35SAIL MAGAZINEout toward Seal Rocks—with this much head-
way, we could finally come about and set a
course for the harbor.
Then as if Finn herself were afraid of heading
out, the tiller went light as a broken drumstick.
The boat rounded up, a gust pounded down on
us, and the sail flailed. I leaped up and grabbed
the boom and forced the sail taut.
I was losing track of time. Reefing, scandal-
izing...what had I forgotten to do? I shifted my
weight to rebalance the boat. I sat up on the tran-
som and on either rail. Was the centerboard dam-
aged? Why wouldn’t the rudder grip the water?
I also wondered whether my wife and Ben
had decided to send someone out for us. But
we didn’t need any help. Or did we? There were
still plenty of boats moored in the inner harbor,
and their owners all had dinghies and in-
flatables. I suspected my wife had already asked
someone to look for us.
Meanwhile, the wind still whistled as I
looked out at the expanse of the open bay, ser-
rated with gray waves and streaked with foam.
At this angle of drift the wind would carry
us beyond the point of rocks at the end of Nye’s
Neck, on a course for Cleveland Ledge light
several miles out into open water.
“Come on, boat,” I said. “We have to do it.”
Back on course, I crouched in the cockpit,
an air pocket of hope that I could hold this
tack still rising within me. We’ll get ourselves
home yet, I thought.
I spotted a mooring field where several pow-
erboats seesawed on their lines.
“Just get us by them,” I whispered to my boat.
At the same time a word came to me out of the
backwaters of my nauti-
cal knowledge. Weath-
ercocking: In heavier
winds, it is the tendency
of a catboat to act like
a weathervane and veer
into the wind, stop-
ping herself dead in her
tracks. Unfortunately,
knowing the term didn’t
help me deal with it. I
could only hope the boat would hold herself on
this course past the mooring field.
But a gust hit us and she rounded up and
sat quaking as if she had thrown her hands up
in surrender. We drifted backward toward the
boats and the wave-smashed rocks.
I was out of tricks. I had to save the boat. So
I dropped the sail, grabbed the paddle, brought
her stern-first to a rocky beach between two jet-
ties and anchored up, soaking myself as I did so.
Above the beach, an old man, his white hair
twirling in the wind, stood on a wooden land-
ing, leaning with his elbows on the rail as he
gazed down at me.
The cold was seeping into my bones through
my drenched clothes. My thinking seemed to
slow down. I fixated on the thought that a skiff
or dinghy would appear from the direction of
the harbor at any moment; magical thinking, as
my wife would say.
Across the water, far back toward the
harbor that had been my destination, a white-
hulled sailboat was motoring out through
the channel—a ketch that spent the summer
moored in the inner harbor. She was too far
away to hail.
“Someone called Sea Tow,” the old man
shouted down to me as he pointed in the op-
posite direction toward open water.
Who’s that for? I thought. A pontoon boat
was approaching. It idled about fifty yards off
the beach.
“You okay, Cap?” came a voice over a
loudspeaker.
Good God, I thought. He’s coming for me.
“I’m a 30-foot vessel and I draw four feet,”
he said. “I can’t get in to you. You have to sail
out to me.”
Sail out? I thought. I can’t sail out to you. The
moment I haul the anchor I’ll be on the rocks.
If I could, I’d sail home.
But in my daze I splashed aboard and
grabbed the rudder to hook it on. The boat’s
action was so violent I
could no longer align
pintles with gudgeons.
“He can’t sail out to
you!” yelled the old
man. “Float a line in!”
The towboat skipper
idled for a minute as
if mulling over the old
man’s suggestion. Then
he backed toward us
and tossed me a line tied to a life jacket.
“Thank you!” I yelled to the old man.
I ended up swimming out for the line. The
moment I tumbled into the cockpit with the
anchor, we were off. In five minutes we crossed
the water I had been battling for hours, me
quaking in the spray as I huddled by the center-board trunk. At the landing, Ben took Finn in
hand, and I met my wife in the parking lot.
“I didn’t know what happened to you,” she
said, trying not to sound stricken—or irked. “It
was Sea Tow or the Coast Guard.”
The ketch I’d seen? My wife had talked to her
skipper. As he climbed into his inflatable at the
dinghy dock, she’d asked him for help. But he
told her this before he buzzed out to the ketch:
he didn’t have enough gas, and had too much to
do before shoving off on a cruise.
I drove to the house, which was less than a
minute away, and changed into dry clothes,
my feet as numb and gray as pig iron. Then I
remembered: the dinghy.
When I got to the beach, I saw no sign of it. I
looked out at the corrugated water. No boat or
dinghy showed on the gray expanse.
Then I crept over a jetty and the dinghy was
below me, the rising tide licking her hull. To
her credit she didn’t say I told you so.
I looked out across the gray waves to the
point of rocks where we’d ended up, a black
broken finger pointing back toward me, a sailor
whose self-respect had been dealt a blow. sCraig Moodie’s books include A Sailor’s Valentine
and Other Stories, Into the Trap, and The Sea Singer.
His novel Stormstruck! is forthcoming under the
name John Macfarlane.WHAT I DID RIGHT:
I managed to remain calm even when I
realized I had lost control.
I persisted in exhausting every option
about how to regain headway.
I knew when to sound retreat after I’d
neared the point of no return and opted to
strike the sail and paddle for shore.WHAT I DID WRONG:
I should have gauged conditions with my
head instead of my heart and not indulged
my yen to sail at the expense of my safety.
I should have carried a waterproof bag
with a change of warm clothes.
I should have questioned the wisdom of
the towboat skipper’s directive to sail out
to him
Before I shoved off, I should have settled
on a contingency plan with my wife so she
could act without guesswork.
I should never have considered sailing
in the fall in New England—or any other
time of the year—without a means of
communication aboard.The cold was seeping
into my bones
through my drenched
clothes. My thinking
seemed to slow down
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