Read Online Caught by the Sea by Gary Paulsen - Free Book Online
Authors: Gary Paulsen
Tags: Fiction
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of power from three solar panels I installed on the roof of the hard dodger. And seawater, of course, is endless.
Rituals again: I carefully split one Oreo cookie, lick off the filling, then dip each half in the hot tea and eat them soft, almost disintegrating. Delicious and distinctly forbidden because I have heart disease and am supposed to live on a fat-free diet. But I am sixty now, and I can’t imagine that I’ll die from eating an Oreo cookie since I didn’t die from all the crazy dangerous things I’ve done.
Of course, the sea has tried to kill me on several occasions, has timed itself to coincide with my stupidity and put an end to me. Here in this beautiful lagoon, with time to think of things, and with serenity, some of the madness comes back to me now as I attempt the death-defying feat of eating a second Oreo with my tea.
I remember when I lost control and did not own myself.
7
Humbled
As I said, I once owned a Hans Christian, a boat with a wonderful reputation—at least from word of mouth. She was a thirty-eight-foot, cutter-rigged sloop with a full, deep keel and a pooched-up canoe stern. Her name was
Felicity.
She was supposed to be a weatherly boat, a tough boat in bad weather. But she was also supposed to be a good sailing boat and be well built. Well, she was slow and cranky and pointed like a hog on ice, and you could have a picnic in the time it took her to come about.
Part of the problem was that she was twenty years old when I bought her and in need of major repairs, and part of it was poor hull design and shoddy workmanship done by a boatyard in China. (I have never bought another Chinese-built boat.) But she was my third boat and I loved her and she was the first boat I took a passage on, and the first boat I hit bad weather on.
There comes a point in owning—or more accurately, being owned by a boat—when it is necessary to
go
. This is more than a beckoning, more than a simple call; it’s an order, and if the order is not obeyed there’s no sense having a boat. Melville termed it the November in a man’s soul that drives him to the sea, and Sterling Hayden, whom I met briefly many years ago in Sausalito, told me that you really had no choice: If the sea called, you went.
So it was with me and
Felicity.
I worked on her for seven months. I put in new rigging and sails, sanded and repaired the blistered fiberglass hull, tried to repair a badly designed motor, gave up and replaced it—it seemed endless. Finally, foolishly, when I was completely sick of working on the boat and sick of boatyards and boatpeople and marinas, I left.
The boat and I were woefully unprepared. The battery boxes were tied in place rather than bolted, which meant that acid could eat through the ropes. And though there were new sails and rigging, I had not used them. All sail handling had to be done up at the mast—none of the lines were brought back to be controlled from the relative safety of the cockpit—and the boat wiring was a mess.
But one morning I filled the boat with fresh water and some canned goods and aimed her out of the harbor. I headed south from southern California down the coast of Baja.
The sea is sometimes a mysterious place, and much misunderstood. Some time ago there was a nonfiction book and a movie out about a storm in the Atlantic that killed some people. The story is competently written, but the book and the film, with its special effects, threaten to do for boating what
Jaws
did for swimming. Perhaps that’s a good thing because it will keep unprepared people from going out there, but the book focuses on one brief period when a disaster hits and doesn’t show that for countless other days and weeks the ocean is benign.
The biggest problem in sailing is that there is usually not enough wind, not too much. Much more likely are disasters caused by collision, faulty equipment or fire on board.
And the lack of wind hit me now. I wallowed down the coast using the engine, realizing
Rituals again: I carefully split one Oreo cookie, lick off the filling, then dip each half in the hot tea and eat them soft, almost disintegrating. Delicious and distinctly forbidden because I have heart disease and am supposed to live on a fat-free diet. But I am sixty now, and I can’t imagine that I’ll die from eating an Oreo cookie since I didn’t die from all the crazy dangerous things I’ve done.
Of course, the sea has tried to kill me on several occasions, has timed itself to coincide with my stupidity and put an end to me. Here in this beautiful lagoon, with time to think of things, and with serenity, some of the madness comes back to me now as I attempt the death-defying feat of eating a second Oreo with my tea.
I remember when I lost control and did not own myself.
7
Humbled
As I said, I once owned a Hans Christian, a boat with a wonderful reputation—at least from word of mouth. She was a thirty-eight-foot, cutter-rigged sloop with a full, deep keel and a pooched-up canoe stern. Her name was
Felicity.
She was supposed to be a weatherly boat, a tough boat in bad weather. But she was also supposed to be a good sailing boat and be well built. Well, she was slow and cranky and pointed like a hog on ice, and you could have a picnic in the time it took her to come about.
Part of the problem was that she was twenty years old when I bought her and in need of major repairs, and part of it was poor hull design and shoddy workmanship done by a boatyard in China. (I have never bought another Chinese-built boat.) But she was my third boat and I loved her and she was the first boat I took a passage on, and the first boat I hit bad weather on.
There comes a point in owning—or more accurately, being owned by a boat—when it is necessary to
go
. This is more than a beckoning, more than a simple call; it’s an order, and if the order is not obeyed there’s no sense having a boat. Melville termed it the November in a man’s soul that drives him to the sea, and Sterling Hayden, whom I met briefly many years ago in Sausalito, told me that you really had no choice: If the sea called, you went.
So it was with me and
Felicity.
I worked on her for seven months. I put in new rigging and sails, sanded and repaired the blistered fiberglass hull, tried to repair a badly designed motor, gave up and replaced it—it seemed endless. Finally, foolishly, when I was completely sick of working on the boat and sick of boatyards and boatpeople and marinas, I left.
The boat and I were woefully unprepared. The battery boxes were tied in place rather than bolted, which meant that acid could eat through the ropes. And though there were new sails and rigging, I had not used them. All sail handling had to be done up at the mast—none of the lines were brought back to be controlled from the relative safety of the cockpit—and the boat wiring was a mess.
But one morning I filled the boat with fresh water and some canned goods and aimed her out of the harbor. I headed south from southern California down the coast of Baja.
The sea is sometimes a mysterious place, and much misunderstood. Some time ago there was a nonfiction book and a movie out about a storm in the Atlantic that killed some people. The story is competently written, but the book and the film, with its special effects, threaten to do for boating what
Jaws
did for swimming. Perhaps that’s a good thing because it will keep unprepared people from going out there, but the book focuses on one brief period when a disaster hits and doesn’t show that for countless other days and weeks the ocean is benign.
The biggest problem in sailing is that there is usually not enough wind, not too much. Much more likely are disasters caused by collision, faulty equipment or fire on board.
And the lack of wind hit me now. I wallowed down the coast using the engine, realizing
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