Little House on the Boatie

Sailing 101- Day Five - Home is where you set your Anchor

 It's our fifth day of this sailing class and even though we could launch a sail boat, sail around for a few hours, and bring her back to the dock - we have only scratched the surface of sailing knowledge.   We've covered the basics of sailing - like going in a straight line, turning in the different directions and all the knowledge it takes to make those happen.  There are subjects like anchoring that one might think to be straightforward. But a quick request of the all knowing Google shows at least a half a dozen books exclusively dealing with anchoring.  

Now, you have to hand it to our instructors. They tackled this topic with simplicity and brevity. Makes one wonder what lurks inside of all those books to justify 200 plus pages. Anchoring is simple; you just pull up to where you want the anchor to actually sit, drop the anchor straight down and estimate  the depth of water, plus the height of the boat deck off the water, plus the highest and lowest tide for the area you're in (luckily in our case, being on a lake we can skip this part), multiplied by the the magic number seven gives you the length of rode (sailing term for the "rope" that is attached to the anchor). Once you have done all this, you back the boat up letting out the rode to the calculated length.  Finally you tie off the rode to the bow of the boat and give the engine a good bit of power in reverse to set the anchor and hope it holds. 

Well - given all that hoo-ha just to drop a simple anchor in seven feet of water with little wind, no tide, and no other boats around to worry about drifting into, maybe there is a justification for hundreds of pages of anchoring theory and technique. 

Once secured to the land beneath the water, the boat puts on a different hat. For me this is one of the idyllic parts that attracted me to sailing. There is this, sort of - adventurous - Huck Finn-ish - transformation that takes place when you combine a boat, and a house. It makes me feel like I could sail away and be my own little island, without the nagging of parents and other grown ups to worry about. Only, now that I have such an opportunity, I am the grown up and the nagging parent.  

I'm told that most people that want to be on their own island have issues with sharing, don't play well with others or are extreme introverts. I'm not quite sure which of these categories I fall into, but I'm sure that there is a therapy group somewhere that could help me integrate better into society and forget those youthful musings - but that wouldn't be much fun now, would it.

Down below in the depths of the boat lives a teeny-tiny little house. Sink, porta-potty, counter, couches, beds, etc. - all adding up to the basic living necessities. The only thing that would make it better is if I were still seven years old. That way I could actually stand straight up, stretch out in the bed and the sink counter wouldn't only come up just above my knees.  

But for now I'll have to settle for sleeping in the fetal position, squatting like a duck to use the sink and I can just forget about standing erect.  On the brighter side of things - I hear the squatty little toilet can do wonders for my large intestine.

~J~