A close relative of mine has spent a lot of time on the water.  He taught me a lot about the water and boats.  Looking back I find it interesting, that time spent with someone who had spent so much time around boats and the water, well as much time as my cousin had.  When I have gotten a chance, those who have had this time seem to be so critical of that lifestyle, maybe “cynical” is a more accurate term. Well, kind of.

It was my cousin who told me, “the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life is the day he buys the boat, and the day he sells the boat.”  His cynical nautical repertoire was long, and it spoke more to me of the number of boats he had owned over his lifetime, and possibly those times boating with those close to him then it did any hatred for his time adrift.  Although not crusty himself, his stories for the water and for boats specifically were made of this crusty wisdom, kind of like the salt of the sea had gotten it’s own say in his stories.  The thing was, if you really listened, it was more like a story being told by an silver-haired deep-wrinkled man speaking raspy of a long shared life with a wife, the story crusty, but the look of his eye wet; all the evidence that he would repeat that life over in an instant.

When my cousin didn’t have a boat, he talked crusty of them and often.

The Sea Blues

I had not really considered myself a “boater” although looking back I had spent much of my time on that same water with my cousin.  The Atlantic is a beautiful thing.  My grandfather was a fisherman, I got to ride in his wooden boat on the Mediterranean with him years ago to fish.  The Mediterranean is a beautiful thing.  As a little girl I guess I knew what I was doing was fishing. I actually loved catching crabs with nothing but a line, a chicken leg, and a bucket.  On good weeks on the dock, I could fill that bucket high enough to feed the whole family.  The dock was a beautiful thing.

Is it a natural thing, to love a smell that no one should love?  Fuel, rust, wood, water, rot, and fish; is it the newness of youth that allows us to hear the song of the waves slapping, to experience the spray, mixing those seemingly intense textures into a feeling, maybe we can call it  a world, and depositing it deep into our minds?  Is there some kind of light that shines special from the water, those clouds, the mistiest of days, that chisels an image of the comfort for such a seemingly inhospitable place?

You know it when you have it.  You know it when someone else does.  It was not soon after my teens when I remember knowing that I never wanted to live more than an hour from the water.

The Pacific is a Beautiful Thing

I love a port town.

Learning to Sail – The Language of a Culture

These days I am a long ways away from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.  I find myself happily about an hour close to the Pacific.  I own a boat now,  and here is my first venture into crusty wisdom sayings. I’ll start by telling you what you may already know: the Pacific ain’t real “pacific”.   (There, that wasn’t too painful.)  When we decided to take up sailing it wasn’t a dock on the Pacific that we found our sailboat moored, it was on the banks of the “mighty” Columbia River. When I think of it, I find it hard to think of a better place where I would want to learning how to raise sail.

I have to give credit to my seafaring cousin, contrary to the rest of my family who seem to live life at the pace of a motorboat, he was the first and only to one buy and actually sail a sailboat.  For those who run the pace of motorboats, sailing seems a bit unfathomable.  “Why would anyone want to get from point “a” to point “b” slowly?” “Why oh why would you want to “think” about or putting so much effort into getting from point “a” to point “b”?”  When I think of it and those who love enjoying the water in this way, it completely makes sense.  My cousin found something other than speeding and fishing to enjoy on the water.  Maybe the ocean salt had found its way into him where he had gone beyond feeling separate from the environment.  I got this feeling from him when he talked about sailing and why he liked it when he took me out.   He was the first of a few to mention how sailing brought him closer to experiencing the environment, the water, the wind, the waves, and respect for that environment more than any other forms of boating he had tried.  Now that I have started to sail a bit, it is easy to believe him.

Of the many things my cousin taught me, but one that I didn’t really appreciate till now was the actual  ”language” of the water.  Not a secret language of course, but one that has been used by those who had traveled on the seas for centuries.  Had I thought of it like that then I may have kept more of it in my memory and maybe the sooner I would have brought myself to learn sailing.  It is of no consequence though, because I am learning it now.

The Dialect of Sailing

So that is what I have been doing lately, spending my off water “rainy” hours learning the different parts of a sailboat, along with the different nouns and verbs of sailing.  It is with terrific excitement to learn such a rich and historical vocabulary tied so close to  the culture of the water.  Although not used on a salty sea, but on the Columbia, the vocabulary  will surely “bend” well with my existing feelings, smells, and the memories of my youth and of the larger water.

Here is a cool site that has a great list of sailing terms : http://www.schoonerman.com/sailingterms/

Oh Yeah…

My cousin was the first person I sent a picture of the little sailboat after we bought it.   What surprised me was that he wasn’t surprised.   “I figured you for sailing”  he said on the phone as I imagined his smile,  ”Just keep throwing money in her hull, and she will serve you well.”