Mysterious Sailor
Published: Sunday, August 22, 2021
By: Bob Bitchin
When I was but a mere youth (pronounced “yoo-t”), I was always walking because I couldn’t drive yet. When I reached the point in life where I knew more than anyone else (that’d be between 16 and 30), I was always busy playing volleyball on the beach or working out at the gym or swimming. Then came the time in life when I would be traveling, doing a lot of diving, and working fairly hard.
Now that I am approaching middle age (middle age is always 15 years older than you are at the time), I find I have to force myself to do stuff so my ticker doesn’t quit on me. You know, stuff like walking when it’s easier to drive, taking the stairs when there’s a perfectly good elevator nearby, or swimming to shore when the dinghy works just fine.
“So what has all this got to do with sailing?” you might ask yourself, wondering if—at last—I have dropped the few screws that were still in my melon.
Well, every morning I am forced by my conscience, or by my wife, Jody, to get out of a perfectly warm bed and go out into the “cold” and walk in ever larger circles. Over the past few months, the circle has ranged a couple of miles, and each morning I dutifully leave Lost Soul, head up the dock, over the parking lot, and along the pathway that follows the channel from our marina. And each morning I have been noticing this same sailboat, a rather old Catalina 27, sailing out of the harbor.
Now what first caught my attention was that it didn’t matter if there was any wind or not. The boat was always drifting under main and headsail. Most days at that time in the morning, there would be no wind; yet here would be the lone sailboat, drifting at half a knot.
One morning my journey from nowhere to nowhere else took me along the seawall about 50 feet from this boat as it drifted a tad slower than I was walking. I noticed an elderly (that means older than me!) gentleman sitting back, tiller in hand, and I could hear Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade wafting across the water to me.
I stopped and stood watching. (Sorry, Jody, I did start walking again, I promise!) How kewl was this? How could you get any more enjoyment out of a vessel than this man was getting by sitting back, drifting on his boat, listening to great tunes, and watching the world drift by?
I don’t know the gentleman who is sailing the boat, though it would be very easy to just follow him to his slip and say “Hi.” But actually, I’d rather see him as I picture him in my mind’s eye. There, he could be an old bomber pilot reliving the days of the Big War, or he could be a retired sailor looking back into a life of sailing. Or he could be an ex-con who just got outta the joint. I don’t really want to know. I don’t want to ruin the scene I have created in my imagination. To know too much would take away from the stories that I built.
They say reality can never match your imagination, and my imagination has no bounds. I remember when I was planning my world cruise, walking those same walkways and looking out across the ocean, dreaming of the adventures that I would soon be living. And then I lived them, and they were good.
So now I enjoy every morning that I walk the torturous steps on the Esplanade and up the steep ramps that I have set as a goal. And as I walk to stay alive, I look over at my anonymous friend and think through the story of the day.
Was he an itinerant dock worker, working his way from Bombay to Rangoon? Was he once the lead singer for a long forgotten mop-headed group who “made it” in the 60s? Or perhaps just a retired engineer from TRW. Maybe a retired magazine guy?
It doesn’t matter, because in my mind he is what I someday want to be—happiest with just a simple boat and a little breeze!
A version of this article appeared in the Summer Issue (July/August) 2021 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.
tags: Feel Good Story, Lifestyle, Sailing
