A free gift: Enjoying the slower pace

September 2005

By Tom Snyder

For a free gift, answer the following question: How long does it take a cruising sailboat to sail from Boston to Camden? Don’t answer yet, because it’s a bit of a trick question. If one were to answer…

“It depends on whether you’re pushing it. If you are in a hurry, you can do it overnight. Otherwise it can take two days”

…then one would not win a gift.

I would love to meet people for whom the correct answer rolls off the tongue – but sadly most of those folks have been dead a long time. There are still a few of you around, and I’d to love hear your response as it might come up in causal conversation.

The trouble with the answer quoted above is that it assumes two things: 1. particular sailing conditions and 2. an engine.

As for assuming No. 1, you’ll need a couple of days in a row that are not dead calm, that don’t have winds that are light with bumpy seas, or light winds that are contrary or winds that die at sunset or don’t come up until 2:00 in the afternoon. You’ll also need days that don’t have dense fog or angry storms. Each of these conditions is what we get a lot of on the coast.

As for assuming No. 2, that wasn’t the question. But it does get to the heart of the question.

The auxiliary engine has been a wonderful thing, getting us out of dangerous situations and allowing us to explore far from our home harbors. Think of the engine as a literal windfall for people with little free time. But sadly, we can no longer answer that question about Camden. And that may be a big loss.

The nice thing about modern something lost, something gained circumstances, however, is that one can usually reclaim the lost part once it has been deemed missing.

There is a linguistic explanation to how easy it is to forget that something is missing. When I was a kid, there was a kind of sailboat called a motorsailer. It was a boat with a full complement of sails and a raised doghouse that allowed for comfortable motoring from inside. It was then, and is now, a great compromise, and a favorite among aging sailors. But nouns can often very slowly become verbs. (In the business world it happens fast enough that we can see its awkwardness within our own lifetimes. ‘Incentive’ becomes ‘incentivize’. ‘Incentivize’ becomes ‘incent’ as in, “I think we should incent Tony to keep his mouth shut in front of the board of directors.”)

“Motorsail” has become a verb. New verbs often sound dorky to us, but soon they become vernacular. “Prioritize” sounded geeky in the 1980s. “Itemize” sounded geeky in the 1890s. The true power of a new verb emerges when later generations encounter it and are proud to learn to use it in context. Today, it is common to hear, “We motorsailed across Penobscot Bay today. It was a beautiful day, tho’ the wind wasn’t perfect.” Motorsailing appears, to newcomers, to be just one more important cruising skill. Like tacking downwind or reefing or flying wing-and-wing. Motorsailing: the seamless combination of power and sail. Most of us don’t use this verb, but it informs us, as people from Harvard like to say.

Flipping on the engine is not a failing, moral or athletic. It’s handy. And it is a loss. Traveling consistently at the speed of available wind and conditions has benefits: You will discover coves of great beauty simply because that is as far as you got that day. You will discover a pleasant form of racing – the original kind, where you are paying great attention to your sails to see how far you can get. You will discover the joy of cheering when you get your boat up over two knots, a project that might have taken an hour of fidgeting. (It suddenly feels so much faster than 1.5 knots. High-fives all around.) You will discover meeting everybody as you tack out of a quiet harbor in the morning.

So, back to the free gift. How long does it take to sail from Block Island to Portland? If you now answer something like, “I don’t know, but I’d love to find out,” you just got your free gift.

Tom Snyder sails Blue Moon out of Peaks Island, Maine.