Sailing? Why?

The author’s son, Henry Behrens, is at the helm of Scout, blowing southwest on Eggemoggin Reach. Photo by Peter Behrens

I’m not sure if sailing sharpens or dulls the mind. Your call.

We own Scout,  a Cape Dory 25, a modest sailboat bought 19 years ago for the price of a badly used Subaru. (Secret: Sailboats can be cheap because so few people really like sailing due to what they see as the pointlessness of it, the bad weather, the danger.) 

Sailboats can also be crazy-expensive, status-claiming tokens. But there’s something sad about paying $900,000 for a gorgeous sleek sailboat you never find time to sail because you don’t really enjoy sailing, anyway.

Go get yourself a motoryacht.

July, August, and into September, I’m out there every afternoon, more or less. Scout sleeps three people aboard but she is mostly used for day-sailing, and inshore. Our modest range is from Pumpkin Island in Penobscot Bay to Halibut Rock in Jericho Bay, with the Eggemoggin Reach the connecting passage.

I was out with my teenage son the other day. It means a lot to me, that he started so young that he can sail like he can ride a bike: no big deal, it comes naturally. My Irish/German father was born on the Isle of Wight in the midst of the late-Edwardian sailing scene at Cowes. I talk to him sometimes when I’m out there. Sailing connects us, the living and the dead. 

When I’m sailing, just being on the wind is also, somehow, like skateboarding. Maybe. I never was a boarder, but always felt a connection to those punks. 

Or, sailing’s like downhill skiing, before that sport became what it is now: massive equipment, helmets, mountain-consuming real estate and resorts. As a boy in the Laurentians, I would ski and ski, whatever the weather, alone, it didn’t matter. It was a compulsion. I felt like I was riding some sort of invisible line—a narrow taut dangerous line of grace. Maybe. Hard to think of a 14-year-old Canadian boy as graceful.  

Oh, sailing. It’s the porpoises we encounter every day, out on the Reach. Their mammalian grace encourages humility in other seaborne mammals.

I don’t want to sound like a surfer who has seen God but it’s hard not to fall into that register.

I like sailing close-hauled, on an edge. (My wife, Basha Burwell, is a better, more instinctive sailor than I am.) Sometimes, on certain desperate afternoons—even inshore, even in midsummer—squalls happen, and the best moment of the entire sail is when you are at last able to hook that mooring line over the cleat. 

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Peter Behrens lives in Brooklin, Maine.