I was standing on a dock waiting for my ship to come in … no, wait, that sounds like the beginning of a metaphor. Let me start again. I was standing on a dock down in the islands waiting for my ferry to arrive, and idly watching a bunch of kids racing dinghies around the harbor. At one point, a Boston Whaler sped through the fleet, dodging nimbly in and out of the youngsters. Next to me, a young man wearing a Mt. Gay regatta shirt turned and said, voice dripping with scorn, “Powerboats are just lame, aren’t they?”

Drawing myself up and summoning my best haughty tone, I said, “Son, you be real mindful
of what you’re saying. There’s
two things a real sailor never blasphemes: motherhood and Boston Whalers!”

If you sail, it’s almost certain that you’ve been aboard a Whaler. Today, inflatable boats are in,
but back a couple of decades, Whalers were everywhere on the sailing scene.

If you learned to sail in dinghies, you were probably rescued by Whalers. As you were ferried ashore from a moored boat, the club tender was often a Boston Whaler. If you raced in a junior program, your sailing instructor probably yelled at you from a Whaler. And if you were unlucky enough to be stopped by the water cops, they were often aboard
a Whaler.

In the sailing community, powerboats are held in universally low esteem for a lot of good reasons. As a kid crewing for adults, I remember a real drifter where even the cigarette smoke went straight up, and one of the adults ripping off a chain of very adult words after a powerboat went past and its wake rolled any prayer of wind from our sails. Powerboats were the ones that beat us to the best moorings, left their generators rattling all night long, and were usually the first to drag anchor in a breeze. They were, and still are, regarded as a necessary evil by sailors, although I recall from my teenage days that the prettiest girls were often aboard powerboats. But that’s a tale for another column.

Why were Boston Whalers so popular? Well, they claimed they couldn’t sink, and the early ads for Whalers showed the inventor sawing one in half and then rowing away, still afloat.

So, because of their innate safety, Boston Whalers became de rigueur as rescue boats and junior program boats around yacht clubs and at sailing centers. A mark of someone who had been around was the ability to reach over the gunwale of a Whaler from in the water, feel around, and find the little hidden bronze bars that served as cleats. It was a badge of “been here, done this before.”

The first time I laid eyes on a Boston Whaler was when the boat dealer I worked for on weekends became the first Whaler dealer on the West Coast. One day a large wooden box arrived, and my high school chum Jon and I were sent to unpack a 13-foot Whaler.

We tore into the wood box with crowbars and soon had a pile of lumber lying around a rather
peculiarly shaped blue and white plastic container.

“What do you think it is?”, said Jon. “I dunno,” I replied as the elder. “Perhaps it’s a molded cover and the boat’s inside.”

Luckily, the owner of the dealership intervened before we attacked the Whaler with crowbars to find the real boat. It just didn’t look like any boat we’d ever seen.

I came to know that light blue interior intimately a few years later as a junior instructor for my yacht club that had a 16-foot Whaler for my use. It was during that long, hot summer that I learned to both love and hate that boat. It could pound your fillings out in a chop. The ads were right, though: it couldn’t sink. But it could sure fill with water.

That summer, the Snipes had a North American championship at our club and I volunteered to run the Whaler as a rescue boat. The regatta drew a lot of inland lake sailors who weren’t familiar with ocean swells, especially when the winds blew into the 30s and the seas turned into breakers. The fleet was soon decimated, and my radio was frantic, “Get the crews, leave the boats, get all the people!”

There were capsized Snipes everywhere, and my Whaler was soon filled like a New York subway at rush hour, with all of us standing thigh-deep in water, which was pouring over the rails as we fished more and more crews out.

I raced through the inlet to the club, dropping off weary crews to squish toward hot showers, and returned to retrieve the boats. Obviously, Snipes didn’t have the double-floors that now make capsizing a momentary inconvenience. No, these Snipes turned into water-logged sleds that weighed tons.

At first, we were wrestling the boats bow-first onto the Whaler, which allowed enough water to slosh out so they would float. Then a Coast Guard 40-footer, crewed by a bunch of scared kids my age, arrived on the scene with a pump like an elephant nose. They would drop that into a Snipe cockpit, a burst of smoke would come from their diesel engine, and the water would be sucked out of the Snipe faster than you read this line. Of course, it also sucked out everything else: mainsheet cleat, jib sheets, hiking straps … all gone. When we finally headed back to the club after dark, wet and bone-weary, we had a long line of Snipes in tow like ducklings.

A few years ago, I returned to my old yacht club and there at the dock was that same Boston Whaler four decades later. It was kind of beat-up but, hey, so am I. I went down and sat in it, remembering a long summer behind that chipped metal wheel. The interior had been repainted about the same blue with a 49-cent brush, and the rubber rail had been replaced by padded canvas.

But when I ran my hand down the gunwale, I could still feel the dents, five, ten, more, from where we’d pulled the Snipes out until their daggerboards hit the rail as we emptied them. They were still there, like notches on a gunslinger’s pistol.

This may seem a non-sailing column but, in fact, it’s really about the essence of sailing. Not to mention a lot of great memories.

For many of us who live north of latitude 43 north, summer is sacred. It’s an elemental imperative of our being, a compulsion imprinted on our DNA, to experience as many minutes of the fleeting season of light and warmth as possible. This cannot be done inside, so moments when we don’t have to be in an office or a house are doubly precious. Fortunate seaside worker that I am, I can make a beeline to my boat, moored a scant block away from my office, when the workday ends. Or just go home, where the deck awaits, along with the First Mate and a glass of wine. This is a place well suited for the passive enjoyment of summer, embraced by garden blooms and foliage and rugged stands of trees that need a good trimming but still allow avenues of views of Lake Michigan, whose water is typically rendered a rich shade of cobalt blue this time of the day by the remains of the sea breeze.

If summer is sacred, then it’s fitting that the ambience described above inspires a certain reverence. We tend to talk about the happenings of the day in muted tones so as not to shut out the rustle of the garden grasses, the calls of the resident birds and the whisper of small waves breaking at the base of the bluff.

When these sounds—you might call them, with apologies to Simon and Garfunkel, the sounds of silence—are drowned out by noxious man-made noise, it is as though precious moments of summer are stolen, never to be replaced.

We can’t see our neighbors through the leafy screens between our properties, but at times we can certainly hear them. They are good people, but their idea of enjoying summer often involves operating equipment powered by internal combustion engines at the very time we are savoring the late afternoon quiet. The south neighbor’s new John Deere riding lawn mower is so loud that I suspect the manufacturer intentionally left it inadequately muffled to satisfy the inner tractor driver of a typical male owner. The north neighbor tills his garden with an antique machine dating to an era when it was not understood that loud noise causes hearing loss. To appreciate its impact on the ear, think of a dentist’s drill amplified a few hundred times.

We could escape the din by going inside, shutting the doors and windows and turning on the AC and TV. Since that would be a lot like winter, it’s not an acceptable option. I am fortunate to have a better alternative that I’ll get to shortly, but still I worry that the ever present and ever growing blight of noise is a sign of a civilization going backward. I tried to imagine the other evening, when the south neighbor fired up his tractor five minutes after I came home from the office, how much quieter the world must have been before the gas-powered lawn mower was invented and grass had to be cut with a pushed reel mower. Besides less noise, most of us would have a lot less grass to look at, hardly a bad thing in the scheme of things. (Disclosure: As the owner and user of lawn mowers, a chain saw and a leaf blower, all I can say in my defense is that I never use them during cocktail hour.)

It would be one thing if the noise blight were being forced on society, but a big portion of the human population seems to want it, indeed can’t get along without it. How else to explain that even expensive restaurants of high repute feel they are pleasing customers by inflicting a music soundtrack on their diners? Stores do the same thing to shoppers. People go to parks and beaches in search of natural beauty and take their noise with them, polluting the atmosphere with radio music or, infinitely worse, talk radio blather.

At least it can be said that sort of noise is incidental to some folks’ enjoyment of life, but other noise that deprives us of the enjoyment of summer is premeditated. Making noise is the goal and the racket is the reward. I know, the appeal of motorcycles is the wind in your face, the freedom of the open road, the thrill of G-pulling acceleration, etc. etc. That’s part of it, but another part, maybe the biggest part, is generating noise that can make my neighbor’s garden root-canal machine seem like a purring kitten. Harley-Davidson is perfectly capable of making quiet motorcycles. It doesn’t because so many motorcycle riders need to announce they are free spirits of the open road by detonating thundering exhaust explosions near as many forced listeners as possible.

I said I was lucky, and so are most of the people reading this column. We can go sailing. Of all the wonderful things about sailing, the one that gets more wonderful everyday, because the world gets noisier everyday, is that it’s our ticket to escape the clatter, for not only are sailboats quiet, but they can take us to where there is no noise.

Not that getting there is easy. The places where many sailboats live can be noisy. The other day, the owner of a boat on a pier near where my boat is docked, a sailboat no less, spent two hours cleaning his deck with a gasoline-powered pressure washer, the kind whose manufacturers warn should not be used without hearing protection. I went home to listen to a John Deere tractor.

Even away from a slip or mooring, there are auditory hurdles to clear on the way to the quiet. Jet Skis, for example. Or, if you are truly unfortunate, you can find yourself within earshot of what may be the most offensive noisemaker in the universe, on water or land. The purpose of the cigarette boat when it was invented was reputedly drug smuggling, but now it has morphed into something arguably more harmful to society—making eardrum-crushing noise that is utterly out of place in the marine environment for the express purpose of showing off. Boatbuilders have all the technology they need to produce long, sleek, sexy powerboats that can cruise at 60 miles per hour or more without excessive noise, but when catering to the cigarette boat crowd they don’t—because making noise is the whole point of these ultimate narcissist’s toys. Regular readers of this column will recognize the name of one of these boats I frequently come across that speaks volumes about the cigarette boat phenomenon—Mine’s Bigger. (No, I’m not making this up.) There has been some speculation as to what the name means. I guess it refers to the boat’s decibel output.

One of the reasons sailing allows us to get away from such din is that the noisemakers don’t want to go where there is nobody to hear their noise. Sail far enough offshore, and you’re in aural nirvana.

It’s not that sailboats are silent. They exist in a world of sound. The wind and sea can be loud. Blocks, lines and sails are all soundmakers. Modern, thin-skinned boats amplify the bubbling and surging of the water against the hull and are veritable symphonies of sound below deck.

Sounds, yes, but not noise. What you hear when you’re sailing are the sounds of silence.

When sailing makes it onto the nightly TV news, it’s time for sailors to cringe, because it will likely release a stream of ignorant stereotypes and clichés about the pastime we think is wholesome and good and just about the finest way imaginable to spend leisure time.

So it was with Tony Hayward’s not-so-excellent sailing adventure. Hayward decided to take a day off from his job as CEO of BP to sail in the Round the Island Race on the Solent in England on the 52-foot racing sailboat he and two friends own. When Hayward was discovered sitting on the starboard quarter behind the helmsman, a media storm blew up and images of the captain of industry (but not captain of the boat), looking as though he were trying to sail incognito, all scrunched up and covered from head to toe in foul-weather gear on a sunny day, were plastered all over the world’s electronic and print information portals. And, of course, the world was shocked, shocked with many exclamation points. Shocked not so much because he took a break from manning the desk where the buck stops in the Gulf of Mexico oil well disaster, but because he went sailing.

Worse than sailing, really— he went “yachting,” the media’s gerund of choice when describing what rich people do on the water. The race around the Isle of Wight attracts some 1,700 sailboats, most of which are rather prosaic and quite small, yet to the media it was a “glitzy yacht race.”

It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for Hayward, in spite of my contempt for his company’s negligence. Taking a break is not a mortal sin.

I will have to admit, though, that in this case taking a break by going sailing was a public relations sin. Hayward would have gotten off easier if he chosen almost any other recreation on his day off, say, horseback riding or playing in a croquet tournament. It wasn’t just that the image of him out on the comparatively pristine water of the Solent while his oil well continued to foul the Gulf was too much for some to choke down. It was that he went sailing, which everyone knows is a metaphor for the wretched excesses of the indolent rich.

Abby Sunderland’s sailing adventure got the attention of the media too (the gamut from staid newspapers to hyperbolic Internet blogs), although in her case some in the press actually got it right. Syndicated Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts was spot-on when he described Abby as a “teenager from Thousand Oaks, California, whose parents allowed her to risk her life in search of a dubious and ultimately meaningless record.”

Abby and her parents hoped she would become the youngest person to sail alone around the world nonstop. She was one of the youngsters I wrote about in the February issue in a column titled, “The quest for fame has teenage girls chasing Joshua Slocum.”
Since then, Abby has found fame, though not in the manner her parents had hoped. She was rescued from her dismasted boat (which was then abandoned) in the far southern reaches of the Indian Ocean in an elaborate operation involving a number of ships and aircraft.

She is now the poster girl for a controversy over parents exploiting children for financial gain, but before we go there I want to say this about Abby Sunderland, based on the grit she displayed even in failure: This is one brave girl who obviously possesses qualities of determination and commitment developed well beyond those of many adults and certainly of many of her contemporaries, who were strolling malls and chirping into cell phones while she was sailing a 40-foot boat in conditions that would tax any sailor, no matter how experienced.

What’s more, if her voyage had resembled the interpretation of it her media-savvy father has been spinning since her rescue—as a sort of singlehanded Outward Bound experience for a splendidly prepared lifelong sailor who has been yearning for years to take on the challenge of sailing around the world—many would have thought it an admirable quest.

Alas, this was something different—a heavily publicized campaign to set a record with the goal of harvesting all of the commercial possibilities that come these days with fame, however fleeting. Pursuit of the foolish record set up a series of dominoes that fell one after the other until the high school girl was left on a disabled boat in 25-foot seas 2,000 miles from Australia and far from other vessels.

The good weather window closed as problems with the boat delayed departure from California, yet the Sunderlands pressed on, lest some other teenager swipe the coveted record. Dangerous weather became inevitable when more time was lost stopping for repairs in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and Cape Town, South Africa. It was storm season by the time Abby set out across the Indian Ocean.

Abby could have attempted her circumnavigation in much gentler weather if she had waited until the Southern Ocean winter was over, but then there would be no record for her. Another teenage girl, Jessica Watson of Australia, 4 months older than Abby, was well along in her around-the world record quest.

For her adventure, Abby was given an ultra-lightweight, water-ballasted, canting-keel Open 40, a boat so complex and sophisticated (it had no permanent backstay) that it would have tested the skills and physical strength of a mature, experienced around-the-world sailor. Maybe the idea was that a really fast boat would give Abby another edge in completing the circumnavigation before she was too old to qualify for the record. (Jessica Watson sailed a comparatively heavy 34-footer, strong and seaworthy but no speed demon.)

On the other hand, while Abby’s boat may have been hard to handle, it might well have saved her life. Built for the 2002 Around Alone race, it was unsinkable and self-righting, and proved to be a safe lifeboat for Abby in the long wait for rescue.
All of this is prologue to the most disturbing revelation in the whole disturbing drama: Abby’s father Laurence Sunderland was reported to have signed a contract to do a TV reality show about Abby and the other kids after she set sail. It was to be called “Adventures in Sunderland.”

Sound familiar? As I wrote in February, “it may be recalled it was a shot at becoming famous by appearing in a reality TV show that motivated a Colorado father to release a spaceshiplike balloon and call 911 to report that his young son was trapped aboard the high-flying craft. At least it can be said that the balloon boy spectacle was a fraud. Sadly, children sailing around the world alone in pursuit of fame is the real thing.”

I have a modest proposal to make. I was in the Pacific Northwest recently to look at some boats, and I found myself on Bainbridge Island in a sweet little harbor called Port Madison. It’s a world apart from Florida, and I was reveling in the cool weather and gorgeous scenery. As I poked through Port Madison aboard a friend’s Whaler, I realized the cove was sort of a time warp: there were lovely clas-sic sailboats tied to piers and on moorings everywhere I looked. But here’s the zinger: they all looked brand new. Though more than four decades old, a Countess 44 ketch from Pearson seemed like it had just been launched, a Westsail 32 was as perfect as it had been in 1972 and, of all things, there were several immaculate 6-Meters to be seen as well.   Judging by the homes on the waterfront, this isn’t exactly a ghetto and the owners can clearly afford to keep their boats in Bristol condition, but there was something more: they were all sea-manlike.

The halyards were neatly coiled, fenders were properly adjusted, and even the dock lines were flemished in coils. That isn’t about money, it’s about tradition and good seamanship. Bear with me here for a mo-mentary digression. I realized that, having switched to digital cameras, I’ve become a sloppy photogra-pher. Where I once took great care with lens settings and composi-tion, I now bang off several shots. I no longer have to wait a week to see the results and, because I’m not limited to just 36 photos on a roll, I can immediately discard bad shots and correct my settings accordingly. Ansel Adams, who spent hours setting up a single photograph, must be whirling in his grave. As I looked around Port Madi-son, I noticed there were newer boats coming into the harbor on this warm summer day and, unlike the boats that were permanent residents, these were uniformly sloppy. Fenders dragged in the water, lines hung over the rails, sails were crunched in lumps on the booms.   And I realized that somewhere, somehow, many modern skippers have become sloppy. Sure, they can punch in waypoints on their GPS and get to where they want, but they no longer bother with paper charts or penciled fixes. They no longer calculate the effect of wind and current on their course. And that’s part of the fun of being on the water.

Anchoring, for example, is becoming a lost art and, though many skippers alibi that they have a “floating anchor,” they just don’t know how to anchor properly. On any weekend, you see them toss-ing anchors over the bow like dis-cus throwers, letting out a fraction of the rode necessary, and then rushing to crank up the stereo.  No wonder so many boats drag their hooks. I once heard from a BVI check-out skipper about the charter crew that requested a replacement anchor on their second day. Why? Because they simply cut the first one away, not knowing they had to raise it each day. Perhaps apocry-phal. Maybe not. Fenders are being left in place while underway rather than  being used just when docking, and it should be no surprise that these skippers also refer to them as “bumpers.” The art of neatly furling a mainsail to the boom has been replaced by self-furling mains and by sails that disappear into the mast itself.  Many skippers have never actually hanked on a head-sail, and simply assume that every boat has roller furling.

Like my photography, it’s easy to become complacent in an era of digital navigation, electric anchor windlasses and self-furling sails. Who cares if the fenders are  dragging in the water or the jib sheets lie in piles? No one ap-parently, although these are the same skippers who have their cars washed regularly so they always look perfect.   Years ago, a Southern California sailing club had an annual “sea-manship race” that was not only great fun, but a learning experience as well. In this race, all the yachts start-ed out at anchor, with the mainsail furled on the boom and the jib in a sailbag on the bow.  At the gun, the crews not only had to hoist the main and jib, but they had to raise the anchor. Remember that this was long before boats had electric windlasses: at best, they might have a lever-actuated windlass that wasn’t much of an advantage. The boats then sailed a triangu-lar course and returned to the fin-ish line, where they had to anchor and drop their sails. The event was not just a race, but an exercise in seamanship and boathandling.  Knowing how to sail on and off your anchor was just as important as understanding the racing rules.  Having a well-trained crew that could hank on a jib quickly or throw a smooth harbor furl into a mainsail was as critical as proper sail trim. I’d like to inspire some sail-ing clubs to resurrect such a seamanship event. It would be a delightful antidote to the usual around-the-marks daisy chain ev-ery weekend. It would be a fresh challenge. And it would carry great bragging rights.

Of course, in this era, you’d probably need separate classes for boats with electric windlasses, self-furling mainsails and roller-furling jibs. Since this is about seamanship, the race might require a man-overboard event during the race: on one leg, the crew has to toss a life cushion overboard and then retrieve it. Seems to me it would be a way of testing (and honing) some boating skills that don’t get used during normal racing. The results might be surprising, too, because it wasn’t necessarily the fastest yachts that won. Often it was a cruising boat with a well-trained crew and seamanlike rigging that was able to embarrass those yachts that usually took home the silverware. Speaking of silver, if you’re wondering about a suitable trophy, I’d be happy (and She Who Must Be Obeyed would be ecstatic) to donate a pair of my worn Topsid-ers, complete with duct tape and salt stains, to be bronzed as the “Seamanship Perpetual Trophy.”   Any takers?