Cushing: Sailing is no day at the beach

I spent a week in the winter of 2012 cruising the British Virgin Islands on a friend’s 54-foot yawl—which, I soon learned, is your basic sailboat with two masts. Sunny skies, warm trade winds, rum drinks sprouting paper parasols; it was paradise.

I couldn’t wait to get home.

Don’t misunderstand--I enjoy watching the flotsam and jetsam float by as much as the next non-sailor. The issue wasn’t the Caribbean, it was the captain—and his wife who thought she should be captain.

Like the breeze, the bickering was constant, and we couldn’t exactly walk away. As my sailing companion summed it up, those eight days felt like eight minutes…under water.

I figured that was it for my sailing career. But this past summer we were invited back, to crew in a New York Yacht Club race from Newport to Nantucket. It all sounded very chic, but the fact remained I still had no clue how to sail, slow or fast.

I was assured I could just sit back and soak in the sights. The captain had jettisoned his former first-mate in favor of the ribald Roberta, a bona fide boat captain herself from the Louisiana bayou. Plus, my partner was extremely persuasive. I was, somewhat reluctantly, on board.

Knowing my aft from my lee bow, so to speak, might help maximize the maritime experience—and make me just a bit less of a landlubber. What better place to bone up on boating basics than the library?

A couple of books on display in the reference area caught my eye. Steve Sleight’s "Sailing Essentials" made me smile, wondering if the double entendre in the subtitle was deliberate. I zeroed in on "Cooking on Board" with its color photos of the miniature kitchen--er, galley--one place I might be marginally useful yet safely out of the way.

The 797.124 section of the stacks contains more nautical know-how than I could possibly digest. Drawn to "Sailing for Dummies," "The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Sailing," and "The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Boating and Sailing," I faced some tough choices. The last one clinched it with headings like "Let’s Do Launch" and "Where the Buoys Are."

The stack of sailing tomes on my bedside table grew, along with my anxiety. My head was, in a word, swimming.

The cruise had been underway for two days when I joined the crew in Dartmouth. It had been raining non-stop.

Armed with slicker, sweats, warm socks, and the few sailing terms I’d managed to memorize, such as tack, jibe, hove to, and my personal favorite, ready about…hard alee, I climbed aboard.

After stowing my duffle in the cozy quarter berth I returned topside, ready to observe my first race.

I was in for a surprise. It seems the captain got his signals crossed because I was immediately assigned a task that actually resembled sailing: trimming the mizzen. That, of course, would be the smaller mast, in the stern.

I glanced back at the receding harbor but it was too late to bail. Recalling one of the titles from Patrick O’Brian’s popular "Master and Commander" series, "Blue at the Mizzen," I could totally relate.

As we navigated from Buzzard’s Bay past Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, the sun finally came out. After ramming a submerged boulder that miraculously didn’t sink us, we started to get our sea legs and get more comfortable with each other.

What we didn’t do much of was race. We were, as they say, becalmed, with barely a gust to disturb the sails. When the final race was officially aborted, the entire fleet had to "fire up the iron mainsail" to get back into port.

I was thus relieved of my watch, and relieved I was. My clumsiness cranking the winch had earned me an earful or two from the captain, but before I completely embarrassed myself by breaking down, my kind crewmembers came to the rescue.

If you like stories of adventure on the high seas there are a few I can personally recommend. And a couple of classics, namely "Moby-Dick" and "Two Years Before the Mast," that I cannot. At least not yet.

I veered way off course while skimming through "Three Ways to Capsize a Boat," Chris Stewart’s hilarious tale of the summer he captained a sailboat in the Greek Islands with about as much sailing savvy as this writer. On a scarier note, "Godforsaken Sea," by Derek Lundy, is the hair-raising account of the 14 men and two women who endured hurricane-force winds, six-story waves, and icebergs in a race to circumnavigate the globe.

And for the practical sailor who prefers non-print media, may I suggest the DVD "100 Sailing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them." I know a surefire way to accomplish that, by steering clear of anything that floats, but I might be missing the boat on that one.

April Cushing is an adult and information services librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library.