Maybe you’ve heard the saying about the right length of boat – that it should be the wife’s age in feet. I’m the wife in this story, but I was the one who chose our boat, and I laughed at this rule and decided to ignore such stupid nonsense.
Spring is late this year. Really, really late. Not a bud in a tree, not a green blade of grass.
We’re back from the beautiful shores of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s officially spring – never mind the snow that stubbornly keeps falling and the freezing northerly wind that blows your hat off and makes your limbs stiff. It’s spring, and like I said in my last post, time to get our hands dirty. And dirty they are!
I was recently talking to a person involved in research on boating and boat maintenance. We discussed the usual boat stuff that one does every spring – or otherwise on a regular basis – like bottom paint jobs and engine maintenance, but also about bigger projects like the ones we are currently planning: upgrades for sails, rigging, and the sanitation system. One of the questions I was asked was how much of it we are going to do ourselves, and what are the sort of things we would have a boatyard do for us.
So you want to go sailing?
At the moment, we have three healthy arms between our crew. As I happen to be in possession of two of those arms, the duties requiring brute force naturally fall on me. So I do all the sail handling, going on deck, jumping onto the dock. Unfortunately, I missed out big time when qualities like coordination, agility and sophistication were being dealt. I fumble through these duties as well as I can, painfully aware that I’m not the smooth, well balanced, cat-like creature I’d like to be.
Actually, in Finland the saying goes “Well planned is half done”. As our boat is currently covered in ice and snow, there isn’t much work we can begin – but we sure can plan. As it happens, I’m very good at planning. So good in fact, that I have turned it into a way of making a living – I prefer not to talk about a career, because careers are something that successful and ambitious people have, and I’m just an ordinary person who likes to make plans. I like it so much I hardly ever stop planning. Sometimes I even make plans while sleeping, which is the best way of putting that time into some use, if you ask me.
Having been a horse girl all my life – since before I have any memory of anything at all – I realized the other day that sailing and horses have many things in common. Perhaps the similarities are the reason why I was hooked on sailing in the first place, on a somewhat subconscious level.
For as long as I can remember I have loved the sea.
Such a sad, wretched sight – a sailboat out of the water!