Crane day

Some context for what follows: I bought Sandpiper, nineteen feet of sailing boat, in March. My sailing experience at the time of purchase was none. My sailing experience by the first of May, when she was due to be craned into the water, remained none. I mention this so that the reader can properly appreciate the day.

Watching one’s first boat dangle from a crane is, I now know, a uniquely stressful spectator sport, and it did not help that partway through the lift she began to swing, or that the bottom of her keel found the ground on the way over with a scrape I felt in my own spine. The crane crew were unbothered. I was extremely bothered, and have decided that being bothered on behalf of professionals is the boat owner’s true station in life.

Mercifully, I had reinforcements. A good friend, and an actual sailor, hopped aboard and took her round to her mooring in the inner harbour while I rowed out in the dinghy to help with the lines, feeling briefly and fraudulently nautical. Then the tide, which cares nothing for a novice’s plans, went out at speed, and Sandpiper settled aground a metre or two forward of where she was meant to sit.

Which is how, at midnight, on the returning high water, I came to be rowing my girlfriend out across a cold, dark harbour, the two of us with a combined sailing experience of none, to shift the lines and secure her properly. It was freezing, it was pitch black, and it was utterly miserable, and I record for posterity that she came anyway. Sandpiper, for her part, sat serenely on her mooring the next morning as though nothing whatsoever had happened.

They say the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day he buys her and the day he sells her. Nobody warns you about the third kind of day. To the summer, then, and to learning, at last, how to sail.