(Part One) It doesn’t matter why The Boat With No Name foundered in the surf off Newport Beach three weeks ago and broke in two like my heart when I saw the video. It matters that it lived, conjuring dreams within every sailor who stepped aboard her with a far horizon in their eyes – like the tears in my wife’s eyes and mine as we saw our beloved friend dying in the waves. https://youtu.be/oSWuhIr3Nvk?t=1591
We were the second owners of this wondrous being – who was as alive to us as the two children we conceived within her during the 7 years we lived aboard in the Oakland estuary. She remained ours for another 18 years before, with deep emotion, we handed her over in 2018 to a young starry-eyed fellow named Jon who reminded us of us.
This was no lipstick dream boat, though it inspired fantasies. It did not move sprightly upon the waves, but carved straight and true as you could steer. When you stood upon its stable deck and took its wheel in hand, you could feel power and soul and character.
This was a marriage boat. She was stout and big-bottomed with a heavy keel, a beautiful interior and the blousiest set of sails you ever saw. Point her in the right direction and she’d take you forever toward it.
The first owner was too old for the dream when he sailed the partially finished boat in 1979 from Newport Beach to San Francisco Bay. Though he had charts for every destination on the planet, it was on his bunk that he traveled, staring at a compass above his head as dementia sailed him away. In 1993 we bought the boat from his weeping brother and sanded the boat’s name – Windlace – off its stern. I wrote a series of stories https://terrywinckler.com/2017/12/dream-for-sale/ about how we rebuilt the boat.
But just as we could never agree on a new name for The Boat so, too, we couldn’t take our little family around the world on it. Heavy-hearted, we sold it to young Jon.
Jon was a man in love – love at first sight. He couldn’t wait to take The Boat With No Name off our hands and go on a honeymoon sail. In that sense, he was like us. We had never sailed any boat before we bought it virtually unseen, motored out into the middle of the – often notorious – bay on a calm day, turned off the motor, raised the sails, and it kept going.
Hey, sailing’s easy, we said.
The next sailing day, we headed under the Bay Bridge when 30-knot winds howled, put up all zillion-square feet of sail and flew out of control from Treasure Island toward the Berkeley flats as it got shallower and waves built up high. I wrote about this frightening moment in a series of stories:
“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 lifted the keel off the sand. 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.
“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.”
What a woman. What a boat.
We later sailed to Angel Island, married, had kids, and started going through difficult times – cancer, job disruptions, money woes – and eventually moved ashore, knowing we never would disappear over the horizon. It was time to find someone who could, like the shoeless dude down the dock who had sailed all over the world without money or plans in a leaky, creaky wooden boat.
But, The Boat was as invisible to shoeless dude as it was irresistible to starry-eyed Jon. Quickly, the purchase was made and the dock lines tossed off.
As he powered full throttle up the estuary toward the Golden Gate, we followed in our car on a parallel road – smiling as three draw bridges raised for him as they had so many times for us – until the road for us ended and The Boat became a vanishing dot on the Bay.
We never saw her, alive, again.
(Next, Part 2 – The Last Voyage of No Name)