—and was chewed out by a woman who had a martini in one hand and a cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth around which flowed a stream of obscenities I had not heard since my military days. Sometime later I barely caught the edge of a Coast Guard cutter, whose skipper was quite nice and only gave me a courtesy ticket for not having a bell on my boat, although I’m not sure that at this stage of my sailing development a bell would have done me a great deal of good. Not nearly as much good as a few dozen rubber bumpers to hang around the boat.

On the negative side, by the end of the first day I had still not left the harbor and was tied up to the courtesy dock because the motor would not start, and I did not have a clue as to how I could sail the boat back against the wind and into my slip at the dock. On the positive side, I had learned to put the mainsail up and get it down in a hurry—a big hurry. I had met lots of people, some of whom wanted to kill me and several of whom tried to help me, and I had learned to sail the boat in something approximating a straight line and to make it turn—come about—without wetting myself or screaming, although none of this happened with any apparent plan or thought or regularity. Indeed, the boat seemed to have a mind of its own, and several times I found myself wrapped up and entangled in ropes in a helpless mess and looked up to see us (I already thought of the boat and me as something of a team, albeit a poorly trained one) heading into a dock full of boats and screaming people.

I had still not brought up the second sail, the jib, and the thought of doing it froze me cold. I would have terrified half the harbor if they’d known I was going to try it.

It was coming on to late evening, and I suddenly remembered the prime beauty of living on a boat—that I had everything with me necessary to life and didn’t have to go back to my dock. I decided to call it a day and spend the night at the courtesy dock.

When it became evident that I was going to stop for the day, the harbor settled down—people had stationed themselves at the ends of docks and slips with boat hooks to fend me off—and as they went back to their normal lives I found myself caught up in the mystical qualities of living on a boat on the sea.

I had made a trip on a boat and was spending the night at a different place.

True, the trip had been a series of calamities punctuated by terror, and I had only come a total of about three hundred yards from my home dock.

But still, I
had
traveled, and I
was
in a different place and had gotten there by sailing, and I was closer to the harbor mouth, to the sea, the reason for it all. I could see the jetties and the open sea from the courtesy dock, just a hundred and fifty yards away, and as I went below and crouched and crawled around, heating a can of beans on the alcohol stove, I felt the return of the excitement that had come over me as a child on the troopship, the excitement that has never really left me.