Portrait by Venture Photography, Greenwich, CT
There’s something very special about sleepovers on sailboats—lying there in your bunk, securely at anchor, gently rocking on the water, listening to the tinkle of the shrouds tapping against the mast, the moan of a distant foghorn. The world is at peace—even the seagulls.
But it isn’t always that way. There are things like mosquitos, downpours and the grinding of the water pump when somebody gets thirsty in the night. Plus, the unexpected.
On one Block Island Race Week Barbara King and I got scant shuteye in the bow of the Kings’ 36-foot sloop Andale. She was tied to the dock—the first in a raft of five, with the fifth boat hosting a raucous all-nighter. That meant all the party-lovers coming and going stomped across the deck right over our heads. Meanwhile, our four heroes in the main cabin, fueled by Mount Gay, lay flat on their backs, snoring up a cacophony fit for Guinness World Records.
Then there was the New York Yacht Club Cruise out of Newport one steamy August. We were on Newbold Smith’s Reindeer just back from sailing closer to the North Pole since Eric the Red and still heretically sealed. Man, was it ever hot below. What’s more, I was assigned an upper bunk in the main cabin that was so shallow I couldn’t roll over. I had to slide out of it sideways and, without stepping on the head of the guy on the bunk below, slide back into it sunny-side-up or down.
Another time we were docked in Northeast Harbor, Maine, and in the middle of the night Joe (name changed), full of schnapps, decided to take the boat for a sail, climbed into the cockpit and turned on the engine. The skipper shot out of his bunk and ordered him back to bed. Then Joe decided to go fishing. I heard him on deck, and in loud whispers from my distant berth in the fo’c’sle talked him down the ladder, and he collapsed on a bottom bunk. But at breakfast time when his wife told him to get up because we needed to sit there, he didn’t have any pants on. His pajama bottoms had gotten wet, and he’d left them on the dock. Hopelessly myopic without my glasses, I’d been conversing all that time with a nude man and didn’t know it.
Then we borrowed Bill King’s new boat Greyling for a cruise up the Sound with Tommye and Jack Toner as crew. First stop: Mattituck—a beautiful harbor in Long Island. Peaceful, that is until midnight, when my Jack was shaken awake by Mr. Toner asking: “Skipper, Skipper, should we be surrounded by grass?!” We were aground at dead high tide. We sat on the rail in our night-shirts trying to level the boat, but finally it was tilting over so far that you couldn’t lie down (you’d roll out of your bunk) and couldn’t sit on the horizontal head.
By 5:30 a.m. we were knocking on the door of the nearest house, which was opened by a retired Navy captain in his bathrobe booming, “Well, what do you know? The first of the season!” He and his wife cooked us pancakes then brought their folding chairs down to the beach so they could chat with us back on board while a work boat pulled us out of the mud.
We made a pact to keep all this a secret. But when we got home and Captain King asked Jack where we’d gone on the cruise, he said: “Well, first stop was Mattituck.” “Mattituck!” Bill replied. “I’ve never gone in there. Afraid I’d get hung up in the weeds!” Yup.
Hmm. Sometimes dry land looks pretty good. Sometimes not. But then, what’s life without adventures?