Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

Please feel free to comment.  Today’s post is the  opening chapter to Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home.  I plan on making the book available for purchase in time for Christmas, and need an idea of how many to order.  Please click here to express a nonbinding interest in ordering.

Dodging Doubts and Dodging Isabel

The deal’s done; it’s time to move. With cheaper berthing in Baltimore on account of next week’s pomp and pitch at the Annapolis Boat Show, I move Faith. Some suggest sailing her to Baltimore alone, given my level of experience, relates to the magnitude of a certain couple parts of my private anatomy, like steroids gone backwards; I miss the connection. October reds and yellows frame a crisp blue sky and the reflecting mud of water as I pretend seamanship.

We read what we can to learn what to expect, focusing an inordinate amount of energy on stuff and technicalities, and not enough on who we are and how our family can work together to make this journey happen. Sailing publications help maintain our misdirected focus.

Heeding the wisdom of these seasoned journaltisers, we replace the obsolete radar system with a new radar system, a functional charging system with a new functional charging system, and a good SSB radio – single sideband, for long range communications – with a new one of questionable merit. In early April, a marine-electronics guy from Michigan accompanies me to Baltimore to install the equipment. He mopes mostly, discovering a few days ago that his wife isn’t coming home. Apparently, she decided, now that the kids are grown, it’s her turn to live, and her living doesn’t include him. All he has left is his work, our work, being stripped of that part of his life that holds meaning. It’s a sad two days, but Faith appreciates the attention. She doesn’t care that most of the work is unnecessary. If Faith spoke, she’d tell us nobody spends much time at the helm, relying instead on the autopilot to do the work, and that our installation of the new radar screen in that direction isn’t very clever. I can’t know today that for the next five years I’ll live with it there, silently kicking myself for four of them, or that I’ll reinstall the older radio after our first passage to a foreign port and not kick myself nearly as long.

I also use Mr. Mopey’s sailing experience – a year in the Caribbean on his boat – to help sail Faith to Hampton, Virginia. Icy rain on our cheeks turns icier and drips down our necks as grey fades to a darkness that fans the forty-knot breeze. He mumbles more than once about the inadequacy of the charts on board for the task at hand, and I make a mental note to correct that. The trip teaches me that we sailed carries a measure of humility not found in we’re going to sail.

The move to Faith, on Sept. 2, 2003, follows a period blurred by fantasies conjured in anticipation of our new life. Months pass before reality returns. School begins with trips to Jamestown and Yorktown, while we wait for the hurricane season to expire before sailing south. Then, to demonstrate that we’re already too far south, Isabel, the season’s last hurricane, targets the Chesapeake Bay. Our options are to either move upriver in the James, York, or Rappahannock and ride the storm; or move beyond Isabel’s reach to somewhere like New York.

The miserable ride to New York scares me. Lorrie and the kids don’t know any better than to have confidence in me, but I’m in charge now, and I don’t have anyone to have confidence in except God. He and I have some serious discussions.

My nerves for this experience are new and turning raw and I assume everybody else’s nerves are too. I’m scared, but as captain, it’s my job to assure the others that things are fine, that this unnatural sensation is normal. Faith is our home now, and our home is rocking like a hobby-horse, riding up one wave and landing on the next with a jarring crash. I go below to offer comfort and talk first to Lorrie, who’s acquiring an annoying susceptibility, more than the rest of us, to sea-sickness. She finds sleep to be the best treatment. My comfort is received with the same gratitude I recall in the delivery room when Emily arrived so many years ago.

In addition to her seasickness, she’s developing a keen fear of the unknown and a broad vocabulary of expletive description.

She instructs me to comfort the kids because they’re all shook up. I check in on Greggii and Emily whose anxieties are masked by a deep sleep, then on Amanda, lying on the top bunk of the starboard cabin where I can put my arm on her shoulder.

“You’re still awake?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I can’t sleep.”

“Are you OK?”

With 12-year-old innocence, she responds, “Yeah. Why?”

“The boat is going all over the place, and the crashing waves, does that bother you?”

“No. Why would it? It’s a boat, Dad!”

Our personalities and positions among each other – that we’re taking possession of or that are taking possession of us – are gaining definition.

It’s my burden to keep Faith and our family on an even keel. Faith is the easier task. She takes her share of attention, but her emotions are straight-forward, without the cyclical nature of the other girls. I would never suggest that Lorrie’s emotions have a physical and cyclical component, but I find Emily and Amanda more accepting of this element of womanhood than their mother. I’m gifted with the ability to figure out how things work, so it falls on me to sail and fix, and as captain, father, and husband, to comfort, teach, and guide.

Lorrie, as admiral and mother, enthusiastically takes responsibility for keeping me in check. She proclaims herself Faith’s “Prevention Specialist,” which will undoubtedly keep us all alive and healthy during our voyage and relieve me of the fatherly burden of saying no. The kids realize soon enough that just ask your mother means no.

The kids are cast in roles and identities on top of their first, middle, and baby of the family traits. Each of them must continue as students, and as children. The fact that they can sleep soundly, and aren’t nervous about the discomfort of getting to New York affirms that the innocence of childhood prevails.

I happen to be the second child of five, while Lorrie is the first of three. The reason I say this is that somewhere in the mental archives of college psychology, certain characteristics can be traced to birth order.

Emily is first, with a well ordered sense of the world and of herself, and when this sense is not supported by reality, she’s frustrated. She’s sensitive to others, as first children tend to be, when the situation tells her she needs to be. She’s able to create and follow an ordered recipe for any situation, whether it’s changing the oil of Faith, or baking cookies, or comforting somebody in a time of need. She’s pragmatic in everything.

Amanda is full of the dreams, creativity, and sensitivity of the second child. Her need for a logical pattern exists only to aid this creativity. Her need for a recipe exists only so the cookies she gives away serve to build a solid relationship, while Emily’s focus is on the cookies. The drawback of her sensitivity is the tendency to take possession of the feelings of others. This I know as a second child myself.

Greggii is the baby. I am pleased that he demonstrates type-A traits in a world where type-Bs are increasingly marginalized.

Anyway, all of my worrying, my fears, and my stress don’t help. What matters is that we’re going to New York, and God hasn’t chosen this moment to bring us home.

We all take more credit for our circumstances than due. It’s no different with me in the calm of the early morning Hudson River. “Wow, I managed to get us here, isn’t that special?” But it’s God who uses our lack of experience to show that He will get us to our destination.

We make it past Sandy Hook by midnight, and enter the Hudson River at one. It’s now three, and the security guard is helping us tie off. “Wow, it’s really peaceful here,” I say.
“Just wait until 6:00, when the ferries start running,” is his reply.

He’s right. The dock, floating so peacefully on our arrival, turns into the Caribbean Steel Drum band that doesn’t get to play the good gigs, but makes up for it by playing loud.
We’re less than fresh in the morning as we motor downstream, past the Statue of Liberty, get fuel, and talk to people about going somewhere comfortable for the sloppy weather that Isabel will send our way. Everybody suggests we take the East River to Long Island Sound, and find someplace secure there. “Just watch the currents at Hell Gate!”

That sounds menacing enough, so I ask, “What’s Hell Gate?”

“Oh, you sure don’t want to be there when the tide is wrong!” says the fuel attendant.

“So, when’s a good time?”

“You should be alright, if you go now. You have two hours before the tide comes in.”
The East River flows both ways, strong at times, depending on the tides. Hell Gate is an elbow in a narrow run of the river where strong, changing currents create dangerous eddies. I’m new at this, and hold the cheeks of my rump together to pass Hell Gate without incident.

It’s a beautiful, bright, sunny morning when we enter the southwest end of Long Island Sound. Sails dance and the atmosphere breathes a festive mood.

We’re on a mission of avoidance, and don’t join the festivities. We know now that Isabel is no longer a threat, but we’re tired and want quiet shelter. We radio a marina that says Faith is too deep and suggests we continue to Oyster Bay, where we can grab a mooring ball.

Our entry into Oyster Bay witnesses the eeriness of changing weather. The graceful flight of the birds becomes erratic, the bright color of sky and water and land fades, and the breeze imitates the birds. We sup and go to bed, all of us with enough fatigue to sleep in our new home that dances awake on the water.

We’re safe.

By morning, it’s chilly, grey, and windy. The change came and a new rhythm settles in: the waves on the hull, the halyards on the mast, the intermittent rain on the deck, and life: cooking, eating, napping, and school.

The next day, the rhythm stills, the colors return, and the birds soar gracefully again.
Returning to Hampton sees us sailing in a steady breeze to an anchorage for the night in the mouth of the Delaware Bay. By morning, it’s calm again and we enjoy a beautiful day’s motor, as motoring goes, down the Atlantic coast of Maryland. The opportunity to practice our radio skills presents itself with the approach of The Coast Guard as they plant their boat about thirty meters off our port quarter to practice their own radio skills. They ask about the passengers, the boat, the last port of call, the next port of call, any ports of call outside of the United States, and we have a generally decent chat on this pleasant afternoon.

Just as they bear off at the end of the conversation, we lose contact. Emily, who’s sitting in the cockpit, asks, “Why is land on the other side of the boat now?”

Our radio doesn’t work nor do any other electronics, including the autopilot that was doing a good job of keeping the shoreline to starboard until now. We’re in the middle of cutting a large circle of sea on our maiden voyage for the Coast Guard to see.

Emily takes the helm while I investigate to find Greggii and Amanda playing down below in the salon. There’s a master power switch just below them that was kicked.