A Legacy Project

That’s me, standing up in my sailboat. 

It’s sixteen feet long. The deck is a buttery yellow, the hull white. Up front the jib flutters in the breeze, while the main sail is slack. Why am I standing up? What’s that power boat doing so close by?

Inside my sailboat, lake water was knee-deep. My dad was sitting on the bench seat shivering. We had sailed ten minutes out toward the middle of Burt Lake. When the wind eased for a few minutes out there, I thought, Let’s get this craft moving. And took the reef out of the mainsail. Then the wind came back, in gusts coming across the lake, blasts of wind into what was now too much sail. In one long hard gust, before I could turn away from the wind, before I could let the main out, the boat pitched over and capsized. 

I knew what to do. Sort of. I had read about the drill, which lines to grab, stand on the keel, upright the boat. It worked. Sort of.

Batton down the hatches. Sailing lingo that means be ready. On a boat it’s a very specific detail.

This boat had two hatches that enclosed storage areas, one fore, one aft. They weren’t there just for storage. They were also floatation spaces, to hold the boat as high as possible in the water in the event it capsized. That emergency, when I sailed on small inland lakes, had always seemed theoretical. This was big water, and we were in it, and as I looked around after we raised the mast and main out of the water, I saw the bright yellow hatch in the rear floating away from the boat and lake water pouring into the floatation space. 

“What do we do now?” my dad said.

The sails were out of the water, where they were supposed to be. The wind was still gusting. We started to tip over again. Once we were upright I immediately lit upon the obvious. A boat full of water does not sail.

We were in the water ten minutes. It was August. Burt was cold. A guy in a big power boat came by and tossed us a line. My dad was shaking now. It was that cold. At the power boater’s suggestion, he swam over and climbed into that boat. I stayed on my sailboat. 

Stupid captain. Pilot error.

I thought, what if my daughter had come along? I thought. I could have killed her.  I could killed my father.