I rowed, but at least I never capsized
A year later my father gave me a sailing dingy. Well, it was actually the dingy that went with the thirty-foot Egg Harbor that he bought, but he paid someone to outfit it with a centerboard and detachable rudder/tiller combination. And a mast and sail. No jib. Just the one sail. I tell you this because it has important implications. This sailboat, and I am stretching it to call this craft anything other than a dingy with a lot of chutzpah, was not a great challenge to racing vessels of any class. Mainly because when the wind took that little sail and the tide was anything but dead low or full high, in other words when the tide was running at all, that little sailing dingy, which probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds, went straight sideways. But fast. And the one sailing lesson I’d had with Capt. Bill didn’t really teach me how to deal with this situation. Or much of anything else in a sailboat. So I had to learn on my own. And that’s what I loved most about my father. He just handed me the tools and walked away. So I learned.
Pretty soon I was sailing sideways up and down our inlet and into the river on the other side of our little spit of land and then out into the Long Island Sound as far as the little dingy would take me in an afternoon, but not too far.
One very windy day I was skimming the shallows on the east side of our cove. As the dingy got close to shore the water depth lowered to about eighteen inches and the centerboard of my little craft dragged bottom and lifted up, almost popping out of its slot. Then the rudder caught the rocky bottom hard, flipped up to the water line and wrenched half free from the bronze fitting that looked like a horizontal L, the smaller leg of the L being the part that kept the rudder from lifting off. This broke off from the pressure and my rudder dangled precariously by the remaining lower L fitting, making steering my sailing dingy next to impossible. When I heard the crunch of the centerboard colliding with a large rock underwater and saw a sizable piece of flat wood pop to the surface and float away, I realized that the day’s sailing was over. I let go of the tiller, lowered the sail, furled it loosely and packed it down at my feet, grabbed my oars, pulled up the oarlocks and started pulling against the wind. All of Capt. Bill’s schooling came back to me in a flood and I suddenly saw the value in learning the basics.
When my father finally saw that sailing that dingy was truly a demented way to get from point A to point B, he bought me a small catamaran. An Aquacat. Two air-filled pontoons and a canvas sling strung between them above the water. But still only one sail on an aluminum mast at the top of which was a large white styrofoam ball that sat like the star on a Christmas tree. In case the cat ever capsized, this ball would in all likelihood keep you from turning a full 180 degrees and ending up with your mast stuck in the mud and the pontoons facing the sky. I never got to test this theory since I never capsized.
