Sailtime Storys by Bill Amt #1

A Sailor’s Lessons Learned Play Book

My first dozen or so lessons learned

Learning to sail

It all started in March of 1978

Before I can share my first trip, I must explain how I became the gained the basic knowledge I think necessary to make a first trip of a couple thousand miles.

As a boy growing up in the cornfields of Indiana, visions of oceans and seas and rivers were ingrained in my mind by my grandfather – a Danish immigrant and a North Sea eel fisherman.  Although I would have wait for college spring break in Ft Lauderdale to get my first glimpse of emerald and blue salt water, his stories of the sea and the transatlantic passage from Denmark on a wooden schooner gave me a leg up on all other wannabe sailors of the world.  So in 1978 I found myself at the yacht brokerage dock in Charleston, South Carolina, writing a check for a brand new Hunter 30 – the FIRST and most primary of the many watery lessons I have learned – A FOOL AND HIS MONEY SOON PART.

Now mind you, I had never sailed before – no prior Sunfish experience, no prior Hobie Cat experience, no romantic, captained, chartered, sunset dinner cruise on a tranquil bay, not even one hour’s practice sailing a remote controlled boat on a little pond.  But armed with my grandfather’s legacy, many evenings of arm chair sailing with the Hiscocks and Joshua Slocum, and the broker’s “personal assurance” that thirty footers are much, much easier and forgiving to sail than little sailboats like Hobie Cats and Snarks, I found it easy to part with the windfall bonus I had received from my company the day before.

After all the broker did promise that he would personally teach me how to sail my shiny, brand new, sailboat – the second watery lesson learned on the second day of my sailing career – never buy a boat, or anything else for that matter, from a guy who lives aboard his own boat, does not own a home on land, and constantly talks about the virtues of retiring to the tropics once he gets a little extra money in his checking account.  Needless to say, once my check cleared the bank, early one morning I watched the very sincere and helpful broker as he sailed out between the jetties of the Charleston Harbor, never to be seen again (at least by me).  I hope he is enjoying every moment of his stay in Tahiti.

So there I sat (for several weeks) at the Ashley Marina in the Charleston harbor, “virtual” sailing my brand new shiny sailboat – which, by the way, was equipped with the Hunter “sail-away package” – a package the broker assured me was all one needed to circumnavigate the world.  A third lesson learned in as many days – there is more to sailing around the world than just buying “a sail-away package”.

Unfortunately there is a limit to how long one can “virtual sail” a brand new sailboat – though over the passing years, as I have walked the docks of a thousand marinas, I have often wondered just what percentage of these beautiful boats are “virtual sailed” by their land locked owners.  But for me the peer pressures and the viral admonishments from an angry wife (who never met my grandfather and thought she had better uses for the bonus money than an impulsive purchase of a sailboat that I did not know how to sail) forced me to abandon the virtual world and step into reality – a scary thought to say the least, although at the time my high level of male hormones would never allow me to utter the word “scary” or admit that I did not have clue as to what I was doing.

So on a very quiet Saturday afternoon I learned how to start the Yanmar diesel engine – thankfully after a few attempts cranking the engine a really nice guy on the boat next to me diplomatically suggested  that it was generally a common practice allow the glow plug to preheat before expecting the engine to kick over.  The same guy, thankfully, helped me to cast off my lines and gave me encouragement from the bow of his boat as I hesitantly left the dock – of course it never stuck my mind that he was not being encouraging at all, but instead nervously protecting his pride and joy from an obvious and hazardous novice.

While I did not dare, nor did I know how, to raise the sails, the day proved to me that grandpa knew his stuff and Danish eel fisherman’s blood did run through my veins.  Returning to the dock a few hours later, after motoring up and down in front of the crowd of tourists walking the Charleston Battery, my newly found friend and a half dozen other boat owners frantically fended me off a handful of boats in the marina, and with only a modest loss of grace but with a sizable bounty of humility, the shiny new boat and I managed to return relatively unscathed.   And, I learned my fourth but very profound watery lesson – virtual boating just does not equate to the real thing – no way Jose!

Over the next few months, I learned many watery lessons. For example, do not try to raise the jib in front of a crowd of people walking along the Charleston Battery especially if you cannot distinguish the foot from the leach – hanks do attach to the head stay.   Or, do not attempt to sail in three feet of water when your draft is four feet – especially if you have a half dozen guests on board who were previously convinced that you were an experienced and seasoned seaman – I have no idea where they would have come to such a premature but erroneous conclusion.  Or, do not tie your boat lines tightly to the dock when there is a possibility that a six foot tide will occur twice daily.  Spring lines, tides and currents, wind and the need to keep grass and tube worms off intake strainers became more than anecdotes in my lessons learned book.

As the weekends, passed my confidence gradually grew – although my book of lessons learned seemed to grow at a more exponential rate – and soon I found myself trying to get the “rail down”, testing just how close to the wind I could come, and practicing, with authority, my commands such as “prepare to jib” and “prepare to come about” with my crew (my then six and ten year old daughters and now ex-wife).  Ultimately, my crew lovingly (I think that is the operative adverb) compared or placed me in the same league with Captains Bligh and Ahab – but then, in reflection, those references may have been more directed toward my command presence than my seamanship.