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Like most people, I prefer an audience when I mess up. The more
people who see me fall over while attempting a slapshot, or hear me
while guest-lecturing on the origins of the blues where an attempt
to say “folk culture” only to have it come out sounding a little
more Anglo-Saxon than I intended, the happier I am. Doesn’t bumbling
in plain sight help keep us humble? Doesn’t lubberly gaffing while
those on shore unfold their lawnchairs, open their beverages, and
settle in for a superb demonstration of seamanship remind us to go
easy on the slips and bungles of our fellow beings? No? You say
you’d rather keep your goof-ups to yourself, and having an audience
while you slip on the ice only makes your pain worse?
 All
of this leads us to the story of my most splendid off-the-couch
experience. A couple of issues ago, I wrote about my fondness for
adventure gear, and naturally enough, if you try–and like–a new
sport, entire vistas of gear and opportunities for getting out of
town suddenly present themselves. So, when my brother-in-law called
one morning and offered us his beater, 14-foot sailboat, I jumped at
the chance. He’d bought a new truck and, wanting to take a spin,
suggested we meet him halfway between his house and ours to pick up
the boat. We piled into the car and drove to Wells, Nevada, and
became the proud owners of a boat with two names, one awful–Toots
Baby–and the other, in a mysterious gothic script, not quite
legible–may have read Illumination or Illusion or maybe Bad Idea. My
brother-in-law showed us, on Main Street in Wells, how to stand the
mast and how to rig the yards and sails, and after the
demonstration, we struck the lot, hitched the boat to the car, and
headed for lunch and then for home.
What could be better? A free sailboat! Sure, nobody wants a boat
called Toots Baby and Ill Wind, but I was dazzled by the
possibilities. A beater needs to be fixed- up,
and surely there were a million gizmos for sailboats that I didn’t
yet know about but would just have to have. More, didn’t I love
stories of tall ships and the sea? Hadn’t I read all of Patrick
O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series, and all of Melville and Conrad,
and several Ramages and even a dozen of Bolitho’s adventures? I was
born to sail, and would soon enough be writing my tales of the high
seas (or at least Flathead Lake), and people would be comparing me
to Farley Mowat and C.S. Forester.
After checking out a few lakes near Missoula, and finding a few
sailboats slipped at Georgetown, we decided to introduce Toots Baby
to Montana waters in the lee of Discovery and the Pintler mountains.
While the boat was still on the trailer at the top of the ramp, we
did everything we had been taught, and soon enough, we were rigged
and ready and I eased the trailer down to the water. Our boat–our
boat!–floated nicely and within twenty minutes we were pushing away
from the dock. My wife–we’ll call her Jill to protect the
innocent–was at the helm since she had grown-up lake-sailing in the
Sierra Nevadas and certainly knew more than I did. I’d been in a
sailboat a couple of times, but everyone had been smart enough not
to let me do anything but sit and smile and sip a drink.
Yet the fates were against us, and we didn’t make it very far. Sure,
Toots was leaking a bit, but all boats leak, right, and I had my
travel mug and could easily bail, so we weren’t worried. We weren’t
worried, that is, until we noticed we had no steerage and the boat
seemed as likely to go sideways or backwards as forward in the
direction we thought we might like to go. Still, sailing is all
about physics, and I had passed
 Freshman
Physics at college, and so how hard could it be? We would be calm,
and rational, and figure out why we were drifting aft-backwards
toward the far shore. Well, if for every action, as Newton told us,
there’s an equal and opposite reaction, Toots needed to provide some
resistance. We double-checked the cranks on the twin center-boards
(dagger-boards? things-that-stick-out-of-the-bottom-of-the-boat?) to
make sure they were fully set. They seemed to be, or at least the
handles were at one end of their utmost arc, but at that moment we
couldn’t remember, or didn’t know, if the boards were down when the
handles were up, or if they were down when the handles were down. We
experimented, but after a moment or two the handles would slowly–and
all by themselves–return to the way we had found them. We could see
no way to lock them in place, and Toots didn’t seem to respond no
matter how we adjusted the cranks.
Meanwhile, we had drifted, in lazy circles several hundred yards
from the dock, and a glance sideways showed us a few folks at the
ramp seemingly looking in our direction.
We tried everything we could think of–we dropped the main and
hoisted the jib–couldn’t boats be sailed just with sails?–and tried
to use the rudder for resistance, but for some mysterious reason,
just as the center-boards seemed to find their way back into the
boat, the rudder refused to sit perpendicular in the water. It, too,
seemed not to like cold water.
 Another
glance at the shore showed us that more folks at the landing seemed
to be admiring our progress, and some had even set up their
lawnchairs and brought over their coolers. In frustration, I cursed
the weeds that seemed to be floating all around us. And then we
realized they weren’t floating so much as they were growing up out
of the water. After all, Georgetown Lake is a flooded farmer’s
field, and the bay we were in was too shallow to set the
center-boards. They kept dragging along the bottom and each time we
tried to force them down, they were knocked back up into the keel.
Glumly, we realized that no boards meant no sailing. At least for
us. After a few moments of testing the water temperature, and
wishing it was warmer, I did what any true sailor taken by the lee
would do: I jumped in, took the painter in hand, and began the long
walk back to the landing. Fortunately, the water was only up to my
chest–and sometimes, shoulders–and although the knee-deep mud kept
swiping my running shoes, I found them each time and carried on. It
was all very much like a scene from The Odyssey.
 To
make the day complete, as it turned out, the ramp was too steep and
Toots and the trailer too heavy for our 1988 Honda Accord, but
fortunately a guy with a 4X4 hooked on the front end of the car and
pulled the whole works out of the water and up the ramp to dry land.
If one couldn’t have asked for a better first experience with
their new boat, the story of Toots Baby and Georgetown doesn’t end
there. When my brother-in-law and his family came up for a visit, we
suggested a sail, and didn’t we know a great lake? Of course, my
brother-in-law sailed us all neatly out of the bay and into the
deeper water. We had a wonderful day, and we all took our turn at
the helm, even me.
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