Back in the 1980’s, my mother and stepfather had a business building and importing power boats from Taiwan. I would help out when they had a boat in the Annapolis Boat Show handing out literature, fielding questions, and giving them a break when they needed to get off the boat. During a lull in the action on one of those days in 1987, a small group of high school students came aboard and was poking through the boat. They were just killing time, looking for something fun to do and we began to chat a bit.
One of the students said he wasn’t into power boats but wanted to learn to sail. I told him I would be glad to take him out sailing and teach him the basics when the weather warmed up in the spring.
He gave me his phone number and when the weather warmed up I gave Sean a call. For the rest of that spring, summer and fall, we did a lot of sailing on the Kirby 25 that I had at the time. Occasionally, over time Sean would sail with me when he was home on vacation from college, and randomly thereafter once he had graduated and started his career and first marriage.
When his first marriage crashed, I took him cruising and bestowed a couple days’ worth of all of the clichés, hackneyed aphorisms, and proverbs that I could drum up to cheer him up and help him understand that it was not as dark as it seemed, he would still have good life ahead.
Sure enough Sean landed on both feet with a wonderful life, a great wife (who he met taking more advanced sailing lessons on a J-22), a couple children, and a career he enjoyed. Other than desiging a remodeling project on his home, I didn’t see much of Sean over the years as his family life settled in.
But earlier this year, we ran into each other in a restaurant and later he gave me a call during which he said that he and his wife wanted to get back into sailing. (I warned you that this was a long story.)
So, today we went sailing. It was a great day to be on the water. It was little nippy, but there were great winds and clear enough skies. Maybe the conditions were everybody’s ideal conditions since we were the only boat that was out there, but we made a fast trip down to the mouth of the West River then home again.
By the time we got to the mouth of the Severn, the conditions had become a little challenging with large downdrafts of the type that was likely to result in a nomination for “Best Drama during a Knockdown, Cabin Sides in the Water Shorts”. But all Synergy came through it with her dignity intact and brought the entire crew home with all of their fingers and toes and lots of great reminiscences.