Opening night jitters

As I was standing around on the torn-apart back deck of his antique wooden tugboat chatting with the man who put my cat to sleep, as one does, he mentioned casually that his daughter was flying back soon from Paris. With vacations on the mind, as we were just beginning our own, I expressed admiration and approbation for her trip, but no, he said, it had been a business trip; she, an opera singer, had been performing with Leslie Caron (in A Little Night Music, I presume), but the gig was over and it was time to fly home. She’d been invited back, he said proudly, to do another show next year. It developed that she flies all over the world to perform, providing a convenient excuse for her parents to follow and see her, and the exotic locales, themselves. As if cruising around the Pacific coast on an old wooden tug weren’t enough.

As far as she travels and as often as she performs, I imagine she still gets opening night jitters, and that’s something I can relate to in an otherwise unrelatable experience. I’ve had opening night jitters for the last three days as we have beat our way northward through the San Juans and Gulf Islands.

The sailing has been fine, excellent even; just as last year, sunshine seems to be triggered by our departure from the Puget Sound region, and it’s provided the perfect counter-balance to the chilly but moderate northerly breezes we’ve had, enough to account for short-sleeves at the helm all day long. Beating past the Adventuress as she makes sail, drifting softly up San Juan Channel as vics of geese pass overhead… these are the memories that Pacific Northwest sailing are built on.

But while the sailing has all come naturally and without any great effort, the anchoring has been something else entirely. I suppose it’s only to be expected; I’ve been sailing pretty regularly this year, since February, and in sometimes challenging conditions that keep the skills familiar. Until last night, though, I hadn’t let go the anchor in nearly a year, and it’s taking some effort to get through the jitters.

Mind you, the conditions have been pretty close to ideal… we’ve been in well-charted anchorages with firm and proven holding, the waters are sheltered, the winds have been calm. Other than what can only be called a normal level of summer-time congestion with other tenants, it just doesn’t get any better for putting down the hook.

But in my mind, I can’t seem to place it where I want it, and when I do, I’m not satisfied with the set, and when I am, the scope is wrong, and we’re too close to another boat, or a rock, or shore, or some other unspecified obstruction. I can only peer around nervously, certain that everyone else is staring at my ineptitude, worried that someone nearby is going to yell out those dreaded words, “Hey! You’re way too close here!” And I’ll have to pull it up by hand, since we don’t have a winch, and go through the whole routine again, probably with just as unfavorable results.

None of this, of course, has actually happened, and objectively I doubt that anyone bats an eye at my antics… only half the other craft that come in even bother to back down on their ground tackle, and while my scope might seem embarrassingly generous by Pacific Northwest standards, the swinging room left between boats has been just about average for these anchorages. It’s mostly in my own jittery, over-cautious mind that these factors all measure up to varying levels of deficiency. And in a few days, with a few more anchorages behind me and no particular traumas to point to from them, I’ll probably be dropping and picking up the hook with as little conscious thought as I ever have. Anchoring is more art than science, every boat is a bit different, and every situation has a number of factors that are assessed as much on a subconscious as conscious level. So it can be expected that it might take a while to get in the flow of it all again.

Still, I doubt I will sleep well tonight, and if the wind picks up I’ll have my head out the hatch every ten minutes, anxiously comparing positions. Another part of my conversation with the tugboat owner will no doubt come back to me in that moment; as we stood there on the deck with the cladding planks torn up, he pointed down next to a worn oval, nearly an inch deep, in the original planking of the turn-of-the-century tug. “That’s where the controls for the winch were,” he said, and I thought with awe on the generations of workers that must have stood there to wear that groove in the solid decking, working the controls as they eased some great vessel in or out of its berth, or took up barges in haul. When I think about in now, though, what I think is, “Boy, I wish I had a winch.”

Image courtesy Tim Zim, licensed under Creative Commons.