I walked unsteadily down the dock towards the boat,
suddenly aware that the entire marina was bustling: engines spit and sputtered, halyards clinked and clanked, people drawled and droned. After two years of teaching, I’d grown to be a morning person, but considering my internal clock read just after 5:00 AM, it took me a while to come around. As I took in the boats refueling, dockhands loading and unloading gear, and finally my father, clad only in a pair of khaki shorts, hanging over the port side of his new boat, attempting to reach the waterline with a sudsy sponge… with all the activity and energy surging around me, I couldn’t help but awaken.
“That’s got to be easier from the water,” I called out. With the flick of his wrist, the sponge sailed through the air and landed at my feet.
“If you want to swim in this marina water, the job is yours,” he said, hoisting himself into a sitting position atop the cabin. He looked as if he’d been up for a while, working. He was skinny, like me (and like Jude), and a deep, weeks-old Caribbean tan made the tufts of gray-and-white hair on his chest stand out even more than usual. He brushed a few stray sweaty hairs from his face and smiled at me, a wry, lopsided grin like the one he offered yesterday when I first saw him striding down the dock; the kind of genuine, benevolent smile exchanged between family members like a secret handshake or an heirloom passed down from generation to generation. He was letting me know that everything was going to be okay, even if it was abundantly clear that he didn’t wholeheartedly believe it.
We spent the next hour checking and double-checking the boat’s vitals: making sure the sheets were coiled and knotted where they should be coiled and knotted and loose and unencumbered where they should be loose and unencumbered; inspecting the gauges on our gas tank and fresh water to ensure we’d have plenty of both; running the bilge pump to flush any stray ocean water from the lowest part of the interior hull below the waterline. Following my father’s lead, I’d shed my shirt and worked bare-chested in the glimmering mid-morning sun. For the first time in months, I was engaged in real manual labor—lifting and stretching, bending and pulling—and the soft, tensile ache in the muscles of my shoulders and back—as well as the sweat that wicked away my sunscreen—were physical manifestations of my efforts, and I wore them proudly.
After our inspection, my father fired up the inboard Yanmar 76-horsepower engine, and as it idled, I climbed over the starboard rail and onto the dock, releasing the docklines but hanging on to the rail to guide us. With my dad’s go-ahead, I walked the 49-foot boat forward out of the slip, waiting until the last possible moment to leap on board, swinging around a stable halyard.
As I gazed out beyond the reef to the Sir Francis Drake channel and the coruscating Caribbean, my heart swelled with lofty pride at my—no, our—undertaking. I looked back at my father behind the wheel, and behind his mirrored aviators, I sensed the same feeling of elation, of freedom from the world around us. He looked comfortable, he looked at peace, he looked… natural, as if his whole life had been leading up to this one singular moment, when everything he owned was under his control and everyone he cared about was on board—he truly was the captain, and my admiration for him had never been greater.
Note: here's a photo of a Beneteau 49 for reference.
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