Block Island Odyssey

Confused Seas

It was my dream voyage. It was the trip I’d always wanted to take, aboard my very own vessel. And it would happen one fine day, as soon as I’d certified myself as fit for sea duty.

To sail to an island in the Atlantic I’d only visited once or twice, the easy way, by cheating, by ferry. Always with “other chicks”, as my wife likes to put it. The next time around I planned to do it right, with the chick I’d pledged the rest of my life to, on our very own sailboat. That had been my Big Idea, until Deb had gone and hijacked me on that same boat, to the Bahamas.

Now there was a nice little trip. I wrote about it, too, in a book you can purchase for a reasonable sum. Just punch in “windandaprayer” on your favorite search engine and enjoy the journey. My favorite search engine happens to be a Morgan 34 sloop named Laura Lynn, but now I’m just playing with words.

Despite the successful completion of that somewhat more ambitious nautical endeavor, there was left in me a sense that a certain personal goal had gone unfulfilled. But there was still time on my biological clock, family cardiac history notwithstanding. Weren’t we as often as not referred to as “the kids” (Isn’t that cute? I was fifty at the time) on the aforementioned journey? Had we not proven we could negotiate a year away from home, combing an entire continental seaboard if we put our minds to it? How hard could it be then, to reach a well-scoped island off the tip of Montauk?

It was a laughable distance now, in our seasoned estimate. A hop, skip, and Long Island jump offshore. We’d be crying “Land ho!” before the coast of Connecticut was spitting distance off our stern. Still I managed, as is my custom, to worry the pants off the thing. Once the time frame had been established for late July, with four days allotted each for the leaving from and returning to our home harbor of Manhasset Bay, with three days set aside for island tomfoolery, I started plotting for disaster.

We could’ve turned around in fear and loathing any time we wanted. The Long Island Sound is generously pocked on both shores with viable avenues of escape, if you don’t read into the fine print.

But see, I like to read into the fine print. Boat people have prospered for generations around harbors I might write off as untenable due to excess pollen counts. I knew from sad experience that you can dismiss any navigable stretch of water, given the proper irrational fear born of unfamiliarity. I prefer to look at every listed anchorage as a potential opportunity to sink our boat.

This is where Deb always steps in. With thousands of miles under her luscious keel, my mate is still unable to reliably tie a clove hitch. If you have issues with that confession, Mr. Burr, I’ll gladly challenge you to a duel. And I’ll give you some insider information: I can’t hit the broad side of a boat shed with a skeet choke.

The thing is, despite Deb’s refusal to retain any nautical lesson proffered thus far, she makes magical things happen for her tentative crew. I don’t care if you can weave storm sails from the spider webs salvaged from your shrouds, you’re going nowhere without the right mindset. Deb has positive attitude in abundance, and no amount of ignorance on a subject will dissuade her from tackling a challenge head on. So we were going to go to Block Island, on a schedule that worked for her.

I’m a freelancer, so I can flip off any work I want to. Deb has a real job, and she wants a real vacation, so I got the boat and myself ready, as per her itinerary. We were loaded down with more stuff than we’d taken on our sabbatical to the Bahamas. I’d listed what we’d forgotten on that trip and made sure we didn’t forget it this time. I packed a radar reflector, just to spite myself. It’d been somehow waylaid in the garage during our last trip, but it wouldn’t be this time, just in case we ran into pea soup at the onset of a lazy mid-summer’s morning and were still stupid enough to raise anchor. I took a sextant too, a frivolous gift from my brother, on the off chance we were boarded by Rhode Island pirates demanding any stuff I didn't know how to use, or my life. We should’ve packed more Oreos instead.

But I did pack everything we would need. Everything but the kitchen sink. Check that. Everything but the kitchen sink, and my wallet.

This is wonderful. I wonder if I've forgotten anything.

It is a sad commentary for a survival-oriented guy like myself, that he can be reduced to tears when he realizes that his Stop & Shop discount card has been left ashore. The fact is, most of my swagger for this trip was founded on media-induced complacency. If I’d actually left home something important, I’d recited, we could always go into town and buy it with a credit card, while the accompanying reminiscences would be provided, gratis.

So there I was, all gussied up in the saloon, having radioed from our mooring in Northport, New York (our first day’s stop) for a complimentary launch ride into town. I was now frantically searching for the fanny pack that announces to the world that I am an Olympic-Class Dweeb. The cold sweats that overtook me came near in intensity to the bout I'd had somewhere along the Carolinas when we’d dragged anchor in the middle of the night during a horrific squall, while stark naked. Read all about it in the aforementioned book. Oh yeah, baby.

I was fit to be tied. Or, if you ask Deb, I was fit to be tossed overboard. I could not shake my wretched mistake. We had just enough chump change between us to scrounge a meal in this otherwise completely quaint coastal destination (the food tasted bitter, the town reeked of sour sweat, and the sounds from the local band shell seemed funneled from the lowest levels of Dante’s Inferno), and to tip the launch chick to get back to our boat. Yes, I said launch chick. My own chick had rightfully deserted me in spirit, and I was on my own. Survival instinct was in play. I was, in the parlance of your extreme sailor, a real pill.

Northport's Launch Chick

We considered turning the boat around right then and there, or maybe taking a taxi home, or possibly a commuter train. Each solution would have proven costly to our collective wallet (which we didn’t have) and/or time (which I weigh heavily in the forward direction). We finally called Deb’s sister Laura (the inspiration for our boat's moniker and much else in life). She dispatched her husband Vincent, who retrieved the wayward fanny pack from the back seat of our garaged sedan, where I’d left it while searching for important stuff to stow onboard. How do you spell “Loser”?

Laur and Vin drove to Northport the next day to make the drop-off, taking a half hour or so to do in a car what it had taken us the lion's share of a day to accomplish by sailboat. We treated them to dinner for their trouble. The food was delectable, and the company unsurpassed. Afterward, the town smelled of lilacs, and a celestial choir was in perfect pitch at the bandshell. Try never to be in a hurry when traveling by boat. I mean never.

We were again independent, as is a newly bandaged child once he remounts his trike, to set off in search of new potholes to challenge. I’m not sure what I learned from the incident. Perhaps as little as nothing, but maybe this: Attitude is Everything. But then I already knew that.

Because Deb has limitless capacity for forgiveness, we were on our way east the next morning, full of nothing but anticipation. Women rock, don’t they? Thank the heavens, because this story is nothing but euphoric from here on in. Which makes it just about over, doesn’t it?

Each morning was ripe with promise, each evening a celebration of the day’s gifts. Block Island was a gem: raucous, primal, sublime. We were reminded yet again what a great, grand thing a small boat can do for the soul.

And the memories were priced as advertised.

Saluting Block Island's sunset.

Protecting the Investment

Save the forests and your sanity. Buy an all plastic boat.

While he walked among us, Phil Hartman gave to the world what it so sorely needs: the medicinal gift of laughter. Of his countless contributions, I’ll miss him most for what I consider his greatest role, that of the Anal Retentive Chef.

I’m not sure how many times Phil reprised this particular character who, driven by an all-consuming fetish for cleanliness, could never quite get to the point where anything edible was actually plated in his studio kitchen. You could have eaten off any of its surfaces, if only a scrap of food had been spared his OCD-driven sensibilities. The ingredients for each recipe ultimately got packed off double-hermetically sealed to the garbage, while the butcher block remained pristine.

Somehow Phil’s tortured culinary lessons remind me of the prescribed way to go about the varnishing of one’s boat. Admittedly, a boat bedecked with properly maintained brightwork is a sight to behold, and I’ll hazard a further assertion. The best way to behold such a vision is from the helm of your own all-plastic tub.

Last year about this time I finished putting the sixth coat of varnish (I was told I quit too soon) on virtually every last bit of exterior teak on my own infernal floating contraption. Mine happens to be a Morgan 34, built by Charlie Morgan in 1970. I hear Charlie is still thriving in his eighties. If I ever discover his whereabouts, he most likely emceeing some floating invasion somewhere south of my home port, I’ll wring his neck.

I’m no nautical engineer, but I’m thinking Charlie must have had an overstaffed and under-challenged carpentry crew there in St. Petersburg in the early seventies. Those guys, who I bet couldn’t swim to save themselves (you try, with less than a full compliment of fingers), wanted to show Charlie what could be done with a little imagination and a generous stand of well-seasoned timber.

Every sailboat owner knows of the countless attachment points there are on a sailboat, for all the things you can imagine attaching to what would otherwise be an uncluttered deck. I can only imagine that after Charlie finished penciling in a functional boat at the drawing board, his lumberjacks all gathered round him and crowed, “Hey Charlie, how about we set all your attachment points off with some really fine looking teak? We can mount stuff on wood, change some things from metal to wood, maybe throw in a few wood accents that have no purpose whatsoever, just for the fun of it. Then we call it a yacht, and you can jack up the price!”

That is what I bet happened. Charlie said. “Here’s the blueprint, boys. Now you go and lay on some nice grainy accents, the kind that give suburban couch captains the drools.”

I’ve got teak toe rail, teak coamings, a teak cockpit sole, and teak mounting platforms for all points of air ingress and egress. There are teak pads where the boarding ladder is mounted, and its rungs are teaked. Turning sheaves, and a mast-mounted winch sit on thrones of teak. The handrails are all teak, as are the top surfaces of the companionway sliding hatch and stern lazarette, the last two items striped like the side panels of station wagons from a bygone era. They’re the cat’s meow, Daddy-oh.

It looks like somebody poured Elmer's glue over our deck and placed it downwind of a wood chipper. Yet somewhere underneath all this lumber is a plain old fiberglass boat. I have, then, the worst of both worlds: all the work, with none of the respect.

A couple years ago, in a fit of depravity, I replaced our miniscule cockpit table with a Rube Goldbergian teak contraption, something that was also available in a pricier polyethylene model. I chose to save myself a few bucks, in order that I might lose my mind.

It is impossible to swallow the proper procedure for maintaining brightwork with a straight face. You just have to laugh at the directions offered by the boat gurus. After consulting them, I stared giddily at the task ahead of me. Laughing aside, there is no shame in a good cry once in a while.

If you own a boat like mine, you will need to rent a pick-up truck to haul everything required for a proper varnish job. It will consume enough masking tape to circle the globe thrice, and enough sandpaper to denude your favorite beach. Toss in brushes, varnish, thinners, strippers, bleach to attack mold, tac rags (I’m kidding. You’ll use the stack of ratty t-shirts your wife has been pleading with you to ditch), knee pads if you’re smart, ladders, power sanders, sunscreen (you will bake yourself for days), dust masks, and I forget what else. Which is okay, because you will too.

This is the kind of job that spawns preemptive jobs. You’ll realize that to do the job efficiently, you’ll want to remove a lot of hardware. In the process, you’ll destroy some of it and have to order more. Stripped bolts of non-standard sizes will be special-ordered. Some parts, perfectly fine where they’d been petrifying until you wrenched them from their perches, having been specially designed by Noah himself for an ancient arc, will no longer be obtainable. You will then strike up conversations with fabricators. Fabricators are guys who don’t own their own boats just yet, but they’re working on it with your help. The more items you dissect and destroy, the further away you will be from ever laying a loaded brush to wood.

As I worked on my own boat, I heard others doing likewise. There were the sounds of miscellaneous struggle, the sanding of wood mixed with a chorus of cussing produced by the grating of knuckles, barking of shins, and general thwacking of extremities.

We were all busy with these awful jobs for one reason. Our boats were not in the water, where we could have been having fun on them. Had the boatyards done what we’d wanted them to do, which is predict a half year in advance when nice weather would arrive, and put our boats in the water a day ahead of that date so we could have some fun, our boats would all be in the water in an admittedly sad state of disrepair, and fun to be on.

This ritual has been replayed every year since the invention of the boat. So, if you’re thinking of buying a boat, get used to the fact that one of the main joys of boat ownership is that of the protractedly delayed pleasure. In that respect it’s a lot like sex, but with higher overhead and less time at the helm.

When it came time to prep the wood, I found that my palm sander was too bulky to get to all the nooks and crannies wood could be found. So I bought a little detail sander, one with a prosthetic protuberance that digs into tight places. It has a Velcro nose for which I must cut lots of bits of special sandpaper, if I choose not to special-order those items and pay shipping-and-handling fees four times the value of the product, which is made of sand and wood pulp. In my next career, I wish to be a shipper/handler. Look out, Bill Gates.

What I really needed was to borrow that sonic thing my dentist uses on plaque around my gum line, to destroy flaking varnish around the bases of cleats and whatnot. No way was I removing through-bolted hardware. I was not going to be one of those guys who did it right, so I could write an inspirational article about my fulfilling, decade-long refit.

Still, it had to be right enough, because I was really doing this for my wife. Women, I believe, would be happy as clams on a boat that leaked like a sieve, as long as it was looking good while heading for the bottom. In any event, Deb does not get excited about upgrades to diesel engines, so I was going to have to show her a fancy finish where it counts: the ego.

When I started sanding down to raw wood, I found that previous owners had tried all sorts of ways of avoiding serious work. Coats of varnish had been slopped on and casually laid over untreated areas. “Wood tone” paint had been tried on occasion. It’s a whispered fact that paint will better protect your wood than varnish, or any other material you might use, but then people wouldn’t gawk at your hubris on display as your vessels crossed paths, so what would be the point?

I sanded for days on my two bit knees, sometimes by hand with bitty strips of sandpaper, sometimes wearing a mask, and sometimes not, when the combination of my own stifling backflow of breath and the fogging of my corrective lenses threatened my sanity. At times I preferred the hacking and wheezing the work inflicted on my unprotected lungs. This is not a rational project, I guarantee you.

When I finally got down to bare wood, the boat looked kind of nice, like a newborn baby full of the promise of tomorrow. It is said that teak is perfectly happy to live this way, and will age to a very functional gray over time. Gray? Oh, I don’t think so.

I taped off the wood. This took the lion’s share of a day. You might be tempted to forgo this step when outfitting the new infant’s room, thinking you’ll just be real careful with the brush. This is always a huge mistake. Bite the bullet. Use the blue stuff. It makes your accomplishment stand out like a sore thumb.

The first coat of varnish is the most satisfying, because you can actually view what appears to be progress. After that you will attempt to convince yourself there is a reason you come back day after day to add an invisible layer of protection. It does seem to be getting shinier. Have you already hit this spot? It’s kind of sticky. Perhaps you should have been more regimented in your procedure. Next time go from the base of the third stanchion to the midship cleat before you shift the can. Brush only in one direction, ideally toward your most recent work, or alternatively away from it, depending on which guru you worship. This assures that you’ll take twice as long to lay down a coat. Oh, and make sure you use only the most expensive brush you can find, preferably one made from the ear tufts of virgin female Himalayan Yaks that only graze above thirteen thousand feet. Or, the cheapest foam brush made. Your call. Anything in between will ruin your finish, say the gurus.

But one must not simply dip one’s brush directly into the varnish can. Oh no, one must decant the portion one plans on applying each day, as one would do before savoring a fine wine with guests visiting from the Dordogne. If you’re a beer drinker, you’re screwed.

Unlike your bottle of Chateau La d’ Da, however, you should water down your first varnish coats in a series of spirit dilutions that I forewent, choosing to go full strength from the can from the get-go. I drink out of the bottle, too. Sometimes the gurus need to be put in their place.

To further postpone job completion, before each subsequent layer goes on, you have to sand off the previous coat. Not all of it, of course, just some, to remove all the muck and bugs that were blown onto your last coat. Because your boat now illustrates, much like a child’s science exhibit does with plastic dinosaur replicas and molasses, the machinations of the La Brea tar pits.

The other reason you sand is to improve adhesion. Scuffing up your work makes the next coat hold better. Well okay, if the gurus say so, even though the goop I inadvertently dolloped onto the deck yesterday without any prep work seems to be adhering just fine, thank you.

Next, you take a tac rag (old t-shirt, like I said) to the newly sanded surface to make it all nice and smooth. Why bother? This is, after all, a boat! We require traction. Even the seats in our cockpits are designed with a non-skid surface, presumably to keep our well-heeled backsides from sliding into the ocean while we’re on a beat. Why would I want to give all the wood a slippery feel to it?

Oh hell, I sanded between coats.

The gurus say a minimum of six coats is required for a proper job. No one hazards a guess on the upper end of the equation, which I put at somewhere around eighty. But no matter how many you decide on, here is something you should never, ever do. Never, ever agree to host any young apprentices, like say a twelve-year old niece and her friend, out attempting to stave off boredom, by letting them come aboard to help you.

Whatever layer gets applied that day will savage everything you’ve worked for. No matter how detailed your varnishing seminar, how urgent your admonitions for care and patience, after a few minutes they’ll be slathering the stuff on like maple syrup on a Sunday morning short stack. Varnish will be gushing from your scuppers, flowing over your topsides, drizzling down your coamings like snot from a sniffling toddler. Better to let them go play unsupervised with the outboard engine.

Who am I kidding? She's the best crew

a captain could ask for.

After six coats (the bare minimum, which was all I could bear) and the half day it took for me to remove all the masking tape (a scalpel, tweezers, and some Goof Off came in handy), I stood back to inspect the result, and was met with the predictable emotional response: depression. If you do the job well, all this lovely brightwork will stand out in stark contrast to the rest of the boat, every remaining aspect of which is in desperate need of restorative therapy.

But the payoff is not far off. Come boating season, out on the water, you’ll find your passengers ignoring nature’s wonders, rapt as they are at the artistry of your work. Then, at some point you’re bound to hear, “Hey, Cap! The base of your starboard spreader.”

“What? What’s the problem?”

“You missed a spot.”

I look forward to that exchange. I really do. It’ll give me a chance to finally practice a live MOB drill.

That’s if you do the job at all. See, you’re supposed to wait for the right weather window. No sun, low humidity, light to no breeze, temperature between fifty-five and seventy-five, or the gurus seem to imply that your work will turn into a pumpkin. We’re talking eight to ten contiguous days of this, in April. Where I live, that kind of weather is as likely to show up as a flock of pelicans.

If you do pull it off, take a moment to enjoy your work before you put in, because you know what’s coming next. Your mate, having lavished the requisite bit of faint praise, will now notice that the hull could use a nice wax job.

What the? More @%*$&# wood? I'll hit it next year.

Nautical Nightmare

Red sky in the morning...

It was my worst nightmare. My worst nightmare.

The skeptical among you are suspecting that little more than dramatic hyperbole is on display here, and it is true that I have a dangerously active imagination, one that seems to loiter on the dark side. I’m also a light sleeper prone to some pretty strange phantasms. Let’s put it this way then, though it sounds a bit like an SUV commercial: It was the likeliest horrible boating scenario I most commonly and frequently obsess over. I was now in the middle of it, most definitely wide awake, and buck naked to boot.

My wife Deb and I were homeward bound on our yearlong “seabattical”, having quit our New York City based careers to stretch our wings while we still had the ability to flap. Folks thought we were courageous. Folks thought we were audacious. Folks thought we were nuts.

Our sailing experience prior to the trip consisted of fair-weather daysailing on the Long Island Sound in and around our home waters of Manhasset Bay. We’d also survived three bareboat charters, twice to the bathtub that is the BVIs, and once to the Leewards, all on well-appointed modern yachts with plenty of gadgetry and headroom. Not much to prepare us for a year of living on a seventies era sloop with fairly Spartan accommodations.

We were just looking for something we could tool around in locally when we stumbled on the Morgan 34. Deb knew she wanted the boat the moment she spied her classic lines. I was less sure, as is always the case with me. I knew nothing about Morgans. I knew this one had an impressively shallow draft with a retractable centerboard because the broker told me so. What to make of that spiffy accessory I had no idea. Research, my favorite hobby, was in order.

Deb is the mover-shaker of this crew. I come along for the ride. Left to my own devices I’d have been content to prepare for a trip the length of the Long Island Sound till the day I was deposited in an assisted living facility. Deb sees the big picture. I see the demons lying in wait for those who follow their dreams. Deb suggested as an alternative to my proposed Block Island odyssey (a trip, mind you, of over a hundred miles, and some of it in open water, for gosh sakes) that we instead head to the Bahamas.

Did I mention that Deb is an excellent salesperson? Which is why, I pondered only for an instant, I was now standing in my birthday suit in the middle of the night with a howling, wind-driven rain pelting my privates, attempting to start a recalcitrant engine as our Laura Lynn dragged anchor toward the military base off of which we’d anchored at the end of our day’s run. We appeared to be commencing our assault on a civilian boat immediately downwind. After that strike I assumed we’d proceed to somewhere along the shore at Camp Lejune in North Carolina. Were I to daydream further, though technically it was nighttime, and there being no time for such reverie, I might have imagined the local military opening up with a defensive barrage, thus putting to an end the nude terrorist menace attempting to infiltrate their encampment, and putting me out of my wretched misery once and for all.

I do not mesh well with stress. Occasionally I catch health professionals referring to beneficial forms of the affliction. What a bunch of hokum. Now hear this: stress is always bad. I don’t need the character it is purported to build. If you ask me, all it builds is plaque on my artery walls. Ironic then to find myself in such a predicament, on such a trip, in what had been a campaign to purge all the seething bile formed by a quarter century of big city angst harbored in a small town boy's heart. Here on this ancient, leaking tub, stripped like a Perdue chicken waiting for his trip through the rotisserie.

When stressful events occur I become agitated and, worse still, tongue-tied. Every part of the boat becomes a thing-a-ma-jig. Deb is left to wondering if I want her to rig a spring line or put on her life vest and jump overboard. So there I was, screaming at her over the din for my "eye things". She’s thinking my glasses (which isn’t a bad guess) but I mean ski goggles, which I still consider one of my grand ideas for the trip, because my corneas feel like a couple of over-easy eggs getting a Tabasco basting.

Next I want something to put on, because rather remarkably in the few moments it’s taken me to get relative control of the boat I’ve taken to shuddering from a pervasive chill. I have no idea what I might have said by way of clothing request as Deb arrived at the companionway offering up a pair of gym shorts. I must have been an embarrassing sight for her in consideration of our fellow boaters, who I assumed were all certainly underdressed and in the midst of saving their own hides. What a sight for the heavens to behold, this navy of scampering bodies caught under the illumination of nature’s monumental strobe lights. It was as if soon-to-be-fallen angels were taking photos of the circus they’d incited.

Having finally worked out the wardrobe issue, with each of us in our foul weather gear, I prepared myself to babble incoherently about the present need to somehow retrieve our anchor, and then reset it, with the various crew duties and logistical considerations to follow forthwith. I hoped I might be given the momentary gift of tongues, and that all would be clear to Deb. Instead she disappeared toward the foredeck, into the blackened night. All was lost.

How so, mightn't one ask? Here's why I was convinced. This old boat of ours has no windlass. We’ve always raised anchor by hand, which has never been a problem with the lightweight “lunch hook” used on our regular day trips. When, however, we upgraded to a heavy primary anchor, and added through ignorance oversized chain to the equation the resulting loads proved too much for Deb’s physique. While my dime store back, an ancestral bequest, makes it no more pleasurable for me, the task of weighing anchor had since fallen exclusively to the guy onboard. Look forward to my next article, “Things Our Next Boat Must Have” hopefully in the near future.

So you see, all was now lost. We were dragging anchor, I was stuck at the wheel playing dodge-boat, with Deb at the bow attempting who-knew-what-all somewhere in the bowels of the tempest. All I could do was carry on with the task I would have assigned her, that of getting the boat positioned for as easy an anchor retrieval as possible, hoping the rode wouldn’t somehow foul the prop in the process. And wish for a miracle.

While contemplating the inscription for my gravestone (Here Lies the Ship’s Fool, He Who Never Had a Prayer) I began to hear mingled with the wind, rain and incessant peals of thunder the sound of chain rattling down the hawsehole. Interesting. This was a task Deb couldn’t do on a still bay on a calm summer day. Yet from a pitch black heaving deck (after a time no man in turmoil has ever accurately gauged) and over the roar of the heavens I heard her scream, “It’s up!”

She hadn’t broken a nail. My eyes water now at the memory of my mate staring at her hands, wondering how she’d done it. They were sore, as was her own back now, but so much worse could have happened to her, to us that night. I delineated each and every calamity I could imagine in the ensuing days. Instead, we’d reset the anchor and it had held the rest of the night, through a lightning storm of startling beauty that was wasted on us.

I am not a religious man, but frequently when pangs of doubt gnaw at me I’ve pleaded with vague, foggy deities to spare me certain contests of human will. To boaters so inclined, I’d suggest you save yourself the trouble of such entreaties. Pray instead, when the inevitable visits, for fortitude, clarity of mind, and perhaps a little luck.

Oh my aching back!

Fear

I want to go home!

One of FDR’s priceless aphorisms went like this: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He issued this solemn nugget during his first of many inaugural addresses, in an effort to Heimlich the nation out of its collective eco-funk during the Great Depression. His somber delivery was a distinct about-face from the buoyant tone he employed during the campaign to get the job in the first place. Well that only makes sense, doesn’t it? Item 1: Put on a good game face, and Item 2: Secure the high ground.

I believe that immediately after issuing the aforementioned quote, the newly elected Prez suffered a brain aneurysm and could no longer walk or have sex again. But don’t quote me on that. I consulted Conservapedia, just for kicks.

Years later (so many, in fact, that laws were enacted to put a curfew on Whitehouse visits) Roosevelt went on to stir the nation into a whole other frame of mind, by declaring December 7th a forever infamous day. It stands to reason that if one lives long enough, sooner or later every day becomes infamous, which is fine by me as long as we get to take it off.

I’m wondering, if the fear quote had been used on the foot soldiers heading off to the Ardennes Mountains with eighty pounds of Spam and M-1 rounds on their backs, how they might have responded. Maybe something like, “Uh, whaaa?!” Context is everything.

I’m sure Frank’s heart was in the right place, as are the tickers of all gung-ho heads of state. But it always sounds a little fishy, doesn’t it, when the guys in the big house tell us we just need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and suffer nobly for the sake of the carpetbaggers who sold us a bill of goods in the first place? But that is sometimes the job of the commander-in-chief. Sit on the sidelines, shaking the pompons, and cheering us on to all manner of foolish behavior.

Where the heck am I going with this? I’m definitely not trying to say boating is foolish behavior, although boating definitely encourages foolish behavior. I was just thinking about fear, and that quote popped into my head. Then I went off on what I like to call a Limbauputian tear, having completely ignored the quote’s original context. (PS: You really ought to read the whole of FDR’s inaugural speech. If nothing else, it proves that we’re doomed to repeat history, whether we’ve paid attention to it or not.)

Like I said, context is everything. Which is why I’m all over the place right now trying to salvage a crippled analogy. Fear certainly can muddle the mind, can’t it? Somebody launch the life raft, puh-leeze!

What I’m trying to say is, fear is sometimes a bit more complex than a simple, self-immobilizing funk. There certainly does exist that counterproductive, debilitating form of fear, that of the unknown. And there is the occasional bout of frozen catatonia, suffered by certain genetically programmed goats (which you can view, and torment if you’re so inclined, on Block Island), and also by humans (with no excuse whatsoever), whose' behavior is often portrayed by inert (but for their heaving cleavage) female movie characters, loaded weapon in hand, watching their boyfriends getting the crap kicked out of them by the bad guy.

But there is also the very righteous fear of the statistically possible, potentially horrible outcome. Starving and drowning come to mind.

You never know what tomorrow might bring, but if you’re going to spend it on a boat, you may be in for some fear-generating trouble. And if you get into it, don’t count on the Coast Guard to bail you out. They might just sit and watch you make an abject lesson out of yourself, which in some cases could be construed as a character-building exercise.

To say there is no point in worrying about whether or not something bad will happen to you today, because either it will or it won’t, simply deserves a good beating. That would be a lesson to the advisor. I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming, did you Socrates? If you had, you might have avoided having a boat hook jammed up your ass.

That’s one thing I fear, and you should too: having something jammed up your ass, while sailing. I’ve actually come close a few times.

And there it is! A lesson for all of us. Watch your backside. Whew! I pulled it off in the end. That was a squeaker, wasn’t it?

I’ve been scared a few times on a boat. Coming soon will be a story about one of those times.

PS: Call me psychic. Having finished this piece, I see that Beth Leonard has actually published a useful article on fear in the latest Cruising World. You would actually learn something from her.