A Sailing Lesson for Life

High winds white-capped Saguaro Lake so vigorously that when my Jeep rolled up with the sailboat in-tow, fishing boats were being blown-off home-made anchors of concrete-filled coffee cans. Anglers reeled lines and pulled anchor to seek safety before winds threw their craft onto the rocks. Ski boats surrendered to the chop and conditions making misery under a sunny afternoon.

Around me ashore, I saw the wind’s earlier victims. Trailer-secured power boats suffered demolished shade canopies whose supports had been mangled like tormented, minimalist, aluminum sculptures.

Boats from all directions aimed for the 2 launch ramps in lines resembling and with the determination of landing craft at Normandy.

Meanwhile, Prindle and Hobie catamarans were sporting trapezes and frolicking, with better sailors able to fly both floats out of the water in arcs mindful of 18-foot fiberglass dolphins. Single-hulled sailors were conspicuously absent. The cats drew impressed onlookers from shore, swilling beers seated atop their trailers and truck beds.

I began removing rigging for what must be a tricky launch from the rocks. A spectator trotted over.

Pointing at my boat then to the lake, he held his baseball cap against his head and yelled over whipping wind, "You're taking that out into THAT!??" He rightly knew conditions exceeded my hull and sail ratings. After all, I had just 13’10-½” of overall length. My gear was rated to 25mph breezes, half the gusting speeds over the agitated water.

I feigned nonchalance reeking of machismo, replied with prophetic self-doom. "It’s hairy. But I can’t let the cats have all the fun,“ akin to the adage of “A sport-biker's last words: ‘Watch this.’"

The exodus of fleeing power boats jammed the ramps so I used 4-wheel drive to gently bounce my trailer down the rocks to the water's edge. My hull was finally in the water, tied-off on a large rock and susceptible to being shattered if blown into or onto the rocks.

I emerged from the Jeep with laden arms: tiller assembly, a small cooler, ball cap and a very hi-tech 3-oz PFD (personal flotation device) vest I used as a seat cushion. I grabbed sailing gloves from (where else?) the glove box. Bare-handed sailing was okay in gentle breezes but nothing was gentle about this day. My hands might get sawn-through by rope-burn by the treacherous conditions.

Wading to the hull, I emptied my arms into the cockpit.

Wind gusts punished my mainsail so viciously that the luffing yielded angry, loud to nearly echoing slaps and pops of disagreement and refusal. I feared the sheet would tear and North Sails weren’t cheap. Not my performance cut.

I bounced the Jeep and trailer up to the parking area. Negotiating the rocks back down, afoot in howling winds, was no small challenge.

The bowline was loosed and I bellied over the rail to cotter-pin the tiller into place. I seated and secured the dagger board, turned and trimmed the main. The boat took off with incredulous speed, the mainsail's seams truly tested. My grin was 50,000 watts.

For almost 2 hours, it was exhilarating to terrifying’s teetering edge. Cats gave me thumbs-up for my skills in 40-50mph gusts. My hull cleared the water several times, exposing the dagger board to howls and cheers from the catamarans, as each time I'd brace for reentry’s slap back into the whitecaps not knowing what to expect. I whooped rebel yells to discharge excess energy disregarding their inaudible cores of fear.

My vang (a control line/rope) suddenly broke its cleat, succumbed to the strain. The line got away in sync with a wind shift, and I was in an instant jibe, swinging 180-degrees putting the wind at my back. The boom sliced across the deck and I ducked from harm’s way. I leaned into the cockpit reaching for the line flogging my calves. Got it!! And as I raised up frantically hauling line to regain control, another wind shift jibed the boat.

The boom caught me in the head, not glancing or direct but forcefully enough to knock me into the water like the head of a bowling pin being toppled by a bullet. The wind's fury of my presence kicked the hull onto its side in the opposite direction as the main quietly filled with water six inches below the surface.

My nose and mouth were bleeding, my jaw and nose maybe broken. Involuntary tears from pain and wooziness, the impact, blurred my vision. If I'd just worn the PDF instead of parking my ass on it.

At best, I had a concussion. If I lost consciousness, there was nobody close enough to save me. Even the cats would play hell tacking for position to get me, but they had run to the back lake.

I could bleed to death down the back of my throat if on my back, so I gulped big breaths and held them for vertical flotation. I brought a gloved hand to my face, pinching my nose, hard, to stop the bleeding, mashing the heel of that hand against my gashed mouth. Added pain might keep me conscious, alive.

Churning water moved me around, listlessly. A blurry glimpse to shore and the ramps caught once-seated onlookers shocked-still, watching helplessly. My hull lay on its side with the dagger board perpendicular to the rail as if sticking out its tongue in “I told you so.”

The boom strike broke the sunglasses off my face and deep-sixed them. My cap was 60 feet off and floating farther. The cooler was half a football field away. Gulping lake water, breathing impaired from facial swelling, I cursed myself for the expensive PFD way off in a third direction.

Through layered, translucent curtains of pain and surrealism, I prayed. Resignation. I would be swallowed by Saguaro Lake. Die. And knew it. Even my prayer was weak, asking only forgiveness for my wrong-doings and missteps.

I weakly treaded water, the nose-bleed now stopped from the agonizing squeezing, but still groggy. I heard something and craned my neck back to look.

My rescuers materialized in a 1940s runabout with a chalky, faded red deck and white hull. It was about a mile or so off and turning its bow to my sightline. No one was launching in this windstorm. They must have been campers from another part of the lake.

I managed a rag-armed wave as I was some 40 yards off my hull‘s position. I'd been spotted. “Shit. I just might live.” Inexplicably, my rescuers turned about 20-degrees off-course from me.

The fisher powered down 100 yards off, barely idling and now inching away at a 45-degree angle. I saw its antique Evinrude 40 outboard as dilapidated as the hull it pushed. I could make out a couple hunting-hatted guys.

The wind shoved them around and I saw a fisherman's rod tip dipping into the water. He had snagged my hat! Then the boat nudged off another way and the angler suddenly hoisted my PDF aboard. The boat swung, transom facing me, bow to the shore. Again, it angled off slowly. A plaid-shirted guy jerked my small cooler out of the lake, heavy with lake water.

My rescue was imminent. I rallied.

Then the Evinrude whined and screamed to full throttle, the old boat pirouetting to race toward the farthest visible shore. It shrank to a pea‘s size and, in horror, I saw it cranked onto its trailer as the truck sped off in its own dust cloud.

Anger-triggered adrenalin snapped me fully alert, powering scissor-kicks to my hull. I worked the water out of the main and crudely lashed it to the mast. The wind died, dropping from 50mph to 3mph as if a fan’s fuse had blown. I swam around and righted the hull on the 4th or 5th try.

I was a mess. My rigging was a mess but I managed half the sheet to get me to shore. Onlookers motioned me to the ramp.

Three waded out, one catching the bowline I threw with surprising accuracy. I plopped over the side into waist-deep water, taken by the arms and walked up the ramp and was attended to on the ground. A woman rushed up with ice in one hand, a first-aid kit in the other. The was chatter about thieving fishermen. If there was talk of my stupidity I never heard it.

I declined ride and ambulance offers, sure I could make the hour-long drive home. Aid givers got my keys, brought down my Jeep and trailer, and secured my boat onto it. I sat on the gravel, propped by my Jeep tire until the last 5 minutes of sunset.

I left, beaten.

I missed a week‘s work, recounting the incident like a looped videotape playing endlessly. It was a beating I'd never forget and a lesson I'd never have to repeat.

 I’d been beaten by the wind. Beaten by the lake. Beaten by thieves. I’d been beaten by ego-driven bravado bullying common sense into reckless endangerment.