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Ah, for those lazy summer days on Barnegat Bay near Tom's River, New Jersey. My dad and I used to load up our Sunfish on the rooftop carrier, collect one of my friends, and trek off to our not-so-secret sailing spot, where Dad had his Lightning anchored on an old Clorox bottle and a rock. He'd go off in his boat, which was big enough for a nice day-sail, but not big enough for overnight houseguests or boy-crazy teenagers, and we'd go off in ours, which was (is - I still have her!) essentially an overgrown surfboard with a cockpit (okay, a foot-hole) and a sail. I, as Captain, manned the helm, and handed the sheet - the rope to control the mainsail (the only sail on a Sunfish) -- to my noble First Mate, who was often onboard a sailboat for the first time in her life. She at first felt grateful to have command over the sailboat's speed and, shall we say, angle relative to the water. How fondly I recall those evenings when the wind traded places with the mosquitoes. Becalmed out in the middle of Barnegat Bay on WIPEOUT (her name, prominently displayed in gold stick-on letters on the stern) with the First Mate glaring at me, mosquitoes humming their peculiar lullaby. I would gently remind her that, although she could no longer pry her numb hands from the sheet to which she'd clung all day long -- sometimes in abject terror (WIPEOUT, remember?) -- in order to slap the mosquitoes, the wind no longer threatened to dump us into the cedar waters of the Barnegat. The Bay isn't very deep (in fact, sailboats are always getting hung up on the shifting bottom if they get out of the channel) but … have you ever snorkeled in Barnegat Bay? Wooee, there are some critters in there, lurking in the soft mud, just waiting for a set of wriggling toes for lunch. I didn't want to step on them, and none of my pals did either. So, as soon as a gust of wind tipped us one degree toward the water, out would go the mainsail (my friends quickly learned how to stop the tipping). As the day wore on, my First Mate of the week would grow braver. "Let's see how far we can get this sucker to lay over!" Inevitably, we'd keel over. It was important to do this in front of Admiral Farragut Academy, an all-boys military school that fronted Tom's River (which flows into the bay and is generally where I would break in my First Mates before hieing off to the bay proper where it was a bit farther to solid ground). See, there were always cute college-age sailing instructors out and about, sometimes with adorable southern accents, teaching the academy boys to sail. Two teenage girls in distress, swamped in the wake of stinkpots (motor boats) while their little ole Sunfish bobbed upside down, seemed to arouse protective instincts. All right, I'm old enough now to know those weren't protective instincts, those were predatory instincts, and we were about as helpless as Tweety Bird, but it was better than jumping up and down on the center board all by ourselves to upright the thing! One of the first things my friends would learn about sailing was what to do when the Captain said "Coming about" or "Ready about": Duck or get clonked in the head as the boom swings by while you tack (change direction heading into the wind). What I sometimes forgot to explain to them was the meaning of "jibe". Usually one turns into the wind, whereupon the boat slows down, the sail flaps slightly, and the boom swings politely across the deck, giving everyone time to duck before getting clonked in the head. When one jibes, one turns with the wind, which is fine if you're intending to sail before the wind. You just let the sail out and away you go. But when you're on a tack, and for reasons of your own decide to jibe, the boom swings fast and suddenly. And that's fine, if everyone onboard knows what "jibe" means. One minute the boom's out to heeeeeeeeeeeeeere (because First Mate didn't want to lay over too far, she had let the mainsail out to theeeeeeeere), the next, CLONK. "Whaddya mean we're gonna 'jibe'?" My First Mate, if she were still onboard, would rub her head, maybe take a swing at me ("I'll show you 'duck'!") if only her hands weren't frozen to the sheet. Oopsie. Of course, we all "get ours" eventually. My dad was standing on the shore of Beltzville Lake, up in the Poconos, watching as my college roommate and I tacked by. It had been a relaxing day with a gentle breeze. I had my feet up on the deck, not in the "cockpit". "Coming about," I warned Roomie, who was enjoying her first sail. We swung around, we successfully ducked, the sail swished out, and a gust of wind snatched freshly-waxed WIPEOUT right out from under me. As the renegade williwaw swept WIPEOUT away with Roomie, her hands frozen on the sheet, Roomie cried out, "Nan! What-do-I-do!" I could only cuss at first, while my father held his sides and laughed himself silly (at me, not at her). Finally I gathered my wits and hollered, "Let-go-the-sail!"
Amazingly, Roomie is still my friend. More amazingly, she came back for more, and sometimes even let me be Captain. |