COME SAIL AWAY

      For years, I had  been dreaming of buying a boat and finally, in the summer of 1972,  the time seemed right.

      I was in my early 30’s, had a good job, and was happily married to Harriet. We were busy parents of two kids, and living in a nice New York City suburb on Long Island.

      And, of course, our location was great for boat owners. The Atlantic Ocean was only a few miles away. I found it easy to imagine myself as a captain of a modest vessel and taking my family out to sea for fun and adventures. 

      But there was one significant problem: I had virtually no experience in operating a boat. The best I had was  to rent a rowboat occasionally for a small lake in Brooklyn and to rent a small outboard once at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains.

      In spite of that, I closed my eyes and took a big leap -- buying  a brand new “runabout” in a nearby town. It was 18 feet long with an outboard engine good for producing 85 horsepower and there was ample room for all of us  in a wide-open seating area. 

      Actually, it was downright spiffy. Blue with white trim.  

      We paid about $3,000 and, as part of the package, the dealer allowed us to tie it up at a dock behind his store for the balance of the boating season.

      Such a deal, eh?

       I don’t recall anybody mentioning the old adage that “the best days in a boater’s life are the two when he buys and sells.” 

      No matter. All of us — Harriet and me, our daughter Leslie, 7 and 5-year-old son Alan -- were eager to get going. So we set a date for our first family outing.

      But when that day came, Leslie didn’t feel well.  So, it was agreed that Alan and I would go it alone. After filling our cooler with sandwiches and sodas, we drove to the dock and then headed out to sea. 

      Our destination was called Short Beach, all of 3 miles away. It was a sandy, fairly well-protected area on the bay side of Jones Beach and near a Coast Guard station.

      The boat dealer had given us clear, easy advice. Take a channel well-marked by colored buoys and poles. Keep  red ones on the left going toward the beach, and then on the right coming back. 

     I had no trouble following the instructions. I also had a nautical chart of the area and a compass, although I had no idea how to use either of them. 

      Somehow, after traveling slowly for about 20 minutes, we approached Short Beach. I saw about 15 or 20 small boats like mine at the shore. In each case, the front was resting on the sand and the back was still in the water -- with the outboard motor tilted up and out of the water to prevent damage to the propeller.

      To make sure our boat's newly-painted bottom would not get scraped on the sand, I decided to go into shallow water and walk ashore with the anchor -- a step to keep us from drifting. But our boat wasn’t equipped with a depth-finder to guide us. 

      So, I told Alan to take our 6-foot aluminum boat hook, hold it over the side in the water and tell me when the tip touched sand below. He followed my directions perfectly. 

      Soon, I heard him say “I feel the bottom.” Immediately, I shut off the engine and started climbing out of the boat — with anchor in hand.

      What a surprise! I plunged under the surface. It was so deep that I couldn't stand — and I was every bit of 6 feet, 2 inches tall.  Fortunately, I had tied the anchor line to a cleat on the boat before stepping off. 

      Dropping the anchor, I swam to the surface and pulled myself onto the boat, hauling the anchor behind me. I could see that Alan knew what had happened, so I spoke very calmly and tried to smile.

      “I thought you felt the bottom,” I said.

      “It must have been a fish,” he replied in all seriousness without skipping a beat.

      That cracked me up, and people on the beach must've had a good laugh, too -- watching this newcomer make a foolish mistake. Then, knowing I  had to swallow my pride, I "beached" our boat like the others had done and went on to have a good time with my son.

      In the weeks that followed, our whole family grew to love that boat. And near the end of the season in October, we decided that boating had become our favorite thing to do for summer recreation.

      But there was also agreement on something else: We should get a larger boat -- big enough to sleep on it, with a galley (kitchen) and a head (bathroom). 

      So we used our 18-foot runabout as a down payment to buy a new 32-foot cabin cruiser that had a "flying bridge" where all of us could be together at sea. And that is when Harriet and I took a basic course for owners who needed to know more about safety and rules-of-the road.

      As the next 25 years passed, we changed boats twice more -- ending up with a 35-foot luxury model equipped with most of the bells and whistles available including a generator, air conditioning, ice maker, microwave, radar, and other electronic navigation gear.

      Having all those boats enabled us to share many happy experiences on the water with our children and then with their kids. One highlight was having our twin grandsons sit on the bridge with me when we were underway.

      Now, though, we don't have any boats and once in a while somebody asks me if I miss owning one.  

      "There’s probably one day each boating season,” I joke.

      But the truth is that I often get nostalgic, reflect on the days at sea, and say to myself,  "What great memories." 

Stuart Sherman is a retired lawyer and sailor still living near water in Massachusetts and Florida.