The SLUSHPILE Blog

We were only out on Friends Good Will for an hour and a half. It was way too short. How can I describe the utter tranquility and simultaneous exhiliration of a sail? No sound of motors, engines or anything smacking of the modern era. Only the sounds of a time gone by, ropes creaking, sails snapping and the luscious sound of waves being individually conquered one at a time. It was heaven.

But, alas, all too soon it came to an end, and we returned to the dock and disembarked. Jim Spurr had graciously offered to take us out on either his own smaller sail boat or on his dingy in order to get photos of Friends Good Will as she went off on her next sail. We opted for the dingy for several reasons: one, it would save time as there was no mast preventing it from leaving the river channel until the drawbridge went up. Two, my kids, although they loved the sail, wanted to hit the beach, and as the dingy would only hold three or four, it meant that they were free to swim.

I opted to go with the kids. My mother, Martha Dougherty was a default onto the dingy as she was the one taking the photos. Neal, my husband, loathes the beach. He simply cannot make peace with the sand, let alone come to enjoy it. I, on the other hand, like the beach, and all that comes with it. Also, I felt Jim might like some manly company for their outing.

So while I and our four kids headed the short distance to the beach, Neal, Martha and Jim headed out on the dingy. Now, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but have had to piece it together through the various narratives, but I think this is a fair rendering of the event:

Upon boarding the dingy, Jim went first. He put a hand up for Martha (who is, by the way, in her seventies) while Neal held her other hand to aid her into the small, bobbing craft. Jim overestimated our Pennsylvania sea-legs, Neal underestimated the amount of support she would need, and before anyone realized what was happening, the dingy took a sharp list away from the dock. My mother found herself with her legs on the craft and her top half dangling over about three to four feet of opened water with only Neal’s hand keeping her from going in. She was neither in nor out and it seemed likely she was going to end up very wet in the middle. Neal said that at this point, she just had a look of resignation on her face, as though she knew she was going in and was only steeling herself for the dunking.

Now I can only imagine what was going through Jim’s mind: his publisher comes up to visit and he drowns her mother. No more publishing contracts for him. . . lol. Whatever his thoughts, he had the presence of mind to grab the dock with one hand and force the dingy back towards it while simultaneously grabbing my mother’s arm and jerking her into the boat. My mother was a great deal relieved, not because she was afraid of getting wet, but because the thought of her cameras getting ruined was too much to bear.

And so they set off in the dingy, and as Neal described it, it was nothing like sailing. It was a rough ride with the little boat speeding over the waves with a fwump, frwump, fwump as they sped to ward Friends Good Will already out on the open water.

My mother, like myself, and probably all writers, is an observer. She had noted earlier on the deck of Friends Good Will that the other passengers had been a great deal interested in our discussions and must have certainly been wondering how our little party was getting such special treatment from one of the members of the sailing crew. I hadn’t noticed because I was too engrossed with all the interesting facts of the ship that Jim had been telling me, and then of our discussions of writing and how he planned his next book, the third in his Great Lakes, Great Guns series, to progress. She said that as we were speaking, many of the other members of our sail had been totally enraptured, turning their heads from one to the other of us as we were speaking, straining to hear.

Now, with the little dingy speeding down on the sloop Friends Good Will, a second group of passengers was suddenly enraptured by our group from Pennsylvania (well, at least part of our group). They swarmed to the rails, watching this crazy little craft with the three passengers come buzzing around the ship in ever tightening circles, a clearly demented woman half standing despite the waves and the bounce, clicking pictures as fast as she could, switching cameras, taking more pictures. Neal’s version was even more hilarious. He, of course, never said a word to Jim, but I imagined that if he was smoking a cigarette (as he is wont to do), he may have been taking deeper and deeper puffs.

Jim, wanting the best pictures, would manuever the small dingy to in front of the ship, directly in its path. There he would idle the small, 15 hp engine and calmly and cheerfully tell my mother, “Okay! Get your pictures!” My mother dutifully snapped away, and Neal watched with growing apprehension as the bow of the sloop came closer, and closer. He looked at the idling engine and wondered if, when Jim revved it up again, if it was actually going to power up, or stall. And he had enough knowledge now, after having been on the sloop just a short time earlier, that it was neither easy nor quick to manuever the ship if they should end up stalled in front of it.

Jim, blissfully unaware of his guest’s fears, would again rev up the engine, buzz around in another circle, pausing for pictures from every angle along the way, and then try to get in for an even closer view of the bow.

In the end, it was all well worth the effort. My mother got some amazing shots, including the two featured on yesterday’s blog post, and she is sending up some of the best ones to Jim as a way of thank you. He did a fantastic job as a host. It simply isn’t his fault that we are a bunch of Pennsylvania farm country hicks that don’t know our way around a sailboat or a dingy.

They arrived back at the dock nearly simultaneously to our calling a halt to our swimming, and we went out to a local restaurant to eat. There, we got to discuss more writing, publishing, sailing, the Second Coming of Christ, the possibility of the expected 12th Iman being the anti-christ, and a myriad of other intersting subjects. It was all over far too quickly.

But no fear, we plan on returning next year on our way through to Washington Island, and charter Friends Good Will for the day instead of only being on her for an hour and a half (I imagine Jim may suddenly find himself having an urgent out-of-town engagement on our dates for being there. . . lol).

Tomorrow, I’ll blog about day 3: Neal and Martha go on a lighthouse picture taking excursion and the kids and I spend the day at the beach, where I get an unwanted souvenir: severe sunburn.