From the outside, I'm sure all appears calm, even blissful. Elsa Marie is anchored in the moonlight in a quiet spot between Dix and High Islands off Muscle Ridge Channel, gateway to Maine's Penobscot Bay. She swings gently and silently under a sky of stars, seemingly transfixed by the beam of the full moon.

But below decks, there's no such serenity. Down here, jarring, cadence-challenged sounds surround me. From the bow, demonized teen-age music oozes from under the door, behind which my 15-year-old daughter, Alli, has staked her claim on the forward cabin.

	Photo by David Roper
	Three generations of Ropers in the cockpit. From left, author David, his father, Joe, and daughter Alli.

Across from me in the main cabin, competing with the racket in the bow, come my 85-year-old father's random, throaty snores, sounding not unlike a mufflerless Maine pick-up truck accelerating on a bumpy dirt road.

I look over at Dad, blissful under his wool blanket. The moon, shining through the big center hatch, illuminates him in an ethereal sort of way. His hands are folded together on his stomach. I can just make out his two hearing aids, which he calls his "other ears," sitting together like two white chocolate drops on the chart table by his head. Sleeping without his other ears leaves him stone deaf, untouched by the sounds of his own snores.

Dad loves nothing better than this, sleeping aboard a boat in Maine. I could love this too, if only given the chance. So I wait for the snores to stop. I stare at the stars through the hatch, thinking that, like Alli's music, his snoring has volume. If only it had some rhythm. I wait anxiously between snores, knowing that at age 85 each one could be his last. Perhaps, though, he'll just stop snoring and sleep silently.

But based on the previous seven days of cruising with this unusual and beloved crew of two I knew what was coming: Soon Dad would kick his blanket off of his feet, his toes would get cold and he'd awaken. The snoring would stop. For a few blissful moments, short of a bit of rustling as he felt around with his feet for the blanket, it would be quiet in the main cabin. I would finally fall asleep. Then I'd awake again to his loud voice (due to no hearing aids), inquiring to no one in particular as to the whereabouts of his blanket.

Next, since he was fully awake, he'd realize it was a good time to go pee, so he'd head unsteadily up the companionway steps to pee over the side. Eyes wide open now, I'd wait, hoping for only the sounds of a trickle, not a big splash. (At these moments the statistic that 78% of all drowned men are found with their flies open would come to mind.)

Sometimes, after the trickle, there would be no sound at all. That's when I'd sit up in my bunk, wondering if I'd actually fallen asleep for a moment and missed the splash, and now maybe Dad was foundering in the cold Maine water. Actually, this was the period of time when Dad, now wide awake himself and sitting on the coachroof, would be taking five or 10 minutes on deck to quietly enjoy the stars.  

And so it went until one night in Blue Hill Harbor I masterminded a grand plan. At the part of the above-described cycle where Dad loses his blanket off his feet, I would break it by quickly getting up, grabbing the blanket off the cabin floor, and tucking it around him before he awakened.

So when the moment came, I sprang into action, found the blanket, tucked it around his feet, and, for good measure, tucked it under his chin. Then, as I loomed over Dad in the darkness, I noticed his eyes were wide open, staring.

I thought he was dead.

Until he spoke.

"I was just thinking," he said. "Do you know that it's been 80 years since someone tucked me in? My mother used to do that. I still remember. Now you, my 50-year-old son, tucking me in. Think of that! Isn't life full of small surprise pleasures?"

Anchored amidst numerous Corinthian Yacht Club boats on their annual cruise. Dad called his girlfriend, using my cell phone. Ashore to partake in a superb clambake. Alli stayed aboard. Fog descended. Upon return to Elsa Marie, I was surprised to find four sets of sneakers lined on deck. Then I found Alli and three teen-agers (boys and girls) below watching a DVD movie ("American Pie.") Where these three teen-agers came from and how she knew them I had no idea.  Made me think of gulls -- there can be absolutely none in sight, but throw a piece of bread in the water and they instantly appear from somewhere.

Dad called his girlfriend, using my cell phone. Told her again how he missed her, how soundly he's been sleeping, and how lovely it is to be back cruising in Maine.

Sat in the cockpit with Alli, both of us tucked under a fleece blanket, taking turns looking up at the full moon through binoculars. The moon brought about a discussion about tides and their cycles.  

"How many times does the tide come in and out, Daddy?"  

"Four times in 24 hours; twice in and twice out."

"So the tide spends six hours just coming in? What does it do when it gets there?"

"Well, Alli, it goes out again."

"Well, why?" (Good question.)

"Good question," I answer.  (Back when I smoked a pipe, this would be when I could buy time to think of an answer by fiddling with lighting my pipe.)

"It seems really random," she says.  

"Honey, it's anything but random."

"Well, dumb then. You know, a waste. I mean, you'd think it would stick around for awhile and do something after all that effort to come in."

Good point.

Ashore on lovely Damariscove with Dad, Alli, and cruising friends Bryan and Elizabeth. Getting an 85 year old into a 71/2-foot Nutshell pram from a fairly high deck is a bit of a trick, requiring a step-by-step process involving both Alli and me. We'd finally figured out the procedure but from port to port often forgot the details. Fortunately, Dad records everything into the mini key chain recorder he keeps in his pocket.

In fact, Dad has always recorded everything. He's the only person I know who actually took notes while he was having a TIA, which is a mild transient stroke that affects speech in areas of diction and syntax. During Dad's first TIA he said to me in the ambulance, "Worry don't Dave ...only it's a slight stork I'm having." He became so frustrated and fascinated by his jumbled speech (but clear brain) that he kept a log of his thoughts at the emergency room during the stroke, to see if the written words matched his thoughts. They didn't, and that log is interesting reading, believe me.

So now he has this recording device. Only problem is it only holds one message and then overstrikes with the next piece of data if you don't record all at once. So, upon getting into the dinghy in Damariscove, he recorded: "Sit down first, then move legs over side, then grab Alli's arm..." OK, but when he played it back at the end of the day's shore activities and thoughts, his message had been eclipsed by a new one, delivered in one big breath:  "Dave says I use too much fresh water on board; Dave says I should remember to close ice box lid right away to keep cool air in; met guy ashore named Tony Lee; I went to Taft School with his father, small world; we need toilet paper; oh hell, just remembered this has now erased how to get into dinghy from big boat; remember to record it again when we figure it out again. Over and out."

Dad called his girlfriend, using my cell.

GPS proved its worth today; relieved stress of navigating.  Dad did quite a bit of steering.

He told Alli about the "olden days" before fancy satellite navigation systems. Spoke of potato navigation, which got him a perplexed look from his granddaughter, who asked if it was a Dan Quayle joke (smart kid!) But Grampy just went on, telling her about how he and her grandmother got lost in the old Atkin cutter Phyllis off of nearby Long Island in Blue Hill Bay.

"Every direction we went, every way we tacked, we came upon land," he told her. "It was very odd, like we were trapped in a box. Seemed as if we'd run a true course. Couldn't understand it. Used Coke bottles, the stopwatch; even got out the old cardboard megaphone. Nothing worked."

Alli gave me a bemused, eye-rolling, "he's really lost it" kind of look. But I shook my head.  "Go ahead, Dad, explain it to her," I said.  

"What you say?"  

"I SAID, GO AHEAD AND EXPLAIN IT TO HER."

'Explain what"?

"ABOUT POTATOES, COKE BOTTLES, STOP WATCHES AND OLD CARDBOARD MEGAPHONES."

"Oh, sure, Dave."  He grinned at me; he has fun frustrating me about his deafness. "All you need to do is ask, you know. No need to raise your voice."   

Dad raised himself up on his tiptoes to check for lobster pots ahead then turned to Alli and smiled. "You see, Alli, we didn't have any instruments to gauge speed or drift, so we'd measure with the stopwatch the time a Coke bottle took to get from bow to stern and then do the math to figure our speed. I bet you learned the formula in school: distance equals rate times time. We'd used that old megaphone to yell ahead and to the sides of us so as to bounce our voice off any land that might be there and gauge its distance.  Worked pretty darned well. Got so you became kind of like a human radar."

Alli pushed the stop button on her Discman and looked up at him. A 70-year gap in their ages, and he actually had her attention. "Well what about the potatoes?" she asked.

"Only used them for the REAL thick fog navigation, my dear."

"You ate potatoes in real thick fog?"

"Nope, we threw them, then listened for the splash. If we didn't hear the splash, well, we knew land was pretty darned close!"

Dad called his girlfriend, using my cell phone.

Best crew I ever had.   

Need sleep.

Tell Dad that the cell phone bill comes to $346, including roam charges, for his calls to his girlfriend,

Dave Roper is a frequent writer for Points East and numeroust other boating publications. He has worked as a delivery skipper and Mississippi River captain. He sails his Independence 31 sloop out of Marblehead, Mass.

Return to top of page