Learning the lesson of the crazy bird

By Tom Snyder
This can’t possibly be right. My father fears nothing at sea. I’ve always known this, and so, by contrast, (not literally) I fear everything at sea. Clearly, I could use a psychic breakthrough. I had a big one in late September. Let me describe.

Hurricane Floyd was off Cape Fear moving northward at 18 knots. My boat, which normally lives on Peaks Island in Maine, was on a guest mooring in South Dartmouth, Mass., a harbor that has won the historical right to get storm jitters. Over the phone, Dad and I calculated that we could easily outrun Floyd to Portland, so within two hours we were sailing out of the harbor as both night and rain fell.

At midnight, we were alone in the Cape Cod Canal. At 3 a.m., we were picking our way through returning trawlers in the middle of Massachusetts Bay. At 6 a.m. the breakwater for Gloucester Harbor appeared behind a rainsquall.

The NOAA forecast revealed that, only halfway home, we had lost the race against Hurricane Floyd’s angry leading edge. So I prepared to slip behind the breakwater and lay low for a couple of days. This was just fine with me.

Apparently, Dad, sitting next to me in the cockpit, bundled up against rain “colder than a whore’s heart” but not quite “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey”… apparently Dad had not heard the same forecast that I had just heard. He said, “Let’s go around Cape Ann. Then it’s a straight shot home.”

I reminded him of those little telltale NOAA phrases like “40- to 50-knot winds” and “10- to 18-foot seas.” This is where he hit me with his classic piece of logic, so compelling in its sweep, so confident in its presentation that a mere fearful son stands powerless in its wake. He said to me (and I think you’ll agree that his reasoning defies argument), “It’s better to keep going.” I did not for a second question his thinking. In fact, I embraced it.

Ten miles east of Isles of Shoals, when we were making a solid half knot over the ground with reefed main and staysail, I suggested that, since we were getting hammered, we should surrender, bear off and scream through the Boon Island shoals into the York River to wait out the hurricane.

Dad reminded me that it’s better to keep going. God. Why can’t I come up with stuff like that? Nonetheless, I was done. I knew that down below were three bottles of wine, 150 feet of anchor chain, a propane heater and a new history of the Civil War. So I turned. Quit.

Sledding for York now at 10 knots over the ground, I could tell that Dad had lost interest in the project. Being cozy below deck in a safe river did not compare with outrunning Floyd. Within hours of battening down in the York River, Dad had found a truck driver willing to drive him to Boston for $100. I, on the other hand, was like a pig in sheets — down below, warm, dry, inebriated, and two chapters into a great book.

The remaining sail to Peaks Island featured a bizarre event that begins to answer the riddle of a fearless father.

The weather was chilly and rough, but the wind had backed to the west for an easier sail to Casco Bay. I was about to go forward to shake out the reef in the mainsail when it happened.

Something landed on my head. I whacked it away. A huge brown bird that I did not recognize fell to the cockpit sole. It flew up at my face so I grabbed it and dropped it overboard. It jumped from the water and flew back to my head, this time pulling frantically at my hair. The boat had rounded into the wind and the now-backed jib was pushing her hard onto the other tack. I pulled the bird off my head and killed it before I paid any attention to my now jibing, noisy boat. For the rest of the trip to Peaks Island, I kept my eyes on all 360 degrees of the horizon.

And so this…

Twenty-five years ago, when my dad first met my wife’s dad, Henry, these two men (neither of whom tended to mention the war) discovered that one was astern of the other when a suicide bomber had struck. Henry had watched the plane come up under the stern of the transport. Dad’s ship lost all the men in the sick bay where the crazy bird had hit…

Rough September weather off the coast of Maine fails to get Dad too riled up. It probably should, but it never will. At 82 years, the lion’s share of which have been on the water, he knows for a fact that, “It’s better to keep going.”

Tom Snyder lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife Anne and children. He sails his Island Packet 350, Bluemoon, out of Hingham, Mass., and Peaks Island, Maine.