Part 4 – Farewell To A Dream: We enter a world of oddly wonderful people and take a life-defining step.[su_button url=”https://terrywinckler.com/subscribe” target=”self” style=”default” background=”#2D89EF” color=”#FFFFFF” size=”3″ wide=”no” center=”no” radius=”auto” icon=”” icon_color=”#FFFFFF” text_shadow=”none” desc=”” onclick=”” rel=”” title=”” id=”” class=””]Subscribe[/su_button]

Afloat In Emerald City

(Last in a 4-part series. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

It was unusually warm for a Feb. 14, as I loosened myself from the blankets, trying to not awaken Laura. Dawn was 30 minutes away.

I dropped softly to the floor of the aft cabin, crouched to avoid the sharp fiberglass edge of the hallway overhead and duck-walked into the main cabin where I stood tall. And smiled.

The plan was going well.

I pushed the coffee maker button, praying that it would not gurgle her awake too soon, and sat on the rough settee to pull on my red sweatpants. The floor was rough, too, but at least we had one. When we moved aboard The Boat, we had to tiptoe on floor stringers between the head (bathroom) and aft cabin.

Mike will be here soon. Better hurry.

This was a big deal. The biggest. Something I swore I would never do. Something I started thinking about when Laura awoke next to me in our apartment – swollen so badly that even her vocal cords didn’t work properly. We rushed to the doctor.

“Extreme allergy,” he declared. “She’s allergic to epoxy. Stay away from it.” As he injected her with cortisone, I felt the sting of his words. We had planned to finish building the forward head (bathroom) and a rudimentary bed platform in the aft cabin – and live aboard while completing the rest of the interior. Trouble was, we built everything with epoxy.

As the cortisone loosed Laura’s vocal cords, she spoke to the worry on my face.

“We are still moving aboard. It’s our dream.”

She spoke with puffy lips.

How did I ever find such a person?

When she recovered, Laura armored herself against exposure to epoxy with a hooded suit, gloves taped at the wrist, ointment on all exposed skin, and a mask – and dove back into the project. We finished epoxying the hull and took on the interior, learning the tools for building a boat – and a relationship.

Tick, Tick, Tick

We learned fast but money and time ran out faster.

Time to move aboard.

In late fall 1993 we splashed the boat, just after my father died, – the father who told of being torpedoed three times by Nazi submarines in World War II. I shared those stories with Harry Braun – the ex-Nazi submariner who had surveyed The Boat and convinced us to buy it.

“Harry, you could have killed my father,” I said after reading his autobiography, “Of Islands and Ships.”

“Jah, good thing I was a bad shot, eh? Or you wouldn’t be here.”

As we laughed, I felt my prejudice against Germans melt. I had learned to despise them in childhood when my mother wept over how they had blown up her beloved older brother in Sicily, and when my father described the horror of seeing men swim to their deaths in burning oil on the North Atlantic after German submarines sunk their ships.

It Could Have Been Me

Harry’s book told of how he had been infected by Nazism in childhood, helping me understand that I – or any of us – could have been an ardent Nazi if raised in the sickness of that time in that place. Harry managed to neutralize the poison and came to this country a grateful man, as did my Canadian father. Immigrants both. As were the Irish on my mother’s side.

“Terry, is the coffee ready?”

Laura’s voice took me back to the moment. It was nearly 7 a.m. Mike is coming.

“Wait a second,” I yelled as I looked for a hidden object and stumbled into the table saw – our only furniture. Instead of cursing, I thought of our first awkward attempts at sailing, with the table saw and all our other tools lying around. I had guided us out into the open bay and barked out instructions:

“Hoist the mainsail…Hoist the staysail…Hoist the jib.” We did all that in a light breeze, but soon found ourselves in a wind zone called “The Slot.”

Thirty-knot winds threw us over 45 degrees. Fear-stricken, Laura spun us in circles as I screamed “Head up….Tack…Gibe” while the giant mainsail boom streaked back and forth above us with shuddering force and the table saw and tools crashed below. We invited guests on a subsequent trip and, hearing a screech when the boat tacked violently, I looked below to see our dear friend Abby fly out of the head, struggling to pull up her pants.

The Real Reason

Fond as those trip memories were, they weren’t why I had risen early on this Sunday. There was a particular trip…

As usual, we had all 1,000 square feet of sail up as we passed leisurely under The Bay Bridge in the lee of Treasure Island. But there is a low spot I didn’t know about where the infamous “slot” winds scream through, and they spanked us over hard. Now I was the fear-stricken helmsman forced to turn away from the wind and run with it towards the Berkeley flats, unable to drop sails and gathering speed.

I knew those flats from years of surfing them in a kayak, but never imagined doing them in a 42-foot, 40,000-pound, full keel sailboat. As we screamed toward shore in steepening seas, Laura struggled forward onto the bow pulpit – over the water 4-feet past the bow – and gripped the railing, ready to haul down the giant jib sail. She wasn’t wearing a lifejacket.

The boat tipped down, about to surf.

It’s dangerous turning a sailboat around in breaking waves and high wind. You can be rolled over. I turned on the engine as the depth meter showed zero feet beneath our keel, as we dropped into a wave trough and hit bottom, as my neurons screamed, as my voice bellowed, “Hold on!” As I spun the wheel starboard and held on. The wind pushed us so far over that it kept us from going aground. I jammed the throttle all the way forward, begging the engine for help as the boat s-l-o-w-l-y turned into the rising wave.

Her Feet

The bow pulpit – with Laura hanging on – rose up as if it would pierce the sky, paused, and slammed down, burying itself in the face of the next wave, which swept over us. All I could see of Laura were her feet flailing above the foam.

Tons of water poured off, revealing Laura in a sodden heap still clutching the rail. And laughing hysterically.

“That was fun!” she yelled.

Then. Struck. Smitten. Overwhelmed. In that moment, a door opened to this moment, on this Sunday morning months later. I grabbed the hidden object and barely had time to escape up the stairs before Laura emerged from the aft cabin, lured by the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee.

In a few quick steps I was off the boat and onto the cement dock. The first strokes of sunlight were painting color, like makeup, on the sweet round stern of The Boat. A darkly dressed figure stood nearby.

“It’s waterproof,” I told Mike as I gave him the object. We agreed to launch the plan in five minutes.

It Was Time

Laura was pouring coffee for both of us when I returned. I grabbed her.

“Let’s go.” She was in her pajamas.

“What’s the rush?” She was irritated.

“Hurry, it’s so beautiful outside. The sunrise.”

I tugged her up the steps and leaped to the dock, urging her to join me.

“There’s seagull shit on the dock.”

“Not there,” I said, pointing to a spot near our disorganized dock lines.

I faced the rising sun, feeling its warmth as we both had so many times since first pulling into this slip. Laura came down with her usual smile and didn’t object when I guided her to the spot. Her beautiful face glowed. As did my heart. I started jumping up and down.

“What are you doing, Terry?”

She didn’t know it was a signal and implored me to stop. Then she sucked in her breath.

“Terry, there’s bubbles coming from under the dock.”

Right on time.

She gasped.

Something Weird

“There’s a strange creature looking up at me from under the dock.”

A neoprene-clad arm slowly rose from the water with a glittering glass jar in its hand. To me, it looked like the Lady of the Lake’s arm with Arthur’s sword. Who knows what Laura saw.

All she did was stare.

“Take it,” I said.

She stared.

“Take it.”

She reached out and grasped the jar.

The arm disappeared slowly into the water.

Laura looked at me, stupefied.

“Open it.”

She looked at it.

“Open it.”

Mystery Solved

The hermetically sealed lid came off with a pop, revealing a trove of colored heart-shaped candies with sappy sayings printed on them such as, “I wuv you.” She plucked one out.

“No, what you want is buried in the candy. Dig deep.”

As she rooted about, Mike the diver emerged from the water a few boats away, took off the goggles which had so shocked Laura, and watched.

When the sun rose in Laura’s face, I knew she had found it.

I dropped to one knee upon the seagull shit.

I reached for her hand.

I asked.

Her answer sparkled even more than the diamond on her finger.

Epilogue

We married a year later on Angel Island, surrounded by friends, relatives, and many liveaboards who had followed us in their boats from Union Point Marina – a place filled with oddly wonderful people we called neighbors. They included a preacher, a dead man talking, the occasional prostitute, drunks, children, old folks, cops and crooks, drug users and sellers, dreamers, lots of ethnicities, and a couple of bodies that floated up. It was the best neighborhood in the world.

Working days as journalists and nights as boat builders, we poured ourselves into getting The Boat ready for the escape. Perhaps a year, we told ourselves, and two years passed. And five more. Hard, happy years. Cancer came – we beat it. Nothing could stop us.

Amid the work we brought two sons into the world of San Francisco Bay, or – as I thought of it – The Emerald City. The Bay enchanted me. Always did. And does. We sailed its waters from the shallows off San Mateo across the shining face of San Francisco to deep within the Bayou-like Delta. What a playground for the kids inside our hearts and in our arms.

We nourished our dream of sailing away by reading of those who had done it. Not just books by Joshua Slocum and Jack London, but “Comfortable Cruising by Liza Copeland, “Swan” by Jim Moore, and dozens of other obscure authors who sold their sailing stories to finance more sailing stories. Just do it, they said.

At times we slipped beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, trying out the Pacific Ocean beyond the Farallon Islands and along the coast south to Monterey and north to Tomales. We sailed among whales and caught tuna. We watched friends’ boats disappear over the horizon. Sometimes we sailed in funeral processions to cast off the ashes of those on their final voyages. Five times at Christmas we decorated The Boat, filled it with friends, and joined the boat parade. We won a prize for looking like a flying squid.

But time and tide could wait no longer.

There came a time when it was now or never, when the big dream of severing the dock lines came down to a winner-takes-all choice. Laura and I took stock: we had money enough, the boat was ready enough, we had read enough, and we had enough charts to guide us anywhere the oceans washed against. All we had to do was choose today and forgo tomorrow.

We chose.

And one day, as my heart broke into a thousand slivers of the finest crystal, we moved ashore.

I could explain the choice in a few sentences, but such brevity would slay the story and truth itself. It would take a book – and that is what you’ve been reading this last month: the essence of a book titled, “Afloat In Emerald City.” I hadn’t planned to start writing it until after finishing two other book projects, but that time and tide thing came along again: two sons in college. Time to turn one dream into three by selling the boat, investing it in them, and becoming an author.

Thanks for coming aboard during this 4-week blog series. Just by reading my words you’ve given me the encouragement to keep spinning them. If you haven’t subscribed to the blog, please do (subscribe here) – and tell your buds to do the same. It’s fast and free.

Next week: a New Year and a new life plan (hint: you’re in it).