Moving Someday
It’s time to move Someday.
A City of Marathon ordinance says that you’re not allowed to live on your boat while it’s in the boatyard. But, there’s a big loophole. Maritime Law says that if you can prove that you are just passing through, and you are making emergency repairs to your boat, or you are avoiding a storm at sea, you can live on it while you are doing the repairs. Ron has been avoiding a storm at sea for about three years now.
It may be a bureaucratic grey area, while the boat is up on land, but once the boat is back in the canal, after two weeks, if you aren’t paying rent and taxes, you and your boat had better be gone. I was only moving down the canal, barely a mile. But, I was cleaning up after two seasons of acquiring tools, materials and sailing gear. I left a marriage of 37 years with less stuff.
In preparation for the move, I caulked both port and starboard cabin moldings and cleaned up the boat, which had acquired a layer of leaves from the trees above. So much for the romance of parking the boat under the shade of an old mangrove tree. I moved all the tools and non-flammable liquids into the truck. I covered the back of the truck with the doubled-up blue tarp. Then, I tied all the boat’s gear down with ropes.
For the first time in two years Someday was ready to move.
I was about to wander up the lane of yachts to the office to see when the crane would arrive when I heard its diesel motor coming down the lane. The crane surrounded my boat with its two legs on either side. Even though the boxy hoist is entirely made of steel beams, watching the crane, one gets the impression of a mother penguin straddling her baby and waddling protectively down some barren rocky beach towards the ocean.
John pulled a lever and the two wide canvas straps slowly slipped under the belly of Someday. One sling at the front, the other strap under the stern. Finally, he pulled the two levers at the same time and both straps slowly tightened. With groaning and creaking, Someday was picked up from where it had rested for two years.
When the keel was only a foot off the ground, the crane’s engine screamed and the steel supports were taken away. Someday hung from the straps, totally at the mercy of John’s skill. A black blast of exhaust shot skyward from the motor announced that the crane and my boat was now moving. My brightly painted boat swayed down the canyon of the other boats like it was passing in review. It was magic.
I stood watching terrified the straps were going to slip, or bump into a building, or another boat, or the gantry would somehow fall. The crane wobbled towards the dock. I grabbed the cheap bottle of wine that I had bought just for the re-launching. I was just in time to splash a very small spray of wine over Someday’s bow as the keel hit the water. Then I drank the rest of the wine straight from the bottle. No need to waste all that good convenience-store wine on some boat.
As Someday nestled into the canal like a duck, John scrabbled aboard to check for leaks. John had supervised the launching and his experienced eye had quickly searched the interior of Someday.
“You got a small weep.” John’s head came back up from the cabin. “Not to worry.” He said to my probably ashen face. “It’s the wood washer on the depth finder. Once the wood swells up, it’ll stop.”
I suddenly wished I had more wine.
“Stay tied up to the dock overnight.” John said. “We’ll check the weep in the morning before you take off.”
“Take off?”
John laughed.
John and I tied Someday to the dock, and with a wave and another loud black blast of exhaust, he left me to the silence of the canal. I stood on the deck and looked around at my suddenly small world. It was one thing to decide to leave the boatyard in the heat of the moment, it was quite another to live with the decision.
I woke up several times that night and checked the weep, sure that salt water would explode inwards while I slept. Even though the canal’s sandy bottom was only three feet below my keel, and Someday was tied to the dock with four new very thick nylon ropes, I just knew I was going to sink. I lay in my bunk, sleeping bag up to my chin, staring at the floor hatch waiting for the glistening gurgle of canal water to silently but deathly ooze into my cabin as soon as I squeezed my eyes shut.
Next morning, the weep had stopped but the wind had risen. A lot.
“Where’d you get the outboard?” Ron asked, pointing to the tiny motor the size of a sewing machine.
“My friend Tim. He had a couple in his garage.”
“I can believe it.”
It was mid-morning. John and I stood on Someday’s rocking deck looking down the canal at my destination. Ron stood on the dock looking down at my boat. At the very end of the canal, a mile away, was the beam of Jacques Cousteau’s boat Moline Au Vent. That was my target. Beside that large boat, half-hidden by the overhanging trees, was the slip I had rented.
Getting my boat down there was the next step. Someday’s bottom had been repaired, painted, and the thru-hull valves were all new. She was afloat, clean, refitted, and was going to stay that way.
“No more climbing up and down that ladder.” I said to Ron. “Besides, that slip,” I pointed towards the end of the canal, “is $200 a month cheaper.”
“Where is our resident con man? Isn’t this?” Ron held up the bowline, “Bobby’s job?”
“Busy.” John said. But his eyes searched the line of boats.
“Wind’s picking up.” Ron said, eyes watching the palm trees rattling across the canal. Looking down at Jack’s tiny outboard strapped to the stern, Ron said; “You won’t be needing that to get down to Cousteau’s boat. Your problem is not going down the canal. Your problem will be not crashing right through the side of that French boat.”
“Gee, thanks. I’m glad I entertain you guys so much.”
“Think nothing of it.” Ron and John smiled.
They threw me the lines, and stood watching as Someday turned away from the dock and put the wind at its stern.
Maybe it was saying goodbye to familiar faces, or maybe it was the reminder of leaving yet another home, but sailing away from this, my boat’s resting place for the last two winters, made me sad. A tiny wave of gloom washed over me.
The wind whipped my collar. I watched the shoreline pass a whole lot faster than was comfortable. My stomach tightened. Screw the melancholy. I was going too fast. WAY too fast!
Out of the corner of my widening eyes, I saw the crab boats and the commercial fisherman’s dock rocketing past. To stay in control of the ten-knot wind pushing me, I had to go twelve knots. I was immediately riding a three-ton wobbly missile at fifteen knot down a narrow canal with very expensive yachts flashing by on either side.
I reached for the reverse position in Jack’s outboard motor.
As I reached around for the lever, I looked up and saw in the quickly receding boat-dock two tiny figures standing on the end of the pier watching me. One tiny figure reached out and slapped the other tiny figure’s back.
For Ron and John, who had spent years sailing their boats all over the Caribbean, finally ending up in this marina, Someday’s maiden voyage must have been the best entertainment they’d had in months.
I felt like HMS Titanic searching for an iceberg. I didn’t mind screwing up. I just didn’t like doing it in front of an audience. Especially this audience.
“I’m going to kill you guys!” I yelled.
They waved.
I cranked the handle on the outboard and the engine roared to life in full reverse. I looked at it in disbelief. I had attached the motor to the stern so that the motor would normally push forward. But, I had forgotten to insert the retainer bolt. There was no way to slow the boat down.
The roaring engine didn’t slow that boat down one iota. What was worse; once I put it in reverse the outboard lifted to the surface and the propeller only skimmed along the top of the water. All the motor did while I rocketed down the canal was to just mix vast quantities of Florida air into the canal. I stared at the white spinning boat propeller stuck out my boat’s ass end in disbelief.
“Ah shit! It’s a Weed Whacker!”
I looked up and over Someday’s bow where Jacques Cousteau’s boat filled my ever-widening eyes.
‘Oh nooo. I’m going to make the papers on this one!’
I had a choice between slamming head on into Jacques Cousteau’s boat, running into the mangroves, scraping along a line of the four boats that were going to be my new neighbors, or doing an impossible 90-degree turn into an empty slip.
Leaving the motor to wail out its useless agony, I ran to the bow and plopped down so I could use my feet as a bumper. My feet sticking out over Someday’s bow hit Jacques’ boat broadside with a resounding ‘thud’. The only things between me and thousands of dollars of damage to every boat within a hundred feet was my dirty Nikes.
Someday’s momentum remained unspent. The boat spun. I ran back and forth across Someday’s deck pushing away from Jacques catamaran on one side, and the dock on the other side with my feet, hands, booting and pushing back and forth, back and forth. My frantic jumping and kicking of neighboring boats was accompanied by the screaming of an angry, out-of-the-water, outboard motor.
A tree branch came crashing to the deck, just missing my head. The mast tangled in the trees above, a twisted branch fell on the deck. I threw the branch overboard. I kicked away Cousteau’s boat once again, and then ran across to the other side of Someday and pushed away from the other neighbor’s boat. Someday slowed, stopped. Then it rocked back and forth.
I reached over the stern and shut the screaming motor off. The silence that followed felt like an omen. My boat bobbed innocently between the dock, the shore, and this huge catamaran only a couple of yards away.
Someday had spun completely around and had missed…everything.
I looked up at that massive catamaran above me. There were two sized-9 footprints smudges right in the middle of all that white French fiberglass. By some miracle and within inches from the dock, Moulin Au Vent, the shoreline, all of my new neighbors’ boats, Someday had stopped, spun around and backed herself neatly and exactly into the middle of my new slip.
I looked around my new mooring and waited for the inevitable cawing from every old salt and tourist standing on the shoreline. I braced and waited. And waited. I looked around and saw, no one. Nobody had witnessed this graceless crash-landing.
Nobody.
I sat in the cockpit for several minutes contemplating my unbelievable luck. Shivering from the sweat that trickled down my back I finally looked up and said to myself,
“Well, that went pretty good.”
Rick Ranson 