More work on The Wanderer today. I finished off Buddy the Bilge Box, the fiberglass wonder, coating it with resin to plug any minor leaks.
Uncle Dock said, “You did a fine job on Buddy the Bilge, yep.” I was hoping he’d point that out to the others, but instead he said, “I guess we’d better get moving. Too much boat attitude here anyway.”
“How so?” I asked.
“You know: my boat is better than your boat, and my boat is bigger than your boat, and all that. Boat attitude.”
I think he’s a little sensitive about the state of The Wanderer. I hadn’t really noticed how strange our boat might look until I saw all the sleek boats in the harbor here. They’re gleaming! People dressed in spiffy matching clothes are on deck polishing everything in sight. You don’t see a thing out of place.
The Wanderer, though, is splotched with caulk, including white footprints across the deck from where someone had stepped in it; our clothes are hanging off the lines in hopes of drying; pots and pans are piled on the deck because Cody and I brought them up top to scrub; and we’re wearing our normal grubby shorts and T-shirts and bandannas.
“Time to move on,” Dock grumbled.
“Ahoy then!” Cody said. “Boom the anchor!”
Uncle Mo was lounging on the deck. “Cody,” he said, “knock it off.”
“Knock off the anchor!” Cody said.
“Go help Brian with the charts,” Uncle Mo said. “Make yourself useful.”
Cody leaped off the side into the water. “Man overboard! Glug, glug, glug.”
It’s hard not to laugh at Cody, but I do sometimes wonder if he has any brains in his head or if he ever thinks any serious things, and I’m beginning to see how it might get kind of annoying to be holed up with him for three whole weeks on this little island of a boat.
Today Brian tried to teach us points of sail. Most of us already knew all that, but if we hadn’t already known it, we sure wouldn’t have learned it from Brian. He launched into a complicated explanation of how the wind relates to the sail and the boat’s direction.
“So when the wind is from ahead,” Brian lectured, “that’s called beating—”
“Beating? Like this you mean?” Cody beat his chest.
Brian ignored him. “And when the wind is from the side, that’s called reaching—”
“Reaching? Like this?” Cody reached out way over the rail as if he were stretching for something.
“Knock it off, Cody. And when the wind is from astern—”
“What’s astern?” Cody asked.
“Don’t you even know that?” Brian shouted. “Astern is back there—the back of the boat. If you’re not going to take this seriously—” Brian warned.
“I don’t see why we have to know all those terms. I mean, so what if we don’t know a beat from a reach? You only have to know how to do it, right? Not what to call it.”
Brian said, “Do you really know how to do any of this? Do you know where the wind is coming from and what to do with the sails if it’s coming from, say, behind us?”
“What do I have to know that for?” Cody said. “Everybody else seems to know, and everybody’s always barking orders, so I just do what people tell me to do. I can haul in a line as good as anyone.”
“Huh,” Brian said.
Later, we got our first juggling lesson from Cody. I thought he was a really good teacher, because he started out very simply, with just one thing to toss in the air. We were practicing with packets of pretzels.
“This is stupid,” Brian said.
Uncle Mo was on watch, but he turned around to mutter, “Juggling. Geez.”
Then Cody had us toss two pretzel packets in the air, one from each hand. That was easy, too. But when we added the third pretzel packet, we were all fumbling and clumsy. Pretzels went zinging over the side of the boat.
“It’s all in the motion of your hands,” Cody said. “Just get in a rhythm.”
“This is really stupid,” Brian said.
“It might help your coordination,” Cody said.
“What’s wrong with my coordination?”
It got ugly after that, so we stopped the juggling lesson.
Brian and Uncle Dock are going over the charts and trying to catch the weather forecast on the radio. Tomorrow we leave for Nova Scotia, a straight ocean sail that should take three or four days, with no sight of land. No land! I can’t imagine it; I can’t think what it will be like to see nothing but ocean, ocean all around.
“This will be our first big shakedown, yep,” Uncle Dock said.
Uncle Stew tapped his fingers on the table. “Weather forecast doesn’t sound too good.”
“Aw, what’s a little weather?” Uncle Mo said.