It seems like we rarely pass all at once anymore. Instead, we are chipped away in pieces. A bit of nose here, a bit of lip there. A hip. A heart valve. A kidney. Which prompts me to wonder what part of me — what authentic piece that any friend would recognize — will remain at the end of my days?
With my luck it will be the stubborn nose hair that I’ve been battling the past two decades. The little bugger can’t be tamed, much less trimmed. I’d love to let go of the sucker, but it has no intention to let go of me.
What does this have to do with boats? The act of casting off to sea involves letting go of a piece of yourself, the land-bound self—the self concerned with time instead of motion, with stability instead of change. If we can let go of these preoccupations (if only during the course of a summer cruise), then the other letting-go becomes easy—the letting-go of things.
In this month’s issue, Tech Editor Drew Frye reflects upon his decision to downsize from his 34-foot PDQ catamaran to his current boat, a Corsair F-24. No one sells the family boat without hesitation. It is a temple to memories, holding them safe as we age.
It never fails to amaze me how a clicking winch can invoke the same emotion it did when I first heard it, the delight of setting my own course, to trim and to ease as I please. It is the note of work being done, the song of a boat underway.
The family boat gave us a purpose outside the customary ones borne of the land-bound life. Like the glass ship in Melville’s coming-of-age novel Redburn, our boat converts our “vague dreamings and longings into a definite purpose.” (In Melville’s case, it was to seek his fortune on the sea.) But that purpose need not be so explicit. The boat can simply be our ticket to ride, to let the wind and water guide our fate.
Like any family heirloom, the boat feels imbued with a spirit of those days. So it’s no wonder that selling her feels like a betrayal of those moments—a surrender to the ache of time.
But letting go of a beloved boat does not mean letting go of the feeling that brought her into your life, nor is it letting go of the joy of those moments. The sheer pleasure of being on the water and the thrill of being propelled by wind to destinations unknown is as easily achieved in a smaller craft.
And in some respects, the high moments in the life of a sailor — the perfect reach on a diamond bay, the flawless tacks up a narrow channel, the exhilaration as a bit of spray hits your tongue — come more frequently on a smaller craft. Though great distances can magnify the value of a landfall in our minds, in truth, every destination, near or far, reached under sail can bring the same sense of destiny fulfilled.
As anyone who has cast off from shore knows, it is not the boat that matters, but the moments under sail. The rare connection between body and nature and spirit remind us that this letting-go of things is not so hard as it seems. For long after a beloved boat is gone, the experience lives on—eclipsing even the most defiant nose hair.
