All craft great and small

Alex Burke sailing Red Stripe in Pulpit Harbor. Photo by Christopher Birch

March/April 2022

By Christopher Birch

January 1994 brought us Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. The White Bronco chase on the 405 had us again glued to our TVs in June. It was an exciting time when the telecast of the day could sustain America. Sadly, it wouldn’t last. The newswire lost its wind, and we became collectively becalmed without a breath of a headline worth noting. Time dragged on for 27 years, and nothing happened. It was boring.

Finally, 2021 rolled in, and we had something to talk about again: The Ever Given and all her 18,000 containers of cargo were stuck in the Suez Canal. Millions of video games, sneakers, plastic toys, iPhones and pool noodles were late. Consumerism was clogged in the Suez drain. The problem was ridiculously simple, but the ship was unthinkably large. The ordeal became “must-see” TV.

Mother Nature (not really taking her own self-interest into account) ultimately solved the problem for us. When dredges, tugs, oversized bulldozers, and hundreds of workers toiling 24-7 failed, the spring tides stepped up and freed the ship.

On March 23 of this year, at 05:40 UTC, we will mark the one-year anniversary of the great grounding, the tourniquet on trade, the Suez situation. It’s time for a moment of retrospection. Seaworthiness of sailor and ship used to be mandated by the great horns forcing passage through the Southern Ocean. What an ironic mercy those spring tides were for the ship who couldn’t steer straight at the shortcut.

Nature’s mercy is something we appreciate aboard our smaller craft here in New England as well. Tides lift our boats too, sometimes to our great advantage. Rain washes salt off the deck. The sun can take over a varnish stripping chore. Currents boost us. Our Cape Cod Canal may not be as vital as the Suez, but under the Sagamore and Bourne bridges, the current is at work as if every pool noodle in the world depends on it. With good luck or good planning, that current will whisk you through the canal with great haste. If it’s against you, you’ll have a bit more “canal-time” to think about the power of nature than you might want. Mercy!

The Ever Given uses the sea to move great quantities of stuff. The recreational boater goes to sea simply to enjoy it. Bearing witness to the power, fragility and beauty of nature is the work of the recreational boater. Somehow, the more dissimilar our boats are from the Ever Given, the easier it is to do this work.

My Russian friend, Alex, has a beautiful sailing/rowing tender named Red Stripe. She is small, simple and in every way the opposite of the Ever Given. My wife (also named Alex) and I are always eager to sail her when given the opportunity. Alex-the-Russian loves Maine and sails down that way with his family in the late summer. Alex-the-wife loves Red Stripe, and we’ve been known to sail around the foggy coves of the Pine Tree State looking for that boat’s Rudolf-like stem.

Our boats recently met in Pulpit Harbor on a crisp September day. Red Stripe was promptly rigged and pressed into service. We tacked out to inspect the century-old osprey nest on Pulpit Rock and glided past the carefully manicured gumdrop trees standing guard at that harbor’s entrance. A red-throated loon watched us watching him from a distance, each of us admiring the other’s red stripe. Eiders and gulls kept us company at a closer range. We agreed with Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Small boat excursions are often remembered as a highlight of the season and this outing qualified.

We didn’t run her aground that day, but if we had, we could have stepped out into knee-deep water and shoved off without any assistance. We had no cargo aside from our little cooler. There wasn’t any TV news or any other sort of news out there. The harbor was unusually quiet, and no traffic separation schemes were required. It was just the two of us going about the busy work of the recreational sailor, bearing witness. Watching and never taking, it was our anti-Ever Given moment.

We could have rowed the boat, but the sail was a lot easier. There’s something about sailing a small boat that opens a sailor’s senses to her surroundings. A free ride across the harbor is a gift. As Henry Besuden famously pointed out, “It’s good to have nature working for you. She works at a minimum wage.”

Christopher Birch is the proprietor of Birch Marine Inc. on Long Wharf in Boston, Mass., where he’s been building, maintaining and restoring boats for the past 34 years.