HERE’S ANOTHER in the ongoing
series:
The
Disease Called Cruising
3.
The Sin of the Lurcher
My watchmate Nick turned out to be a
lurcher. Nick was easy-going, friendly, optimistic, and confident. A wonderful
person to sail with. Except for one thing. He lurched.
In his happy-go-lucky way, he never
wore a safety harness, even when our light-displacement 33-footer was hopping
over waves as busily as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest. Nick
rarely hung on to anything when he walked on deck, or in the cabin below.
The rest of us scrambled or crawled
everywhere in fresh weather, clinging to whatever handhold presented itself.
But Nick moved in a series of partially controlled lurches. He nearly drove me
crazy.
Sometimes, when he was on his way
back to the cockpit from the foredeck, he’d be thrown, tottering, to the edge
of the cabintop, where he would blithely let his guardian angel take charge.
Always, the boat rocked back the
other way just in time, and Nick would make another lurch in the general
direction he was aiming at.
He would take his mid-watch pee at
the leeward shrouds and never hang on. I
showed him how to do it, arm curled around the shrouds. One hand for the boat,
one hand for the family jewels. But no, it simply never occurred to him that he
might be flung overboard.
He would come back along the
sidedeck carrying a sailbag over his head, in an erratic series of lurches
whose length and timing seemed destined to end in his being catapulted over the
stern. And then he’d thump down next to you in the cockpit with that silly
friendly grin on his face, and what could you say that you hadn’t said a
hundred times before?
“If you go overboard, you’re dead,”
we’d say. “We’re hundreds of miles from the nearest land and out of the
shipping lanes. How long do you think it would take us to drop the spinnaker
and come back to find you?”
Nick would sit down quietly and
seriously and try to work it out.
“Never mind how long!” we’d snap
impatiently. “The exact time doesn’t matter. The point is, you don’t stand much
of a chance of being picked up. How are we going to explain it to your widow?”
Nick would look contrite for a few
hours and crawl ponderously around the deck like a hippo stuck in a mud hole.
But once a lurcher, always a lurcher.
Before you knew it, he’d be staggering around the foredeck again, holding the
spinnaker pole above his head in mid-jibe, teetering and swaying like a drunken
ballet dancer.
Somebody Up There was obviously
keeping an eye on Nick. He never fell overboard. He just drove us crazy.
I like to think he drove us nuts
because we were concerned about his welfare, but it could also have been
because Nick, with his smiles and his infinite faith, with his swashbuckling
lurches and his devil-may-care attitude, made the rest of us look and feel like
clinging, gutless wimps.
Nice as a man might be otherwise,
it’s hard to forgive him a sin like that.
Today’s
Thought
When you put to sea in your own boat, you become a different
and, for the time being at least, a better man.
— James S. Pitkin
Tailpiece
“Life’s
not fair.”
“What’s
your problem?”
“I
want to know why my sister has three brothers and I have only two.”
(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday,
Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)
2 comments:
But naturally there will be that little bit of schadenfreude when one day you hear he was lost at sea.
I understand what you mean, Edward, but I hope it never comes to that, and, if it did, I hope I would feel deep sorrow, not schadenfreude.
Nick and his wife are still cruising, and I think he has gotten a little more cautious at the urging of his wife.
John V.
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