"The area that is now the town in Mamaroneck was purchased from Native American Chief Wappaquewam and his brother Manhatahan by an Englishman named John Richbell..."
--Wikipedia
Deb and I have owned our Morgan 34 for close to twenty years now. Built in 1970 and having survived at least three previous name changes, she’s worn for us the name of Deb’s younger sister Laura, whom we lost to Crohn’s Disease a few short years ago. Our Laura Lynn rests on a mooring in Manhasset Bay on the north shore of Long Island, and like many boats launched by hopeful mariners she spends considerably more time languishing by herself than in the wishful company of her crew.
Our boat is still reasonably seaworthy despite her years. Sailboats generally seem to age as well as old sailors as long as there's someone around to care for them. I'm sixty-four now, with a host of my own deficiencies to monitor. Despite my being composed of hardware from an earlier era I continue to manage the myriad issues that have sunk many a sailor’s relationship with his chosen sea siren.
Deb and I have seen precious little time aboard these past few boating seasons since one of life’s capricious currents deposited me on the continent’s Pacific shore. Being seasonally beached in LA thousands of miles from my home port caused me to question the continued funding of a vessel that lives on the East Coast, though she’s given us incalculable pleasure over the years. I'll not bore you with typical arguments for hastening the other happiest day in a boater's life. I will state that as in any cherished relationship, keeping things right between you and your love requires unwavering commitment.
In the midst of these personal concerns everything changed quite dramatically for all of us earthlings, and we find ourselves trapped in a dangerous reality, searching for ways of coping with a global pandemic that can exhibit a host of symptoms, the more benign among them being cabin fever.
Deb has honed her culinary skills to James Beardian levels since the near annihilation of New York City's restaurant industry. Among other diversions, I dug out a birthday gift given to me a decade or so ago by Laura’s daughter Emily. It was a wooden model kit of a Chesapeake Bay Flattie, requiring the kind of skill and patience of which I’m typically in short supply. It took a pandemic to launch the project, but the Emily Ann now rests proudly on my desk.
While Covid-19 has put a virtual stranglehold on my television industry, Deb is back to work, partly from home these last several months. Interestingly it's the “from home" part that has weighed heavily on her. Deprived of the personal interactions that fuel the human spirit whether at work or among family and friends, the absence of normal routine was doing a number on her psyche. Deb figured some fresh air was in order, and our boat seemed a safe method for achieving it.
Scan your harbor on any pleasant weekend and you'll see boaters who've come to your harbor precisely because it isn't their own. Boaters tend to be a tad restless, most of them anyway, though me not so much. But I needed to tend to my relationships, so that meant shaking off the cobwebs, getting serious about boat prep, hauling the big hook out of the garage (we have no windlass or anchor roller) and onto the boat because I can't sleep on a lunch hook, and neither should you. Oh, and looking at the map.
I doubt I'll ever be ready for another big trip like the one we took to the Abacos back when my back was more able. As I age, I recognize the loss of my always questionable capabilities, and I've simply lost confidence in my ability to keep us safe. I've witnessed eminently competent sailor friends lose more than the proverbial step, and on a sailboat things can go from fun to dangerous faster than, well actually faster than sailboats can go. Just recently I spoke to old friends who'd switched from sailboat to trawler, then onto cozy cottage, a common transition for snowbirds.
I'm still willing to hazard the occasional overnighter, and on the local chart I could see an old haunt of ours that goes by the name Mamaroneck, christened so probably by some ancient band of white settlers who'd butchered the sound of the local natives' tongue before ultimately butchering the locals themselves and extinguishing their language forever. I'll offer my own translation of Mamaroneck, which goes something like this: "Place where the big water alternately swallows and spits up parts of our Earth Mother placed by the facetious hand of the glacier gods." It's an approximation.
I call Mamaroneck a haunt because we were there at least once before, so I kind of knew how to get there and back in one piece. It’s a short sail from home, and a quiet, amenable place to anchor if you pay attention to what the original inhabitants had to say about it.
We went there with enough supplies to stay alive for the requisite period, with some extra stuff thrown in for good measure. Nobody was going to freeze, starve or threaten the bartender is all I’m saying. It was all working out quite nicely and would have continued in such a fashion if I hadn't been stingy with the anchor rode.
This calls for a flashback. When on our big trip back in 2005-2006, Deb and I ran afoul of the formidable forces of nature in St. Augustine, Florida. Our boat was hanging in that tumultuous harbor on a 35lb CQR with a short piece of chain and the requisite amount of nylon rode based on, you know, broadly accepted formulas. While we were doing a beer tasting at the local brewery, it turns out our boat was pirouetting around her center of lateral resistance amidst the tide and wind shifts. Our centerboard then proceeded to knife through the nylon rode, at which point our boat was set free to roam the anchorage until she was fortuitously lassoed by the alerted harbormaster.
Discovering our boat securely tied to the municipal dock at the end of our shore escapade when she should’ve been out there at anchor was a sobering experience. I immediately inquired as to where I could buy an anchor and a bunch of chain and proceeded to do so at a chandlery that caters to professional fisherman. Getting little in the way of advice, I managed to purchase oversized chain, and I've since been burdened when weighing anchor by hand (have I mentioned that our boat has no windlass?) with the weight of all that chain, anchor, and goo typically adhering to it all. It tends to make one reconsider the whole mathematical scope formula nonsense, which is something you should not do.
Mine is a shameful confession on many levels. It'd been a while since I put the big anchor over the side with all that chain providing an impressive catenary influence. I'd marked the chain with zip ties at intervals but had forgotten what they represented. In any event, the evening was on the calm side and predicted to stay the same, the ground tackle had held us countless times up and down the coast since the St. Augustine debacle, and I was contemplating the aggravation of having to extract all that gack hand-over-hand the next morning when leaving. Which is another thing you should not let your mind do.
It was a lovely afternoon, then a lovely evening, then time for bed. A while later, as is my custom, I awakened to tend to one of my nightly forays to the head. Those trips always involve me taking a look around to see if things are as they ought to be.
Looking around for the visual markers I'd memorized during the day - the dip in Hen Island to the East that splits the island in two at high tide, aligning with the yacht club flag pole on the far side of the adjacent harbor that served as a stationary range, and there’d been a moored schooner just off our... what the hell was that rock outcropping doing a few feet from our hull??? ... the view wasn't making any sense to my muddled mind.
Nothing will flush the after-effects of a nice bottle of Gruner faster than the realization that you're dragging anchor. As is my custom, I shifted into panic mode, telling Deb we had to get the boat started and out of there pronto. I didn't know if we were minutes or seconds away from a very painful rendezvous with what was listed on the charts as "Spike Island." The wind had picked up, the tide had risen considerably, and I hadn't paid out enough rode. Once again I felt the familiar trio of urgency, fear and nausea that occasionally visit the incautious sailor.
I'm going to skip a whole lot, because we survived. The engine started, we yelled our confused exchanges over the wind and diesel noise, likely awakening many of the sleeping seaside residents and maybe some of the souls of those long-lost native Americans. I didn't harm myself hauling the anchor up and we didn't wreck the boat, both of which outcomes had a reasonable chance of occurring that night.
We reset the anchor back where our evening had begun, paid out more than enough chain based on the aforementioned formula, set it but good and slept hardly a wink the rest of the night. Morning broke, a lovely sight to behold for creatures unequipped with night vision.
We contemplated the path our boat had to have taken the night before in order for us to have threaded a needle between various rocks and hard places along the shoreline. We watched a gaggle of paddleboarders out for a morning jaunt around Hen Island, which was back where it belonged. I wondered if the town was talking about us. We had our coffee and breakfast. I pulled out my GPS manual to relearn how to set an anchor alarm (I’d been terrified by false alarms in the past and had given up the practice). The manual was glued shut from an old leak at an overhead portlight. Guess I’ll have to print it out someday.
I lifted the anchor, hosed off about five pounds of dense mud from its flukes, lashed it to the foredeck and we drove home. I mean... oh you know what I mean.
Deb had gotten her well-deserved dose of fresh air while emotionally removed from the monumental stress of a global epidemic. I believe she said that the stress she’d experienced the previous night was a welcome change of pace from the kind she’d been experiencing of late. Deb always locates the silver lining.
I myself received another reprimand from our Earth Mother about paying proper respect to her formidable powers. At my age, will I ever learn? Anyway, having returned to dry land we slept that next night in a bed that hadn't shifted from where we'd placed it years ago.
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