May 2010

By David Roper

Why I’ve never sailed around the worldMany years ago – at age 16, in fact – I decided to run away to sea. I had been reading of Robin Lee Graham’s adventures as a globe-circling, solo sailing teenager. Seemed like a cool thing to do. In fact, I became obsessed with this idea.

But over the next 44 years my dream had a tough slog to windward. We would (the dream and I) make a few miles and then be beaten back by the forces of life. These forces were always the same. There were three of them: rot, money and women. One at a time, I maybe could have handled them, but all three seemed to work together against me, keeping the lee shore always in sight.

The first setback came early on in the 1970s. I blame one particular boat, one instance of financial instability, and one woman from the Midwest. We’ll change the boat’s name just in case she’s still floating in the neighborhood (but when you read this you’ll know why I strongly doubt this to be the case). We’ll be nice and just call her H1N1. The woman from the Midwest shall also remain nameless (we’ll call her Mona Lisa), as I’m sure she still has revenge on her mind and perhaps has me in her crosshairs 35 years later.

The boat came into my life quickly, which should have made me immediately suspicious. Though she was going to take me around the world, I didn’t poke around much into her past. I fell more for her cabin lantern and fancy tiller than her integrity. As I sailed her home from Connecticut to Marblehead, I talked to her and patted her and sang to her. I also pumped her. Constantly. Incessantly. I should have smelled trouble.

The lady was naive because she lived far from the sea. I’m not sure she ever bought into my romantic idea of sailing around the world. In fact, when she first saw the boat, she cried. It wasn’t out of joy, but more out of female intuition. They hadn’t invented the swine flu back then, but she must have sensed it in this spore-filled rotten wooden form that was supposed to take her across the great Atlantic.

In the boatyard, where we lived for many months, she just nodded as I found rot in the decks and rot in the garboards and rot in the horn timber. She rolled her eyes when I couldn’t find any sign of keel-bolt heads down in the bilge. (“Well, what will hold that big lead thing on then Dave, if there are no bolts left? And if it falls off when we’re sailing to Europe, what will happen? Shouldn’t you have thought of these things Dave?”) Hmmmmmm.

Time passed, and she tried to help. But when the hot month of August rolled into the dusty boatyard, she began to take very long iced-coffee breaks somewhere off premises. I sensed I was losing her and the boat.

The final blow came a few weeks later. Somehow, we had pieced H1N1 back together, and had gotten to some finishing touches, slapping thick coats of paint over the rot. It was hotter than ever that afternoon, with no breeze and lots of humidity. I had removed the broken (of course!) knot meter from the cabin bulkhead, and my lady friend was now fashioning a mahogany plug for the four inch hole that remained. I was on the scaffolding putting a coat of high gloss white paint on the topsides. Sweat ran from my forehead, stung my eyes, and then ran from my face into the paint can. “I cut the plug wrong,” she said angrily. “It won’t fit in the hole.”

My response should have been something civilized such as, “Don’t worry, it’s too hot up there on deck. I can see how you could make a mistake such as that in this heat. We’re both working too fast. Let’s just knock off for the day and get a cold beer.”

But I didn’t say that. What I did say had something to do with her not even having the intellectual capacity to put a round peg in a round hole. Actually, it was even worse, but this is a family magazine. I’m willing to bet that right then she was angrier than she’d ever been in her life, yet I swear that a small Mona Lisa-type smile came to her lips.

I cocked my head, curious at her response when I had expected the worst. She leaned toward me and kind of waved me closer with her index finger. “May I see the paint?” she asked calmly. “Sure,” I said, perplexed.

And then, very slowly, she poured the entire can over my head.

And as for the money part of not being able to sail around the world on this boat and with this woman, well, when both of them got done with me, there wasn’t enough money left for even a quart of cheap white paint. And Mona Lisa, who had since stopped smiling, was gone for good.

Dave Roper made a miraculous recovery from these early misdeeds and has sailed Elsa, a Bruce King-designed Independence 31, for more than 30 years out of Marblehead, Mass., where he lives and works.