"Never a ship sails out of a bay, but carries my heart as a stowaway."
- Roselle Mercier Montgomery

Was there ever such a romantic notion as the outward bound traveler? There he goes. The things he will see! The adventures he will have! The challenges he will face! God I wish I was that man. That is the romance of the boat leaving harbor.

But what about the boat that will never leave the harbor again, the rotting, sagging, peeling, crumbling hulk of a dream that once was the most perfect combination of aesthetic perfection, efficient function and self-sufficiency? There is also romance in the old wooden boat that has been left to rot in the field. Maybe more.

That guy who is sailing away. He has done it. He is no longer a dreamer. He is traveling. He is an insult, a smack in the face, a painful reminder that I am still on shore, dreaming my dreams. He is an asshole. (Well, not really, but since he is there and I am here, I don’t like him.)

However, standing next to me on land is a wooden boat that long ago was the prettiest thing on the water.

It once carried a young man to the Bahamas where he spent three years aimlessly roaming, the sun on his shoulders and the horizon in his eyes. He got sick and had to put the boat on the hard. He carefully wrapped it in many layers of plastic bail-wrap cast off by the farmer who owns the field. He wanted to get better so he set to refitting the boat. But he did not get better. The wind caught a corner of the plastic and blew it away. The squirrels discovered that boats are great larders. The sun blistered the varnish and the rain washed away all the salt that once remained from those years in the Bahamas. That man and I are brothers. We are both on land (well, he is in the land) hoping to get out to sea. Most people are not sailors, they are on shore looking out to sea. Even the sailors, most of the time they are on land wishing they weren't. Many people feel a great urge when they look to the edge of the world where water and sky meet. We feel the pull of the tide and we begin our romantic fantasy, we begin to build our dream to leave the harbor.

Four out of five dentists agree that the best way to get on the water is to buy a used plastic sailboat. Rebuilding an old wooden boat is the most expensive way to get an old wooden boat. Everything you do to fix this derelict only reveals more things that need to be done. It is a never ending headache of problems, except to the person who also takes pleasure in the process. Some people like working with wood. Some people like old things that still work. There is great satisfaction in knowing you did it yourself. And, it is an old saw that it isn’t about the destination. It is the journey that matters.

This particular romantic fantasy begins the moment you put your hand on the old wooden hull and think to yourself, “I can do this. I can see this boat in the water.” Maybe my travels don’t start until I hoist sail and head south. But my journey starts the moment I touch the hull and begin to plan her return to the water. Yes, it would be nice to be that man (or woman) sailing into the sunset. It’s like watching a movie and pretending that you are the main character. But maybe what we need and truly want is to be already on our journey, to be one who is working to put that dream into reality. That is not going to the movies, that is writing your own script and that is much greater romantic adventure.

Do you hear that?

The word I hear most frequently is my name. I have a job where at any given time there are 22 people clamoring for my attention, right now. I have a family where at any given time someone demands 22 things of me, right now. I like to do things for people and I never learned how to pronounce “no”, so I try to accommodate people. But now and then my head starts to explode and I need to unplug. For the past few years my chance to tune out has been a trip to North Ontario to open camp. There are no phones, no electricity, rudimentary plumbing, and no people. To get there involves a 12-hour drive, a 4-wheel-drive trek on a hidden trail, then a mile-long boat ride across an isolated lake to the camp, the only camp on the lake.


This level of seclusion isn’t for everybody. And that is a good thing. Otherwise, it might get crowded, which would defeat the point. Solitude is the point. For a few days at least there isn’t a single reason to utter a single word. I might curse out loud because the water pump won’t take a goddamn prime. But there is no real rush. I can have a cup of coffee and think about the problem. And up there the problems are always straightforward and always get solved. Better to keep my mouth shut and not injure the quietude with blasphemy.

Ok, it’s not perfectly silent. I use a generator to run the pump. The outboard engine takes me across the lake. An mp3 plays tunes while I eat. The hiss of the gas stove boils water for coffee. But the only mechanical sound I hear not coming from me is the distant drone of the occasional de Havilland Beaver carrying fisherman to distant lakes.
Opening camp is work, but it is done in time. Plenty of time to do things that people with time and solitude do: like go fishing.

After a day of doing, it is nice to lie in bed and listen to the uninterrupted night. But the peace is so complete that I am soon listening to my dreams. Several days in a row of this rigor and I am ready for anything and anyone.

The first words when I came out of the bush were at Tim Horton’s: “coffee, black.”

Tick Tock

I grow old. I see it I feel it. I am somewhat concerned with it. In the past three years I went from being a young man to being middle aged. I like a lot of what has happened. I tell you, I know how to get shit done. Some balls drop, but for the most part I get tons done. The pleasure of accomplishment has displaced the anxiety of insecurity. But time is passing. This commentary - Culture That Makes You Feel Old - got me thinking:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/culture-that-makes-you-feel-old,39572/
Me, I check my age every morning when I look at Wikipedia’s This Day in History (I do this because I teach social studies and I want the kids to see how history is a series of connections and consequences.) The part I notice in the long list of birthdays is the number of people older than me but still alive who have accomplished something significant like writing a book or doing public service worthy of note. Then I look at how many people worthy of a notation on the “Born on this day” list are younger than me are and there because they are celebrities.
I have discovered that I am on the tipping point. More frequently I see the names of people I admire, born after April 27, 1964.

Being There

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.” Henry David Thoreau

This is what it is all about: going there and being. Someone tipped me off to this blog by a young family cruising the Bahamas in a boat much like Haiku.

http://blog.mailasail.com/seafever

Our lives become so busy, filled with so many essential and critical deadlines, that sometimes it is hard to image how to live life doing something as basic as waking up, eating, playing, sleeping. How can a simple life be fulfilling?

I have learned that when I am able to put aside the societal expectations to live in contact with my environment, that I become engrossed in something deeply satisfying: living. I become aware that although I am just a very small part, I am indeed a part of all that I have met.

Stay tuned: soon I hope to post pictures of my footprints in the sand.

Infected

I know when I was infected with the disease. It was in my sleep when I was a very small child. My father came into my room and put this talisman over my bed. This was the last thing I saw before falling asleep and the first thing when I woke up.

The painting hung in my father’s room when he was a child. Today it hangs in my son’s bedroom.
These things can be tough to identify. But it sure looks like Shamrock V, the only remaining wooden J boat.

In hope that someone reading this can corroborate the ID, my grandfather received the painting as a gift from the widow of Marshall Sheppey, a tycoon from Toledo, Ohio who briefly owned the boat pictured and kept it in Miami. He hired Warren Sheppard to paint this portrait

Water in the veins

This is the earliest picture I have of me on the water. I’m the towhead sitting in my mother’s lap. The guy reaching for a match is my father’s best friend. Can’t ID the rest, although I can say there are a lot of them because we used to cram ourselves into these slab-sided pine skiffs from the Cutler Lake Lodge in North Ontario to get to the far end of the lake to spend the summer at my Grandpa Dirk’s fish camp.

These boats were amazing. Sixteen feet long and five feet wide, they were cross-planked on the bottom with the sides coming up at right angles. (They could easily have been Phil Bolger’s inspiration.) Billy McKnight, an old-time woodsman, logged the trees, milled them into thick boards and nailed them together with 10-penny nails. Painted grey and red, they were pushed by six-horse Johnsons. Despite constant use and abuse, they held up well. The last one found a permanent mud berth about 10 years after this picture was taken. Thirty years later I still find the bones of Billy’s old boats on the bottoms of quiet bays.

In those lodge skiffs I learned that pounding through the waves to a far shore in a sturdy wooden boat is just about the best way for a boy to discover adventure.

There’s lots of maths in a boat.

Specs for the Haiku by Iain Oughtred:
LOA: 9.15 m - 30' 0" Beam: 2.36 m - 7' 8" Draft: 0.40 m - 1' 3" Sail Area: 31.32 sq m - 337.00 sqf Weight: 1590.90 kg - 3500 lbs Displacement: 772.73 kg - 1700 lbs

People build boats by eye and experience all the time. One day, I might. But right now I follow the plans. That means I take a series of measurements and turn them into 3-D shapes. This is when I wish I was metric. But I do love how my brain feels after struggling with turning numbers into a spatial reality. And there are some interesting things to learn. For example, the numbers above mean the boat will only go 7.34 knots (or more than 8 miles an hour!)

The formula:
v = 1.34 x √LWL
where:
"LWL" is the length of the waterline in feet, and"v" is the speed of the vessel in knots (1kn=1.15mph)

I don’t understand the formula well enough to explain it, but I think it says a boat creates a hole in the water that it cannot climb out of. But it can push it forward at a speed that is defined by the length of the boat, or the distance between between the bow wave and the stern wave.

Other interestingly named numbers that affect speed are prismatic coefficient (explains how sharp-ended a boat is, knife versus brick going through the water) and wetted surface (how much of the hull’s surface comes in contact with the water creating drag.)

When I try to wrap my head around this stuff, I can’t think of anything else. And that is a good thing, at times.