A simple story, but is it really that simple?

Midwinter 2006

By Tom Snyder

I recently came across a photo of my boat lying on its side in a field of rocks. This is a photo that demands a story. One doesn’t look at it and simply say, “Wow, she really is on her side.” So this story doesn’t have a point. It’s really just a long caption.

Four years ago, on a tranquil July day, I took my good friend, Jerry, out for an afternoon sail. He is not an experienced sailor, but, even better, he’s a strong and wise guy. Not a wiseguy – a wise guy. We sailed off the mooring, and three hours later, we sailed back to it. Jerry secured the mooring while I put the mainsail to bed. In 10 minutes we were in the dinghy. End of story, almost.

Later, I was enjoying the quietest of sunsets with my family. Sounds good, doesn’t it. Actually, my teen-aged son, whose friends were eating elsewhere, was waiting out the event under duress. And my younger daughter had recently discovered that I was not even remotely a cool guy. So really it was my wife and I who enjoyed this moment. (For the record, I was, in fact, a cool guy. Honestly.)

A neighbor appeared. He began speaking to us with an enforced calm that gets one’s attention fast. This is the same tone I’ve heard from my dentist right before deep drilling, as in, “Now everybody’s going to act like a grown up, right?” Our hard-working and very earnest neighbor painted a picture for us of a boat, ours, lying on her side. “Beached” would be the correct word if she were on a beach. In this case. the word was “rocked.”

My wife took the photo as we first arrived on the scene. I found myself trying to act like nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. My daughter looked like an accident victim. She went quickly from the standard model nonverbal daughter to the open-mouthed and speechless kind. Soon I delivered my five-point state-of-the-incident address: hull lightly dinged, tide still falling, wind nonexistent – I’d get two anchors set while waiting for high tide, and also, holy shit!

My daughter (let’s continue to call her “my daughter” for this piece) declared that she would go the all-night distance. With me! Wow! My wife brought us food and books and extra flashlights while my daughter (on second thought, let’s call her “my buddy” for this piece) and I set two anchors at a 60-degree angle so that, as the tide rose and the boat righted, we might gently tug her through a maze of rocks to deep water. We rowed out to the mooring to examine the pennant. Nothing wrong there, so this was clearly a case of an improperly secured mooring. Ooops.

We spent the next many hours sitting in a sideways cockpit. I read to my buddy, and she read to me from her summer reading. I toasted to her strength and fearlessness. We shared high-quality snacks. The hull groaned horrifically as it shifted on the bed of rocks. At 2 a.m., a car pulled up on the road above us. Someone got out and walked warily down through the woods toward us with a flashlight. I recognized the gait, so I yelled, “Is that you, Jerry?” There was an unnaturally long pause before his timorous voice hazarded a “yes.” Or more of a “yes?”

Poor guy; he felt terrible. We assured the much-reduced Jerry that everything was cool. That it would be dangerous to attempt to board the now-shifting vessel. That he should go home to bed. But I forgot to tell him something, and I will call him tonight, these many years later, to tell him that the slipped mooring was not 100 percent his fault – or 50 or 25 percent. It was 0 percent his fault and 100 percent the fault of the captain, who in this case happened to be my daughter. I’m kidding. It was me. I was kidding!

Guess what. I just discovered that there is a point to this story. (I guess there always will be.) And it is this: Never… No, the point is this: Always… No, this is it. Boats are heavy enough, tricky enough, and dangerous enough to require that the chain of responsibility be unarguable, even on pleasure boats – even between friends.

Boats are different from houses or cars, so there’s a good reason for the history of formal captaincy aboard. It’s often the subject of jokes, especially in response to petty tyrants, mini-Blighs or even unrepentant a’holes who give the captain a bad name. (Oh, no. Now I’m on a high horse. All because of a photo.) But still there must be captains who say, “My fault.” And woe to those captains who don’t teach.

So there it is in all it’s moral narrative finery. Hey, I warned you. (Actually, I didn’t.)

Tom Snyder sails Blue Moon out of Peaks Island, Maine