Kim HaworthBoth Dancing Dragons at the brokerage dock. We were two boat owners for over a year.
Unlike my husband, I didn't grow up in a boating family. Sweetie's father was a member of the U.S. Power Squadron and, as a child, every weekend and vacation was spent on the water. I was a farm girl and more interested in horses and 4H.
We didn't know a soul when we moved from Napa to San Francisco in 1981. I had been boating a few times as a child, mostly horrible experiences where the people I was boating with either got hopelessly lost in the tule south of town or, dragged me reluctantly behind a fast moving motor boat on Lake Berryessa. Nobody told me to let go of the rope if I fell down, and consequently, was dragged across a rocky peninsula before the driver of the boat noticed. Neither of these recreations were my idea of a good time.
However, we needed something to do on the weekends after we moved down to the Bay Area and, knowing that my Sweetie loved boating, I signed us up for sailing lessons.
Sailing wasn't nearly as scary as I had expected, at least not at first, and although Sweetie had been primarily a power boater as a child, he took to sailing like a duck takes to water. We learned all the terminology that goes along with a new vocation. Halyards, gudgeons and scuppers became part of my vocabulary and increased my success at solving cross word puzzles.
We completed our course of instruction and decided that boating was for us. Finding an ideal first boat is a daunting challenge, and we did the best we could with the information we had at the time. Actually, a Folk Boat would have been a much more forgiving first boat, but we got hooked by a slick talking salesman and bought a 20 foot trailer boat with a swing keel. It had a 3.5 horse power engine with no reverse and the total overall weight was 1,600 pounds, far too light for the heavy wind on San Francisco Bay. Our first trip out was a disaster and I was so anxious to get off the boat at the end of the day that I leapt to the safety of the dock without a line in my hand. Sweetie was yelling all the way to the sea wall! At least no damage was done.
We persevered all that summer, learning something new every time we went out, such as ride the tide whenever possible -- a 3.5-hp engine isn't enough to move the boat through water that is going 4 knots in the opposite direction. Or, always turn the boat into the wind to raise the sails, and the most important lesson of all: The tiller turns the bow in the opposite direction you think it will go. I almost lost Sweetie on that particular lesson. We also learned that trailers take almost as much maintenance as the boat, especially when dipped weekly in salt water. It's amazing that our marriage survived the learning curve of that summer.
That winter, we took the both the U.S. Coast Guard and Power Squadron classes and met other boaters from our marina. It was fun to compare boating horror stories and to learn that we weren't the only ones who screwed up.
It didn't take us long to realize that we needed something heavier for the bay. Luckily, we found a broker who would trade our almost-new 20 footer for a Catalina 27. Once we stepped up to the larger boat, I really began to enjoy boating. It was still scary sometimes, but I learned to trust the boat and to gain confidence that even when things go wrong (like losing the cotter pin from the upper shroud one blustery afternoon) you aren't necessarily doomed.
Even to this day the trawler scares me, especially when the shift cable binds or the wind is particularly strong when coming into our slip. I guess we should have named our boats "˜Poullet du Mer' (Chicken of the Sea). For the most part, I have enjoyed meeting new people, watching aquatic wild life and floating my problems out to sea with the tide.
