Even the Anchors Are Gone
It’s a strength training blog, so I should start with a mighty feat:
My parents sent me down to the Point, a beach and boating area in our Northeast town, to pick up our mooring anchor. It was a chilly October day, the sailing season long done, the boats hauled out of the water and placed on their cradles, and finally the anchors all pulled and placed at the top of a concrete ramp running into the water. Mooring anchors are shaped like upside down mushrooms; the genius in the design is that the dish at the end of the shank would sink into the mud, get filled up, and create a seal and stability that far exceeded its 250 pound weight. A special barge with a powerful winch was necessary to tear them out each Fall - and drop them back in place each Spring.
A 250 pound rusty and muddy anchor with 20 feet of chain and heavy line was nothing to sneeze at for owners who had to come claim them and take them home. Also in the parking lot, beside the cluster of standing shanks at the top of the ramp, were two of the big floats for the dock, which was at the end of a long pier, the center of the action as boats would come and go, loading their crew members, or from where the motor launch would bear people out to the moorings.
Two workers were on their hands and knees on one of the big floats, sanding the surface by hand. As I pulled up, they stopped and shook their heads at one another. The misery of the job was interrupted only by owners showing up and acting entitled to assistance. They each sat sullenly, one leg up, an arm draped over that knee, unwilling to move until I went to the trouble of appealing to them.
Having opened the back of the station wagon, I walked in amongst the anchor shanks and turned our mushroom on its side. From there, I bent over, grabbed the edges of the ‘bell,’ and hoisted the 250 pounds up to belly level. With the shank protruding in front of me and the chain dragging behind, I walked over and put it inside the car. I coiled the chain around the bell where it rested on its edge (so it wouldn’t roll around), closed the door, gave the fellas a nod, and I was off, leaving them where they sat slack jawed in surprise.
That was pretty emblematic of a youth spent at the Point. One of the spoiled little preps lifted weights, it turned out, but beyond that the moment was proof that some of us knew our way around. This was where we sailed boats large and small, in good weather and bad. As a little kid, I cried in terror sometimes at sailing camp. As a college kid, I swam to a couple in distress in a storm and sailed them and their boat, tiller in one hand, mainsheet in the other, to the ramp, tearing down the channel in shrieking winds. It was where my father dove beneath the boat every Saturday before a Sunday race, sandpapering away the first film of growth that would slow the hull as it moved through the water. We were the ones who hauled our boat out every Fall - ourselves - getting it on the trailer, and the trailer jacked up and on blocks before we built a wooden frame for the heavy canvas cover that would protect it for the winter.
Sailboats were - are - a ton of work even for casual weekend racers. More than that, they provide a soul defining way of life which I fear is being lost.
The other day my sister sent pictures from a visit with an old friend, with whom she walked through our old haunts at the Point. At the ramp, she was surprised to see a crew of workers fetching boats from their moorings and towing them to the ramp to be hauled out. Not a single owner was there to participate or even observe.
She was further surprised to see that these guys were not taking out the masts prior to putting the hulls on stands and shrink wrapping them for the season. In the old days, stepping or unstepping a mast was always a brief but intense group struggle, a barn raising with a slight Marines-at-Iwo-Jima flavor. Owners always helped each other out; the other families in our fleet racing ‘class’ hauled their boats at the same time. Nobody would dream of leaving the end of season evolution to a crew at the boatyard.
I texted my sister: at the top of the ramp, were the mushroom anchors waiting to be picked up?
They were not.
I had to figure out what she was seeing. People are not picking up their 250-pound mushrooms and taking them home anymore - because they can’t. They don’t have the cars for it, and they’d all be physically unable to pull them out and put them in the garage the way my Dad did before I got big enough to handle it, or the way every other businessman and weekend sailor took care of this years ago.
The workers are not unstepping the masts. Of course, these owners wouldn’t even consider strapping one to the top of their car - think of the menace to traffic or the trouble of performing any necessary maintenance before wrapping it in plastic and storing it for the winter.
The mushroom anchors and mooring lines must all be getting winched into a truck and taken to a storage yard. People probably don’t even own these. They rent them.
That’s it: those boats getting pulled that day must have been rentals owned by the town or yacht club. Seriously, no owners came to keep an eye on something they bought with hard earned cash?
The cell-phone picture she sent from the ramp made me sad. Whether those boats were rentals or their Soft-Boy owners were willing to pay to avoid hard work, a certain number of people were reducing sailing to a very superficial experience. I feel badly for them and especially their kids.
There are a lot of ghosts running up and down that ramp, where decades ago we wheeled Sunfishes and Lasers and up and down every day of sailing camp. Starting at age 10, dripping wet in our T-shirts and bathing suits, squinting in the sun, we were part of an operation that was criminally negligent by today’s standards, yet this was precisely how we overcame our awkwardness and naïveté, surviving somehow and getting home every night despite being two to a Sunfish and part of a fleet spread across a broad swath of water with scant supervision. When the college aged instructors did bother to direct any attention our way, it was usually to torment and capsize us. We were quick studies, creating our own mayhem, happy to capsize our own boats and duck under the hull or swim around the stern to climb up on the dagger board and right the boat once more. Soon, rough and windy weather or any actual disasters held no fear for us.
It’s not all joy. Days can be marked by crushing boredom, stifling heat, sunburn, starvation, dehydration, or other miseries like searing bladder pain or hours of driving rain, shivering cold, and longing for the warm clothes at home you forgot to bring. One of sailing’s great gifts is the ability to grasp completely the setting in any war drama or adventure story you read.
Self reliance is the theme on various levels, something I simply don’t see as possible for those who are merely dipping their toes in the sport. Our parents didn’t rent boats or leave the dirty work to others; all the sanding, painting, and fiddling with hardware was rendering with their own hands the craft with which they went out to take on the world.
If those boats getting pulled the other day had owners who were elsewhere, then I hope they were doing something truly soul enriching. Otherwise, they were missing an enormous opportunity.
We were awesome there. I wonder if anyone else has been.
