If you are inviting people to sail on your boat, leave me out. I don’t get seasick—just claustrophobic.
Despite the photo, I’m not talking about cruise ships. I love those cruise ships! I’m talking about your skiff, rowboat, sailboat, even your yacht.
People speak some sort of a foreign language on those things.
What is a spinnaker? A jib? What are fore and aft? What is starboard? What’s the matter with left and right, like you would say on land?
You can’t go anywhere. You are confined to a small space and have to listen to your host rail on about their sea adventures. Well, I have some sea adventures too:
My sister and I rented a rowboat when I was a teenager at Lake Tahoe. I wasn’t much of a rower, and my little sister cried as the wind picked up and blew us toward the middle of the huge, deep lake. Fortunately, I was able to maneuver the boat to the edge of the small bay and we got out on the rocks. I don’t think we ever told our parents about it.
And the time a friend took me on his sailboat in the unpredictable San Francisco Bay. The voyage from San Francisco to Oakland went just fine, but again the winds came up, and I thought we would never make it back without crashing into the Bay Bridge.
Most humiliating was a voyage in Chesapeake Bay with my uncle and aunt when I was about 30. My 17-year-old cousin and her boyfriend got out a sunfish—a teensy boat—and they let me hold the rudder for awhile. Soon we saw a Coast Guard boat making a B-line toward us. Did they think we were smuggling drugs or something?
When they got close, an officer looked at me and wanted to know why we had no life preservers. I drew a blank and looked at my friends. “What’s the matter? Can’t he talk?” the officer asked the two of them. Because I was holding the rudder, apparently that made me the captain of the ship. What, I was Captain Ahab? Captain Hook? Captain Queeg? Captain Bligh?
We got off with a warning. I don’t remember if I gave them my name. Perhaps I was banned from the seas for life. Good!
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