Beauty at a boat-length (or thereabouts)

It was a five- to 10-knot day, blue sky, Simpson clouds. Perfect. I’ve had my fill of squalls, gales, microbursts and tropical storms. I shut down my computer and headed down to the boat, thinking a sail might inspire a topic for the August editorial.
Every idea so far had me as the hook, and the magazine is not, by any stretch, about me. I’m just one small cog in Publisher Joe’s well-tuned publishing gears – a word mechanic, a computer jockey, a dilettante these days, and a conduit for boating stories provided by those who are out there, doing it, on a regular basis. With my deadline bearing down on me, I harbored a frail hope that my sojourn into the bay would bear some editorial fruit.
The strong spring tide was starting to ebb in the windless lee of my finger pier, but, with blind faith there will always be some poor excuse for a draft to catch with my sail, I gave the boat a stout push uptide, pushed out the boom, and agonized her out into an unconvincing five-knot zephyr, just clearing the boats at pier’s end.
Bearing off, I ghosted toward the cove’s narrow entrance as the wind clocked into the south. A garrulous, wind-against-tide popple greeted us as we left the cove and bore off to enter the bay proper. We reached toward the south shore of the bay to check out a heavy-displacement double-ender, anchored off the beach. The wind was still light and fluky, but just steady enough to evoke the indescribable imagery of a well-designed sailing vessel moving efficiently across a flat sea – the sizzling of the wake, the steady chuckle of the bow wave, the creaking of the mast wedges as the boat leans gently to a gust.
The watermelon scent of bluefish-macerated bait wafted across the cockpit. Upwind, a few small choppers corralled their prey and churned the surface as they attacked; frantic terns hovered above the “bluefish slick” to feed on remnants. Tiny patches of white fluttered erratically, like albino butterflies, along the far shore – kids and their Optis and 420s, practicing roll-tacks. An osprey on a mission flew over, appearing to look down with disdain on the feeding frenzy, perhaps deeming the terns’ freeloading fishing style beneath his lofty station.
No one was aboard the double-ender, but people were swimming and picnicking on the sand – just a local boat out for a glorious daysail. Under the lee of the land, we were thwarted by the gentle southerly and a south-to-north-running ebb pumping out of a deep cove. We bore off to the northeast in a light but steady breeze to inspect a creek I want to explore this year.
Something tiny in the sky, to the west, caught my eye – a hummingbird hurtling east across the bay. Just below it, floating toward the northeast, I spied a gossamer, what Merriam-Webster defines as “a film of cobwebs floating in air in calm, clear weather” – what mariners since days of yore have cherished as a prophecy of wind-change. The boisterous southwest wind would soon be filling in.
Riding this on a broad reach, we sped toward our harbor. By the time we’d reached the marina, the moon tide was low, leaving a narrow channel by which to approach my slip. I jibed around the corner into dead air and water too shallow near my finger pier to have the board down. A man in a dinghy from one of the larger boats in the harbor recognized the exercise ahead, and declared, “That looks like fun,” and it would be. Trying to turn into my slip under sail with only way on and no board always is. With a hint of a bottom-gouging board to assist, we got in on the second try.
During a lifetime of red-letter days in the North Atlantic – from 10 degrees north to 60 degrees north – I’d experienced none sweeter than this one right in my backyard. But I still had not conceived a subject for the August editorial. All day, I’d been so absorbed by the moment, I’d not once considered the task at hand.
Of course it isn’t about me, I reminded myself in self-reproach. I set a course back to the office to hopefully find an August topic and attempt to wrestle another editorial to the floor.