The Laser Tip

When the air gets cold it’s only natural to assume that the water has gotten cold right along with it. The mornings are chilled, the evenings too, and when the middle of these late summer days warm us just enough, we don’t think much about going swimming. The water must be too cold. It is, after all, September, and everyone knows that September is fall and that August is summer. Once August is over we must do things for fall, like pick apples and wear corduroys and talk about football and elections. And if we’re out during the day and we’re warm, and then we start to sweat, we certainly don’t think about beating it to the lake for a swim.

This is our problem. Two days ago, late into the afternoon, the wind was blowing. It was blowing in a way that it hadn’t blown in a while, or at least since the day the new sailboat arrived on that trailer. The air was warm, the wind stiff, my sailing appetite whet. I have not yet tested the Kestrel, as I have a strong premonition that if that boat is going to somehow tip or sink or crash headlong into something immovable that it will be my hand on the tiller when that happens. I’m trying to avoid that. So I rigged up the Laser and pushed off, hoping to chart a path towards Majestic and then back towards Pebble Point before reversing the whole tack and finding my way back to the Loch Vista shore.

Lasers, it should be noted, are not necessarily engineered to hold a sailor of my magnificent girth. They do best when captained by someone light, like my son, and when a little wind hits his sail in that little boat he skitters across the surface with barely a drag at all. When I get in that boat in that same wind, the boat will move all right, but it’s more like a plow straining to clear a road of a heavy wet snow. Even so, I might push the deck of that boat a little closer to the water than it would like to be, but it sails just fine. And so I rigged up and pushed off from the shore, being careful to step with purpose so the zebra mussels couldn’t cut me, and I sailed past the pier and past the first buoy and then the second, and within seconds that mighty southwest wind had caught my little sail and I was off.

What fun it is to sail a tiny little sailboat in such a big wind. The tack must be just right, for running too parallel with the wind will just push your sail into the water and your boat onto its side, and running too direct at the breeze will cause your sail to luff violently. If you don’t think a small sail can be violent I urge you to give it a try. Sails flapping in the wind with swinging aluminum booms are as violent as anything so idyllic could ever be. But I know this, so I sailed with purpose and I sailed straight, and all was well. I’d hike in the sail a bit and see how far I could lean, hoping that my weight might at this point in my day actually provide me with some form of tangible benefit.

All was well until somewhere about three hundred yards off the southwestern tip of Cedar Point. It was there that I decided to let the sail out to its fullest and ride with the wind. When you do this, the boat no longer tips, so your weight is no longer your friend. The boat just cruises, pushed along by the winds, leading straight downwind. The problem with this is that with the waves crashing around you there is no longer an angle where your weight can offset the tip. Instead, you’d hunched closer to the center of the boat, trying to provide stability to a boat that is being tossed around like a dollar store kite in the school parking lot. This is what I was trying to do.

I was doing it well for quite a distance, until a combination of what must have been a rogue wave and a gust of wind pushed the boat over in fraction of a second. In one move the boat flipped, which is not uncommon. What is uncommon is that it flipped with the sail let fully out, so instead of the sail hitting the water and holding the boat on its side, the sail cut right into the water and within a second the hull was sunning itself and the mast was pointing straight towards the bottom. Making matters entirely worse, the daggerboard had slipped out of its slot and was floating in the water next to me. The rudder had come undone as well and the tiller had untethered itself from the rudder, leaving all three pieces floating in the water. But they weren’t floating nicely, they were being pushed by the huge winds, pushing further away from me with every breaking wave. I thought for a few seconds about how all of this was a bit problematic.

I grabbed onto the three floating pieces- the pieces that would be integral to my ability to somehow right this boat and sail back to shore- and set about trying to stick the daggerboard, upside down, into the opening in the hull. It sounds easy as I write it here, but out there it wasn’t. The daggerboard is heavier than it should be, and I’m weaker than I look. After several missed attempts, the board stuck in the slot and I worked to leverage my weight onto the board, at once pulling the board towards me and pushing the lip of the submerged boat away from me.

It was then that a boat came by for a look. They asked if I was okay, as I obviously wasn’t. I said I was. They didn’t believe me. I insisted. They drove away, but not before the guy got so close that I thought he might snag a loose line with his prop and really make this a bad day. They didn’t go far though, content to watch from a moderate distance to see if I could indeed figure this thing out. Having them watch made my efforts more serious, as I otherwise might have just chosen to cling to the boat and, in an hour or two, wash ashore.

With the daggerboard in I had some hope that I would be able to flip this boat, but each time the boat would start to flip the wind would push it right back over again. I struggled to swim the boat into the wind, so the nose would face the Fontana Beach, and after a few minutes I had done just that. The boat flipped more easily now, and with steady pressure on the board and enough push with my toes on the deck lip it slowly righted itself. I was careful to yank the daggerboard out as it flipped, and when I slung it, along with the rudder and the tiller onto the boat I felt as though I was home free.

And I was. I rammed the board in place, leaned over the center to clip the rudder in, and balanced as best I could as the tiller snugged into place. With that, a few hikes on the sail and I was off. I mean, I wasn’t off, I was headed home as quickly as possible to lick the wounds on my body but mostly tend to the scrapes on my pride. The boaters who had offered help watched as I sailed home.

This wasn’t about sailing, and it wasn’t about me turtling the boat. This was about the moment where I was floating in the middle of the lake with the wind whipping my boat and my face, and I wasn’t cold. It wasn’t freezing. It wasn’t somehow uncomfortable. The lake was warm, and sun bright, and the feeling as much mid July as it was mid September. This isn’t a story about a sailboat, it’s a lesson about water. The water is warm, the sun is high, and there is still time. Time to take one last swim, or maybe twenty more, and these are the late summer swims that must tide us over until the next summer. Get to the lake, and get in it.