Boat blessings

May 2024

By Craig Moodie

I hauled our catboat off the beach, shoved her into deeper water, then jackknifed into the cockpit beside my wife. “You did it again,” said Ellen as I sheeted in. I followed her eyes to see blood leaking from a fresh scrape on my left shin. But no matter: The mid-September afternoon smiled on us with warm sunshine from a cumulus-pocked sky, a seven-knot breeze, and riffled blue-green waters – ideal conditions for our sail commemorating my switch from gainful employment to free agency.

The author, champagne in hand, celebrating his retirement. Photo courtesy Craig Moodie

Free agency, you ask? Some call it retirement.

I balk at the word “retirement” – if applied to me, that is. Finally I have the chance to work on projects I (mostly) choose, and to work harder than ever. Can that really be called “retirement?”

We slalomed through the mostly empty moorings of the outer Megansett Harbor and pointed for the end of Scraggy Neck and Seal Rocks, slipping along at a stately pace into the broadening bay. We settled into our cruise with the hull kissing the wavelets and the wake burbling around the rudder. The mix of peace and euphoria that only sailing brings suffused us. Even my shin stopped bleeding.

“Do you want to do the honors?” Ellen said. From the ditty bag, she drew out the bottle of champagne our son had sent for the occasion – the brand with the anchor emblem on the neck, naturally.

I hooked my arm around the tiller, taking the bottle with my steering hand and using my other to pry off the foil and wire, the sheet pinned under my foot. The cork proved eager to be free. Et voilá, with a soft poof, I released the sweet perfume of champagne in its atomized cloud to mingle for a moment with the rich, fishy funk of the salt breeze.

Thus we poured ourselves the first sip of champagne we’ve had aboard Finn since the day we launched her. That warm May morning, we spared her prow and anointed her with a few sprinkles, saving the rest for ourselves on our inaugural voyage into Buzzards Bay.

Now, almost two decades later, we bounded outward on the same tack, holding plastic cups of sunlit ambrosia, its golden stars streaming to the surface. The summer crowds had dispersed and only a few other sailboats were out, a junk-rigged beauty of a ketch that moors in nearby Squeteague Harbor among them. For once, the breeze behaved itself. We passed close to the boulder-strewn shore of Scraggy Neck and skirted the black fangs of Seal Rocks into open water. A few miles to our north, Wing’s Neck lighthouse appeared – our demarcation point now that the sun was lowering.

This was a celebration. We had our boat. We had each other. We had the moment. And we had . . . champagne.

But as we came about and ran for home, wistfulness seeped into me. I glanced at Ellen. Did she feel it, too? Maybe the sharp autumnal light caused my pang.

How many sails with our kids, our family, friends, dogs, and just ourselves had we taken? We used to joke that I should run a business given how many excursions I skippered with the cockpit at capacity: Captain Crusty’s Catboat Cruises.

As the years mounted, and more and more water passed beneath our hull, the demand for Captain Crusty’s services ebbed. Our kids grew up. So did siblings and in-laws. Friends turned to their own lives and boats. Dogs crossed the bar.

In recent years I either single-handed or double-teamed with Ellen. On rare occasions, we took friends or family out. Each season, we sailed less.

We swanned back toward shore, an underlying question nagging: How much longer could we hoist our increasingly creaky carcasses into our yachtlet, she of the seatless coccyx-crushing cedar cockpit, the knee- and elbow-battering oak coaming, the foredeck that sometimes seemed forged of ferro-cement?

“This . . . is . . . perfect,” whispered Ellen, eyes closed, chin tipped skyward, strands of hair flowing.

She was right. This was no time to brood on what lay in our wake – or ahead of us. I had found a message in a bottle: This was the time to look not backward, not forward, but around – at all that I had.

Look around I did. Beneath the swelling sail, I spotted the junk-rigged ketch as she heeled across the water, the late-day sunbeams raking at just the right angle to make her white hull and sails glow. She seemed to levitate on a sea of effervescence – as did we.

“Cheers to that,” I said.

I glanced down. On the other knee, a cut had appeared as if by some miracle, the necessary stigmata, I figured, for another blessing of the boat – and of my launch into free agency.

Craig Moodie lives with his wife Ellen in Massachusetts. His work includes “A Sailor’s Valentine and Other Stories,” and, under the name John Macfarlane, the middle-grade novel “Stormstruck!”, a Kirkus Best Book.