“This is kind of like…a bachelor pad,” one my older sailing buddies said looking into the cabin of my 1968 Pearson Ariel, as the sun set across a sea of landlocked masts.
“Yeah, except I’m a girl.”
“Except you’re a girl. It’s minimalist. It’s not a couple’s boat.”
The conversation then somehow morphed into why I don’t have a boyfriend, as it often does with many of my sailing comrades, who mostly happen to be in between the ages of 50 and 70. I’m not sure where all the younger sailors are, but they’re not here sailing Lake Champlain, so I put up with the probing relationship questions from my married and divorced friends.
I don’t often wonder why I don’t have a partner on my boat, but other people do. Is it the size of my boat? Her condition? My hair do? My location? The questions are asked, but rarely answered. I don’t long for a lover to share the blue road, but it wouldn’t suck to have another set of hands to rebed deck hardware, or, and perhaps more importantly, another person to contribute some legal tender to the whole venture.
These conversations about my being single at 27 have led me to a conclusion, however; I either need a partner, or I need a job–because it turns out sailing an old boat from the era of early fiberglass construction is a wee bit more complicated than I once thought.
So this year I’m in the same place, with a new boat and a new plan. The dream is the same, though. And I don’t need a boyfriend to reach it, but I do need a crew.
You’re on the wrong coast! 😉 Just kidding. I’m glad to see another blog post! I wish I could teach you all those things you need to know. You don’t need crew, you just need to learn how to do it yourself. Julie has a boat now and we’re just beginning to go down that path. I’m doing stuff for her only in as much as is necessary to show her how to do it herself.
I know it’s overwhelming. I know it seems like too much to learn, but it’s finite. It ends. The simpler your boat, the fewer systems you need to master. But you need to master them. It’s *your* boat. *You* need to know how to fix everything on *your* boat. Thankfully you live in the age of YouTube and Google.
Keep blogging soul sista. I want to see more pictures of that sweet little boat you managed to commandeer.