Skip the varnish, Feng Shui is the key to a happy boat

Just when I think I’ve seen everything, I encounter something so bizarre that

it’s hard to explain. A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in my cockpit in the marina, doing nothing except draining Corona bottles and pondering my dumb decision to varnish my formerly bare teak caprails. I admit, I did it in a fit of yachtiness after looking at a book full of varnished yachts.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Gary in my columns before, but he has a PHRF racer-cruiser a few slips away. He views himself as very avant garde, and so I follow his activities with a certain bemusement that verges on wariness. For example, he was the first in our marina to decorate his boat for Christmas with lights up and down the spars and along the lifelines.

Shortly thereafter, we had an epidemic of electrolysis problems with through-hull fittings and keel bolts, culminating when Dave’s keel actually fell off. His boat gently leaned over against the dock lines (and his neighbor’s mast), but remained surprisingly watertight until it was towed to the shipyard. No one ever proved that Gary was the culprit in the electrolysis infestation but, of course, we all knew that he was the carrier.

I was on my second Corona when I saw Gary, walking around and around his cockpit, doing something weird with his hand. As I watched, I realized that he had a saltshaker, and was carefully distributing something on his deck. I assumed that he had just painted the deck and was using the shaker to dispense sand for a nonslip surface. That’s the way it’s been done for years, or at least until we started mixing little resin beads into the paint itself. And then I realized that he was walking on the deck, so it couldn’t still be wet.

I watched a while longer and finally couldn’t stand it. I walked up his pier and said, “OK, I give.” He smiled as you would to a retarded child and said simply, “Fungoo.”

“Hey,” I said, “nice way to talk to the guy who held a wrench for two hours while you bedded your porthole.”

“No, no,” he said, “not fungoo, Feng Shui.”

“Aha,” I said, not having the faintest idea what he was doing.
“Look,” he said, reverting to his speaking-to-a-retard mode. “Every boat has some bad chi, so I’m helping to alleviate all the negative feelings that are keeping me from winning races.”

“And the saltshaker?” I asked.

“I commissioned a Feng Shui expert to cure my boat, and that’s what I’m doing.” He didn’t add “dumb-head” to the end of the sentence, but it was certainly implied.

So that’s how I spent a few hours watching Gary “create positive chi flow” on his boat. And, because I know all of you are on the edge of your chairs to find out ways to have a happier boat, here’s what I managed to pry out of him.

If you haven’t been reading home magazines (or have a wife like mine who has always Feng Shui’d our homes), Feng Shui is the 4,000-year-old Oriental concept that governs the design of homes to create a positive energy force called chi. If the ch’i moves through your home or boat comfortably, it will shape your life for the better in all ways—health, finance and relationships, not to mention getting to the finish line first.

Now, most Feng Shui relies on using a compass to determine where the chi enters the house, but Gary was using something called Black Hat Feng Shui, which uses the location of the front door (in this case, his companionway) to position the Bagua (bah-goo-wah), which is the mapping system for your house or boat. Got that?

Sprinkling sea salt around the cockpit, I’m told, will absorb the negative energy in crewmembers. That might not make the boat go faster but, on the other hand, I’ve seen Gary’s crew douse the spinnaker and, boy, there’s a lot of negative energy flowing. I think my boat’s already pretty well protected, because I’m a little lax about washdowns so sea salt is almost always crusted on the deck and topsides.

Gary has tied little blue ribbons on his steering wheel, too. Blue is the representation of water, which is the perfect state for properly steering the boat: clear, thoughtful and flowing. He also cleaned the windows, ports and see-through hatches on his boat, because keeping windows clean allows chi energy to enter the boat from outside. In Feng Shui terms, the windows are the eyes of the boat.

He has a tiny plaque that he installed on the inside bulkhead facing the companionway door, which is a representation of the Three Star Gods named Fuk, Luk and Sau. (No, really, I’m not making this up.) They stand for wealth and prosperity (in this case, fancy trophies), rank and authority (correcting out on handicap) and longevity (keeping a crew together for more than one season.)

He also put a little plastic dragon inside, which symbolizes good fortune. The zinger is that you can’t put the dragon in the bedroom (there are bunks everywhere on his boat) and it can’t be near the head (which is close to everything). We’ll see how that one works out.

Gary also changed the docking of his boat. Now he backs into the slip because one of his main competitors is on the next pier. A boat is considered to be a “predatory tiger” and, when facing toward another boat, will create a threat to its occupants.

There’s an epilogue to the story. Before he left the dock to go racing last weekend, I watched as he led his entire crew in a cockpit ceremony. They clapped their hands and sang along with “Cheeseburger In Paradise” because, he explained, clapping and singing makes the statement that the boat is now a cleared space and the crew will go forward refreshed and free from past events.

Later that day, I saw him stalking up the dock looking unhappy. Turns out they’d finished near the bottom of the fleet after taking a flyer hoping the wind would swing left. It didn’t.

All he’d say was, “I need more sea salt.”

Frankly, I think he needs chi that knows the wind never swings left at this time of year.