Light My Fire!

Wood Island Light near Biddeford Pool

We’re spending the night in Biddeford Pool. This was pretty much our final stop before reaching Portland and civilization last year and I remember it very fondly. The fact that at this point this year our trip is not even half over yet allows me to see the quaint little harbor with new eyes, and even though the feeling is different this time around I think I love it even more. From our vantage point in the water the little town is a closely spaced cluster of summer cottages, while the rest of the shoreline is more sparsely populated and mostly wild. But of course, the view is further enhanced by that iconic symbol of public good and safety – a lighthouse.

Portsmouth Harbor Light

We have seen many lighthouses on this trip, some more beautiful than others, most with some kind of house attached or nearby, but all built for the same original purpose; a navigational tool for ships at sea. Largely obsolete with the utilization of GPS systems, lighthouses are kept nowadays mostly out of nostalgia. The feeling of safety and permanence evoked by a lighthouse is almost universal. Wikipedia sites an urban legend about a radio conversation between a U.S. naval vessel and an unidentified ship on a collision course. The naval vessel insists that the other ship change course, but the other ship continues to insist that the naval vessel do so. After the captain of the naval vessel identifies himself and demands a course change, the other party responds with, “I’m a lighthouse. It’s your call.” It’s amazing how easy it is to believe this story, even though it has been thoroughly debunked by many sources (including the U.S. Navy).

Baltimore Light

Our own Baltimore Light was advertised “For Sale” a few years ago, and last year Rick and I met up with one of the couples who bought it. They went in on the deal with another couple who thought the lighthouse would make for a cool vacation house – two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, all with a three hundred and sixty degree ocean view. I’d have to agree, the only caveat being you have to have a boat to get out there.

Stage Island Tower

At Biddeford Pool you get an added bonus – an ancient looking stone marker. This is technically not a lighthouse (no light), but at least during the daylight hours it would have been used navigationally the same way. I think it looks remarkably like the Shot Tower in Baltimore.

Boon Island

On our way to Biddeford, we passed what is reported to be the tallest lighthouse in New England, the Boon Island Light. The storms are so violent there that all the lighthouses they tried to erect got demolished. They finally succeeded in building this extra-tall long-lasting one in the 1800’s, but before that there were a lot of lost ships and lives. Boon Island is a tiny barren island, six miles off the coast of Maine. It is so named because it was seen as a “boon” granted by God by a small group of castaways shipwrecked there in the summer of 1682. A more famous shipwreck happened in the winter of 1710, when a British merchant ship crashed there. The fourteen crewmembers survived the wreck but had to endure a month's worth of cold winter conditions with no food or firewood. Imagine being stuck on an island within sight of land and not being able to communicate your plight to anyone on shore! Two of the crewmembers died of injuries they sustained during the wreck, and two more drowned while trying to get to shore on a make-shift raft. The remaining ten survived until they were rescued, but not before having to resort to cannibalism - a gruesome story that Rick's father loves to tell.

Determined to stick with our newly-renewed cocktail hour ritual, we sit out on the foredeck with our drinks and watch the sailing students in their cute little turnabouts. It has gotten rather cold now that we’ve made it to Maine and we had to really bundle up just to watch the sunset. It’s actually kind of a welcome change.

Our problems with the boat have mostly worked themselves out by now, but a couple weeks back when we were still having so much trouble we got some advice from one of our good friends Sally Swift. Sally is a very energetic and almost manically hard-working radio show producer, as well as a cookbook writer and foodie, who has a thing about lighting fires. I don’t really understand it, but Rick shares her love of pyromania and has many stories to tell from his childhood about fires that were started because of him – all accidental of course. Sally insists that to rid a new domicile of bad spirits one must burn sage and disperse the smoke all around. We have been desperate to rid ourselves of the spirit of Walter, the former owner of the boat, so we bought some sage and have been drying it for the past week in anticipation of a Walter-exorcism. It is finally ready for burning, so we put on some Stones music and crank up the stereo. Go Mick - “Get out of my life and don’t come back!”

Tomorrow we push on to Portland, Rick’s old stomping grounds. Let’s hope we are now Walter-free!

Portland Head Light

Balls!

I love Portsmouth. Located in sort of a crossroads between New Hampshire and Maine, the mouth of the Piscataquis is actually the confluence of a number of rivers , making for a very picturesque shoreline. One of the points of land jutting out into the river is occupied by a giant, castle-like structure that overlooks the rest of the harbor. We learn later from some of the locals at the yacht club that it is an old navy prison, built on an island and modeled after Alcatraz. It has not been used as a prison since the seventies and remains empty.

 I find quite a contrast between this beautifully crafted piece of early twentieth century architecture and the modern, ugly, garage-type storage bin right next door. The time and attention, not to mention money, that was obviously lavished on this older building is astounding compared to the lack of care and pride that is evidenced in many more modern efforts. The degree of aesthetic detail is particularly impressive considering that this building was meant to house military criminals.

The current is notoriously strong in this river and we decide that it will be safer and easier to take a mooring at the Portsmouth Yacht Club. Most moorings are denoted by an air-filled floating ball that keeps the mooring line near the surface, easy to pull up and then attach to your boat. This yacht club is particularly well endowed with enormous mooring balls – the small motor boat moored next to us is almost outgunned by its own ball. This provides a wonderful opportunity to come up with all kinds of size related jokes and we take full advantage.

We plan to go in to the club and take showers, but I think it would be fun to go for a quick swim first. Rick warns me that the water is cold – he got a small sample of it when he grabbed the mooring line – but I convince him to join me anyway. I mean, we’ve been swimming in ocean water all the way up the coast. How cold could it be? As soon as we touch the water I realize my mistake – big balls no more, this water is COOOOLD!!! Rick is taking his time getting up the ladder and I’m screaming for him to move so I can get out. The water must always be this cold because when we finally make it in for our mercifully hot showers, it is clear that we’ve made some points with the staff of the yacht club who saw us diving in.

Now cleaned up and ready for a night on the town, we hop in the dinghy and start up the river. It’s going to be a long trek and the tide is going out so we will be working against the current. We make it up about halfway, but the current is so strong that our little motor is no match for it; we are pretty much treading water at full speed. We might just be stuck with hot dogs for dinner after all. Thankfully, we are somewhat near another yacht club and the driver of their launch takes pity on us and offers us a ride. We pull the dinghy behind us, but getting off turns out to be almost a bigger problem. Michelle, the driver, pulls up ahead of where we want to go so that we can drift back, but it still takes all of Rick’s skill to get us in to the dinghy dock. Thanks Michelle, we owe you a dinner!

Portsmouth is an old port town but, unlike New Bedford, they seem to have survived the decline of the whaling and fishing industries very well. We only have one night to spend here, but I like it so much that I make Rick promise that we can stop in here again on our way back south in August. He says we’ll have to time our shore visit a bit better next time though. After a short walk around town and a fabulous seafood dinner, we head back in the dinghy, this time with the current.

A Day in the Life...

It seems that time passes quite differently on a boat. I did bring along a watch, but I stopped wearing it sometime in the first week of our trip. No rehearsals to attend, no appointments to keep – heaven. Rick has needed to pay more attention to the time because of the tides – not paying attention could easily screw up his navigation efforts – and we sort of decide together where we are going next, but mostly we just let each day pass without trying to insert too much of a schedule.

For Rick, each day begins with a cup of coffee and then usually some time spent at his navigation station/desk doing something on his computer. He looks at the weather forecast and the tide schedule, and then figures out where we might take the boat to our next stop. After that he likes to spend some time working, answering emails and writing. This is his time to really get somewhere on his latest book project and he needs to be pretty much left alone to concentrate. When we are at home in Baltimore he has a study on the third floor of our house where he can close the door to me and the rest of the world, but here on the boat it’s a bit more difficult.

My day starts a little differently; I pretty much wake up talking. I’ve always been a morning person, finding coffee totally unnecessary. While Rick is trying to work I putter around the galley, cleaning up, making breakfast, chatting away. Then I get on the computer myself and give a running commentary of the latest news and gossip. Rick has had to ask for a moratorium on talking while he’s working and I mostly remember, but it’s really hard. I try to visualize “the cone of silence” from Get Smart. I have had to bring along a number of things to do, since I knew this was going to be part of our daily routine. I read, blog, sew, all things I never seem to have enough time to do at home. One would think that getting internet on a boat would be a big problem, but not in these modern times. Our cell phones work almost everywhere, even quite a ways off shore, and Rick’s Iphone is set up as a “hotspot”, acting like a wifi and allowing simultaneous connections from both of our computers. We are somewhat limited by our battery power though  - the more actual sailing we do, the less we run the engine and that means we have less electricity to run all of our little gadgets. It’s a good thing I brought a hand powered sewing machine!

After a couple of hours of “quiet time”, we usually ready the boat and up anchor for a new destination. The traveling part of the day can be fun and exciting, but it can also be kind of boring depending on the weather and the scenery. It’s always interesting to go through a canal because there are lots of other boats around, and often people on the sides to look at. Wide open expanses of water have a very relaxing effect. Sometimes we go for hours with nothing new on the horizon. That’s usually when I fall asleep.

When we’re underway, Rick most often has the boat set up with either the auto-helm or the wind-vane. Both of these devices are self-steering aids that set the boat on a specific course and keep it there until you change it. The auto-helm is run on electricity (more battery power), while the wind-vane uses the wind to hold the boat steady. The auto-helm makes more sense to me – the wind vane looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption – but Rick seems to understand both of them very well and utilizes them quite a bit. When either self-steering method is used, you still have to look out for other boats or large buoys, but you are pretty much free to wander about the boat and do whatever you like.

The Monitor Wind Vane

Even with the steering taken care of Rick likes to stay on deck, scoping the water for sea life. He alerts me whenever he sees anything interesting, and I scramble about, grabbing the camera. Taking seascape pictures from a boat is really quite easy with a good digital camera; you pretty much point and shoot. The camera does all the work. Capturing wildlife from a boat though is an entirely different matter. The subject of your photo is a moving target, spending only a second or two above water or else very briefly perched somewhere. You and your boat are of course also moving, and on a day with big waves you are moving a lot. I have gained a whole new appreciation for those guys at the National Geographic. I was able to get some very ill composed dolphin photos a few weeks back, and yesterday we spotted some very far off whales that photographically look like black lumps and a puff of spray. In two summers of sailing I have seen many, many seals, yet I only have ONE very blurry, unrecognizable photo to show for it.

Meals aboard the boat are of course limited to whatever we’ve managed to bring with us, but we have a surprising amount of variety in our diet. In fact, sometimes we are able to come up with meals that I think are positively gourmet! The other day we had a dinner of grilled pork tenderloin with a watermelon/feta salad that we could have served to the most discerning of guests. Our lunches are a bit more mundane – hot dogs, liverwurst sandwiches, leftovers from dinner, etc – and are usually prepared while underway. I have to say though, even a tuna sandwich tastes extra special when enjoyed on a boat. The stove is gimbaled – that’s when something pivots in order to rock with the motion of the boat – so we can cook even in the worst weather.

We’ve been through a few storms now, mostly in the evenings, and they can be pretty exciting. The other day in South Dartmouth we had a nice front blow through and decided to stay on a mooring there and ride it out on the boat. We saw a couple of young fellows heading out in a small racing sailboat, and wondered what they were doing with a storm about to hit. They were looking the other way, so maybe they didn’t see that half the sky was black?!! A bit later we saw them coming back, apparently frantically searching for their mooring ball. With no engine on their boat they were forced to use the now screaming wind to move their sails along, and they had to keep tacking between all the other boats in the mooring field. We finally saw them struggling to take down their sails, but the wind was too strong and their mast broke in two! A police boat came blasting out into the field to get them and we watched it head more slowly back to the docks, towing the ailing boat behind. We speculated that the fellow in that sailboat was a kid trying to show off to his friend in his father’s fancy racing vessel. I don’t think Daddy’s going to be very happy!

 

In the evenings we usually head in and anchor somewhere, sometimes in a port city but usually in some little picturesque natural spot. My favorite part of our routine last year was the cocktail hour, usually spent on the foredeck. We would sit up there with our captains’ chairs and some snacks and watch the end of the sun, sometimes still in transit and sometimes at anchor. I hadn’t really realized until now, but that part of our routine has sort of fallen away. We’ve had better weather for sailing this year – more wind – and with the boat heeled over amid lots of deep waves, it’s not that inviting to be sitting on the foredeck. Rick would also like to suggest that the reason for our loss of the cocktail hour is that we’ve been drinking all day, so why bother? I’m sure that’s not true. Well, pretty sure…

We finally have begun our regular duet playing sessions which usually happen sometime around that now defunct cocktail hour. We got off to a late start this year with our music making, I think for several reasons. First of all, there were so many things going wrong with the boat that Rick was spending practically every spare moment working his magic and fixing things and there wasn’t a lot of energy left for violin/viola playing. Many people may not realize that playing an instrument requires a great deal of mental effort, even when playing for fun. The other main reason for our musical lethargy is much less forgivable; we have a really great stereo on the boat. How much easier it is to push a button and have wonderful performances of great music right in your living room! Or in our case, the cabin or cockpit. How demoralizing to pull out your fiddle and not sound like one of those recordings! It took us a few practice sessions to get our fingers moving properly again – and also to come to terms with lowered expectations – but now we’re in the groove and making our own music once more.

Going ashore is something we do to break up the regular routine. We went in for breakfast in Cuttyhunk, and although the meal was delightful, I actually got a little sea-sick just from being on land. Leave it to me to have something like that happen; now that I’m used to living on a boat I get sick by landing on terra firma.

We most often go in for dinner when we go ashore, but this last week we decided to visit the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA, and we spent the day there. New Bedford is obviously struggling financially, but the museum is top-notch. The focus of the museum is a bit schizoid in that half of the place is devoted to the glorification of the whaling industry, while the other half is devoted to education about whales and whale conservation, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I particularly liked learning about a certain whaling ship, the “Rebecca”!

We’ve had a number of great sailing days this past week and are making steady progress up the coast toward Maine. We’ve decided that the wind will be better tomorrow and the next day for our last few stops up to Portland, so we’re taking the day off to rest and recuperate here in Gloucester. We’re mainly following our usual routine – writing, reading, napping, etc. – but I think I’m going to insist on the reinstitution of our cocktail hour. Cheers!

Transience

We’re on our way to Block Island. We’ve really been on our way to Block Island for some time now. Located halfway between Montauk and Cape Cod, Block is the jumping off point for the northern waters. The question has never been, “where are we going?’ but instead, “How are we getting there?”

We could have gone straight up and across from Cape May, making a thirty-six hour off-shore passage and arriving nice and early in our trip, skipping all of those other stops. Since we weren’t sure how I would handle the ocean waves and swell, this was pretty much a non-starter. Another possibility would have been a shorter hop, an overnight from Barnegat, skipping Manhattan and going directly to Block in the waters south of Long Island. The weather would have been good for such a trek, but unfortunately Rick didn’t think of it until we were headed into Sandy Hook and by then it was pretty late in the day to change our minds. I think the memory of my seasickness episode the other day probably kept the possibility of an overnight, off-shore journey, even a modest one, strongly out of his mind. But neither one of us is looking forward to a repeat of last year’s fly-infested, stagnant-air run down the Long Island Sound. Unfortunately, it looks like we are left with no other choice. Once leaving Manhasset, we will need to make three or four stops before we can shoot through the Race and land on Block Island.

The wind is pretty nonexistent this morning, so we’ll have to motor until later in the day. Leaving Manhasset, we pass a giant mansion out at the end of a point. Isn’t this the mansion portrayed as Katherine Hepburn’s family house in “The Aviator”? Rick has heard that the Hepburns had a house around here and we start calling this one “Kate’s Place”.  It’s  pretty big and it takes us a while to get out of sight of it.

There is obviously big money in this part of the Long Island Sound. The houses that line the shores probably should be summer cottages, but they are gargantuan, even for houses to live in year round. At the end of the afternoon Rick pulls us in to Huntington Harbor, where he knows we’re not allowed to anchor but he likes the feel of this little upscale town and wants to look around. The narrow harbor winds around quite a bit, and the shores on both sides have a pleasingly diverse topography. Mansions or not, it is quite picturesque. Rick has a particular favorite building – an abandoned, churchlike structure that he thinks is the nicest house in the neighborhood. I think it looks like a smaller version of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and even though I think it’s a cool building I’m not sure I’d want to live in it.

There is a boat in the marina that appears to be sinking right on its mooring! They have it all roped off, so obviously we are not the first to notice.

We head out of Huntington and over to nearby Lloyd’s Harbor to find a place to put down our anchor. There are a few different ways to park your boat. The most protected and also the most expensive thing to do is to rent a slip at some marina. Rick has a slip for Valkyrie in Baltimore and he rents that slip on a yearly basis, but when you are cruising, taking a slip is usually prohibitively expensive. Some places will let you dock, but that is usually reserved for very temporary stays of a few minutes to refuel, or to load or unload. If you want to spend the night you usually have two options – take a mooring, or set your own anchor. Anchoring can be a tricky business. You have to be sure that there will be enough water for your boat when the tide is low, you have to know how much anchor chain (rode) to let out in different weather conditions, you need different types of anchors for different types of sea bottoms (mud, weeds, rocks, etc.), and you can never be absolutely sure that your anchor will hold in a storm or heavy wind. Moorings on the other hand are great because you can just tie up your boat and forget about it - go ashore, leave it for a week, whatever - you know it’s not going anywhere. So why anchor, you ask? Well, quite simply, anchoring is free.

Moorings can be relatively reasonable - $25 a night – or they can cost a lot - $3-4 per foot of boat per night. Three dollars a foot for Valkyrie would be a hundred and five dollars. Sometimes they are free as well and we take advantage of them when they are available, and when weather conditions call for it we think it’s money well spent. But most of the time we’re just too cheap to pay for a mooring ball and we anchor instead.

When we leave Huntington Harbor, we figure we’re leaving the hoity-toity neighborhood to park in a more welcoming area down the street. Of course anchoring in Huntington was never a question, but upon entering Lloyd’s, we’re slightly chagrined to learn from a prominent sign that we are relegated to a very limited area designated for “transients”. I don’t think I’ve ever been called a “transient” before. We swim naked and then hang out our laundry to dry just to fulfill the transient image, then have a drink and watch the sailboat race that seems to be happening right in our front yard.

Our close friend Marguerite Thomas came up with a sea-sickness cure for me, so when we were in Manhasset we just had to buy the ingredients and now we get to try it out. It’s a drink featuring plenty of ginger, the legendary seasickness cure: candied ginger, gin, bitters and ginger beer. A “Gin-gin”!  (You can read about it at Wine Review Online )  I’m not sure if it does anything for my mal de mer, but it does make a great drink. Tchin-Tchin!

Rick connects the interior speakers on Walter’s unfinished stereo system and then plays “The Ride of the Valkyries” at full indoor and outdoor volume, blasting out the other boats. I know it’s corny, playing music that matches the name of our boat, but what a thrill it is to hear that amazing music with waves at your feet and wind in your hair! We follow up with Mahler One.

“Transients” FOREVER!

The next morning the forecast for wind is not good for sailing, and it remains bad for some days. So far we have miraculously been spared any visits from those nasty flies, but with light air from behind us we know they are overdue. Rick thinks if we can get ourselves over to the Connecticut side of the Sound we will be at a better angle for sailing in these wind conditions tomorrow. We decide to head over to the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are a truly unique set of closely spaced little islands, little haystacks of rocks that really look like thimbles, just off the coast of Connecticut near New Haven. Many of these tiny islands sport only one house, precariously built on stilts over the lava rock surface. Some of them have a few houses crowded in together. I remember being completely charmed by them last year and am really happy to be spending the night here again.

In the morning we head out once again, this time for Coecles Harbor. Rick is delighted because even in the relatively light air, Valkyrie sails beautifully. The old Alberg would have been a wet snail. We are followed for quite a ways by a boat with a spinnaker. These are the colorful balloon-shaped sails that you sometimes see; they are great in light air that is coming from directly behind you. We would probably have used one a few times on this trip, but unfortunately, Valkyrie doesn’t have a spinnaker. This is one of the things Rick would like to change in the coming years, but at least for this summer, we will have to do without one.

As we are turning into Plum Gut (love the name), a giant sea turtle appears right at the stern of the boat! His shell is probably about four feet in diameter, spotted with great clusters of white barnacles, and his head and neck stretch out another foot and a half, his mouth open and gasping for air. Rick quickly turns the boat around to go back and get a longer look, but our friend Mr. Turtle has already left the surface. Apparently a fellow transient.

Coecles Harbor (no idea how you pronounce this thing) is a sweet little place; basically a small, almost fully enclosed lagoon. There are few cottages in the immediate vicinity, but many boats have come in to anchor. A swim is absolutely in order after the hot day. We get seemingly little exercise on board, so I began our trip with the promise to myself that every time we went for a swim I would do five laps around the boat. It’s never boring because you usually have some kind of current to work against, at least in one direction. Also, Rick never seems to get bored by chasing after me for a goosing. Today I go for six laps!

We fire up the charcoal grill that is attached to one of the side rails in preparation for the two obscenly enormous steaks we bought in Manhasset. Four pounds of meat is obviously too much food for the two of us (maybe I should have done twenty laps), but the intention is that we will have leftovers, saving cooking time on another night. After doctoring them up with an herb rub, “the critters” are sizzling on the grill and Rick comes below to tease me about something-or-other, when we hear seagulls whooping it up outside. When we rush back out to see what’s going on, one of the steaks is missing. GONE. We keep looking at the grill in disbelief – surely the steak will reappear. The seagulls have swarmed around our boat, calling to one another and raising quite a ruckus, but none of them seem to have the steak either. We would absolutely know what happened if we had seen one of the gulls flying off with our meal, but probably that steak was too heavy (and hot!) for the thief and it is now sinking to the bottom beside our boat. We quickly get out the grill cover before they can grab the remaining steak, and two of the more aggressive gulls get in a real set-to with one another, right there in the water. “It’s YOUR fault!” “No, it’s YOURS!” It’s a good thing seagulls can’t seem to work together or we would have lost everything.

As it turns out, two pounds of steak is more than enough for two, or even three meals. Perhaps we got what we deserved for our gluttony. Anyway, I’m sure the crabs will have a great time with our steak.

The Patron Saint of Human Torments must be smiling down on us because we have had no flies over the entire trip out Long Island Sound. Now poised just at the end of the Sound, we have one more short day of travel before we can get to Block Island. Our decision to stay in Coecles has put us just south of the Race so we will miss out on that wild ride, but it was fun to visit a new place so I'm not sorry. In the morning we up anchor and head out once again. I kind of like being a transient.

Manhattan

Manhattan and then Manhasset – that’s what’s on the agenda today. If we didn’t care about sailing, we’d have a perfect day for it; sunny, not too hot, a little breeze. Unfortunately, that means we will have to motor our way there, but at least we will have good visibility. This leg of the trip was perhaps my favorite of all of last summer and I’m really looking forward to doing it again.

It’s a busy day in the New York Harbor. We pass or are passed by all kinds of ferries, barges and sail boats. A tug boat pushes by that is just like the one in a book we both read as kids but can’t remember the name of. Wasn’t it “Tuffy the Tugboat”? We make a special side trip over to the Statue of Liberty before heading up the East River, past Wall Street and the financial district. We can see the new Freedom Tower still under construction at the site of the World Trade Center and Rick and I have a debate about how high the finished building will ultimately be.

Once in the river, we can see a number of familiar buildings– the Empire State building of course, and then the Chrysler and Met Life buildings.

As we pass the United Nations and the Trump Tower, we can’t help noticing a tiny stump of guano caked rock in the middle of the river, upon which a weathered sign proclaims “U Thant Island”, named for the Secretary General of the U.N. in the sixties. We later learn that it’s actually a manmade island, the unintentional result of a landfill buildup during the construction of a trolley tunnel. Its official name is Belmont Island, but nobody ever calls it that. Some hippie types made it green in the seventies, turned it into a bird sanctuary and started calling it U Thant Island. I guess the name stuck. The juxtaposition of this pathetically teeny scrabble of waste rock and weeds named for a world advocate for peace, against the backdrop of giant majestic buildings named for corporations and tycoons leaves one to wonder about the state of our civilization.

As wonderful as it is, the trip up the East River this year is not the magical experience it was last time. I know it loomed large in my memory, and possibly no reality could live up to those images in my head, but part of the magic of that first trip was the newness of it all. I had never thought of, let alone seen New York in such a way before, pretty much ignoring the fact that Manhattan is an island and as such is surrounded by water. Seeing all of those unthinkably tall, familiar buildings from the viewpoint of a tiny sailboat was a mind-blowing experience that simply can’t be repeated a second time around with the same affect. Christmas is just not the same when you’re not seven anymore. Loss of innocence aside, it’s still a pretty cool ride.

After the drama of city views dies down, we spend the afternoon coursing up the Long Island Sound, motoring all the way to Manhasset. We grab a mooring ball and hang out at the boat for awhile. Rick wants to go for a swim, but I just don’t feel like it; I’m feeling rather depressed and deflated. This feeling has been coming on gradually since before we left Baltimore, but I have been unable to find its source. After chatting it out with Rick for a while, I might have a few answers. For one thing, I think the stress of the trip is finally getting to me. Most of our difficulties with the boat have been figured out by now, but we both remain somewhat shell-shocked as a result of them. We jump and startle every time an alarm goes off or there is an unfamiliar noise - “What’s THAT!!!!?” It most often turns out to be something innocuous like the GPS unit telling us we’ve arrived at our destination, or my Kindle telling us it's low on batteries, but the skittishness is getting tiresome.

But the real problem turns out to be something else, something harder to get a hold of. The problem is that I feel guilty about Rick having bought this boat. We have always had a very egalitarian relationship when it comes to money – we split everything fifty-fifty and even though we are married, we keep our finances separate. This worked great a decade ago when we made about the same amount of money, but his salary has continued to rise over time while mine has stagnated and then was pretty severely cut this last year. The economic downturn has had a devastating effect on the symphony orchestra business in general, and has added to an already underperforming financial picture at the BSO. When Rick decided that we needed a bigger boat to accommodate both of us, he knew of course that I couldn’t afford the extra expense and he footed the entire bill himself. He told me he wanted to own the boat outright and that he wanted this boat to be HIS, but I knew he was just saying that so I wouldn’t feel guilty.  Now that he has bought the thing and all these systems seem to be going belly-up, I feel responsible for his choice and helpless to do anything about it. If I can’t be a full partner in the buying of the boat, at least I could be an equal contributor in the upkeep and running of the boat… Except that I don’t know a damn thing about any of this and when things go wrong all I can do is sit around and wring my hands.

I’m glad that we’re finally talking about this because as it turns out, I was wrong about a lot of my assumptions. (Unfortunately I’m right about my low salary, darn it.) First of all, surprise, surprise, Rick is very happy that he has bought this boat. Yes, this PARTICULAR boat. First and foremost, he loves the way she sails. The old boat was a slug in light air and not all that fast even in a good blow. He also enjoys the way the cockpit is cut low so he can feel close to the water even in a bigger boat. He loves the boat’s “shippy” solidity and the obvious craftsmanship of its makers. The boat is well insulated and ventilated, making for a very dry and quiet interior, and yes, he likes the extra space along with the steadiness of the movement that make for a more enjoyable experience for us as a couple. He tries to reassure me about the systems on the boat; some of what has happened has been due to operator error or unfamiliarity with the systems and not due to inherent problems within them. The problems that were real, he says, were actually pretty minor and he has managed to fix most of them already. Apparently when Rick says things like, “Uh-oh, THAT’S not good!”, or better yet, “If we can’t figure this out the boat’s gonna SINK!”, he’s just thinking out loud and I need to step back and take what he says with a giant grain of salt.

Probably most importantly, Rick assures me that in fact, he wasn’t doing me any favors by buying the boat entirely on his own dime. He really does want this boat to be HIS. He wants to be able to make any final decisions about it on his own -perhaps amid consultations with me, but ultimately he wants to have the final say. He wants to be able to go out on his own and not feel badly about it when he does. Basically, he wants his Man-Cave. Even if I could have contributed half the money for this boat, he would have bought it on his own. And even if I and my proneness to sea-sickness weren’t part of the equation, this is the boat he would have bought.

We take the dinghy in to a dockside restaurant called Louie’s on the Bay for a great seafood dinner. I feel so much better now – freer to enjoy the perks of being married to a sailor without actually needing to be one myself. It’s going to be a great trip.