The First Time I Went Sailing

      Or, Aren’t sailboats supposed to heel?

_______

May 1, 2013

     “You are not going to find the ideal boat. You are not
even going to have it if you design it from scratch.”

Carl Lane

Except for watching my first husband do all the work as he sailed the little Abaco sailing dinghies when we were on our honeymoon, I had never been sailing when we moved to southern Illinois for graduate school. I had always wanted to try it, however, so when he found a little 14’ sloop-rigged boat at a nearby lake for sale, I enthusiastically encouraged him to buy it. The Abaco dinghies were fun, but pretty tame stuff compared to this baby – two sails – TWO! A REAL sailboat.

I’m talking about a little boat, with a dagger board for a keel. We dragged it up on to the beach of the little man-made lake to store it. There was a small sailing club that had an area reserved for them, and no one bothered the boats there.

We didn’t do a test sail before we bought it. Perhaps we should have …

I waited impatiently for Saturday to come, and then we raced down to the lake to sail our little boat, which we named Daisy Mae after the wonderful sheepdog I had had as a child. I watched Dave putting the sails up, and climbed in. Our first sail on our first sailboat –- does it get any better than that? He took the tiller, of course; he had learned to sail at summer camp while I knew nothing at all about it. In no time we were scooting across the little lake. The boat was tipping, but I’d seen pictures, and I knew sailboats “tipped.” It didn’t bother me, but Dave kept saying, “This isn’t right … this isn’t right.”

“Dave,” I said, “I certainly don’t know anything about sailing, but I’ve seen pictures. Sailboats tip!”

“Not in this direction!” he said, and with that, the boat, with its sails out to starboard, tipped completely over –- to port -- and stayed there. HUH?

Well, she couldn’t completely turtle, because the lake was only 8 ft deep, but the mast got stuck in the mud. Meanwhile, I was in the water with the sail over me. I was frantically trying to swim out from under it to get air, afraid I would drown, when it dawned on me. I just poked a finger up, pushed the sail off the water, and there was air. So I calmed down. Dave dived down to the bottom of the lake with our throwable cushion and tied it to the top of the mast, and we managed to get the boat upright – but she went right back over again.

By then someone with a little outboard motor on his bass boat had come by and offered to tow us in. “OK,” said Dave, “but please do it slowly, because she wants to tip over again, and if she gets dragged with the mast down, it will snap.” Shallow water can be a problem!

So the man towed us in, with both Dave and me hanging in the water off the starboard corner of the stern to keep poor little Daisy Mae upright.

She was much harder to drag ashore than she should have been, and Dave finally figured out what had happened. The boat had “positive flotation” –- that is, the benches we were sitting on were air pockets. The port bench leaked, and had filled up with water, pulling her over.

I don’t recall what we did to fix it, but people from the little sailing club helped, and we had a lot of fun sailing that boat around the lake that summer (I say we, but Dave did all the sailing.) By the end of the summer, Dave had me convinced that if you put a mast in a bathtub, he would be able to sail it.

My first sail may be why I don’t really get scared when sailboats heel. I know, first hand, that heeling is a good thing. I really don’t like boats that flip you off into the water, but Daisy Mae only did it once, no harm was done, and I have forgiven her.