The little boat that built a story

December 2^nd marks two-months since my sailboat was pulled off the lake for the winter. It seems like a lifetime ago that I was on the water with that little blue-hulled beauty, yet memories of sailing her across the bay to meet up with friends at a favorite anchorage on a sunny warm afternoon were recorded September 27^th in my diary.

I wonder if “Scout” misses me, landlocked in the backyard under layers of blue tarps and a skiff of snow, frozen where she sits.

She’d helped build a bolder “me” this past summer.

I learned to trust and lean in and let go.

She’d helped build me brave, nimble-footed, and into a sequential thinker.

I learned about challenge and what inexperience means when in a storm and unprepared.

I also had learned that paying attention to the lake map is important, because when I didn’t—and when my first mate didn’t either—even a little “Scout” boat like mine could run aground out on the lake on rocks on an otherwise quiet and uneventful evening.

During at the Rendezvous Yacht Club’s annual “Commodore’s Presentation” held recently, we celebrated the outgoing sailing season and the boat captains who made names for themselves by being really, really good sailors and winning races.

We also highlighted the blooper in the bunch.

Just as I was ramping up a loud guffaw for the name of whichever fellow sailor would be tagged as the annual rock tumbler, I was called to the front of the room to accept the “Rock Award” for 2015.

Drats! Obviously my cloaking device out on the lake didn’t work.

The jolly roving tar that had come to my rescue on that rocky day also had a camera around his neck to document the whole incident.

But it was good for a laugh.

Who knows where the lake will take me next summer, but two things are goals—away from storms and rocks.

Meanwhile, in the two months since my boat was bedded on a trailer here in my neck of the woods, it has taken me nearly all of that time to “fine tune” my tarp system to keep the rain and snow from pooling on it. 

I worked and reworked and re-reworked the tarps to a skin-tight fit, only to come home a few hours later and find a lake had formed in the cockpit.

Then two weeks ago, after the last big rainfall when I came home after work to find the tarps drooping again like old eyelids, I lost my ever-so-cool “cool.” 

I morphed into a “Dr. Jekyll” version of “Yosemite Sam.”

It was a good job there was no one around to hear me shouting. I blamed every man who’d ever come through my life and not stayed. Everything I’d wanted to say to each of them spilled out of my mouth in any angry tangent as I tied those tarps down once and for all.

Funny enough, I did such a good job of it I won’t ever have to worry again about that boat for the rest of the winter.

Thank you kindly gentlemen.