Time-lapse Photograph

This is a story that I wrote a few years ago for Chesapeake Bay Magazine's Reader's Rondezvous. An old sailing buddy and I set out to recapture our fierce racing youth in a boy's long weekend...


A number of weekends ago, as my wife and I unpacked a seemingly endless number of cardboard boxes, we realized we were sorting through the accumulations of years of day-to-day life. We surveyed all those items that fall into that odd grey-zone of once useful/now useless, but too nostalgic to throw away... but was nostalgia that accounted for hundreds of pounds of relocation freight. We were in the final phase of moving, in response to the career winds, from Houston, TX (semi-landlocked) to Columbus, OH (absolutely landlocked). We were also wondering for the hundredth time how in the world we had accumulated so much stuff. I had been assigned some heavy moving task and was stalling by flipping idly through some old photos found in box 193. Suddenly I came across some shots taken in the early 1980’s of the rough crew of the Olson 30 “Impetuous”. Featured on one dog-eared photo were Greg, my longtime friend/foredeckman and me leaning shoulder to shoulder against the stern railing presumably after some furious round-the-bouys conflict. Man, we were young-looking! We had all our hair, broad smiles, dark tans and were in the midst of toasting a couple of cold beverages in green glass bottles. Whether we were celebrating some vast race victory or good-naturedly consoling ourselves over some idiotic strategic blunder eluded my memory. I suppose that it hardly mattered now. What did matter was the realization that, of all the crew of those racing days, I had lost touch with all of them save my friend Greg- and Laura, the lovely winch grinder that I’d married.

Suddenly, the idea hit me. Why not charter a sailboat on the Chesapeake at the tail-end of my business conference slated for the Maryland Eastern Shore and get Greg to steal a few vacation days for a “boy’s sailing weekend”? We could perhaps let a strong breeze and a nautical venue jog a few of the old brain cells into spilling out some forgotten sea stories. Maybe we could even reconnect with some of our racing glory days back before the twin priority trump cards of career and kids kept us tamed to the shore so effectively. Perhaps Greg could take some time out from traveling around the far side of the world starting-up complex chemical units to sail with an old shipmate for a few days?

Yes, absolutely he could! He e-mailed me his airline reservations the following day.

Some few weeks later, there we were, untying the mooring lines of a chartered Sabre 34 at a marina in Galesville and motoring out into a calm, still morning on the West River. Laura was to accompany us today on our first leg to St Michaels, there to pick up her rental car and drive south to a visit with friends in Virginia Beach. From that point forward it would be just us boys. Nothing on that lazy day brought to mind racing, unless it was a memory of those deadly, windless contests drifting slowly backward from the line while hopelessly rummaging through the icy depths of an empty beer cooler. Today was about auxiliary power, cool drinks, reading while leaning back on the companionway bulkhead, and snoozing with the Nautica hat pulled down over the eyes. All too soon, the familiar shape of the lighthouse at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum rose up out of the mirror that was the Miles River, signaling the end of charter Day 1. After a nice dip in the marina pool and a few crab cakes, I kissed Laura goodbye and she bid the boys fair winds on her way to Hampton Roads.
We were now officially unaccompanied.

Day 2 dawned over the breakfast eggs and coffee, with a few wind-traces promising a little real sailing. The wind would come, we knew, because the morning before had brought the landfall of Hurricane Ivan the Terrible into Greg’s hometown of Pensacola, FL. We knew that this would cause meteorological pinball across the entire eastern seaboard and that heavier weather was forecast for the Northern Bay on Saturday and Sunday. Greg had prepared his home as well as he could and had concluded that the die was cast. There was nothing to do, he reasoned, but focus on the sailing. The wind built all day as we headed for Kent Island Narrows. Once we were north of the bascule bridge, it was an increasingly brisk reach toward the breakwater at Rock Hall. Amazingly, as the breeze came up, we slipped into our old respective crew positions: me on the helm and Greg forward. We sailed, we tweaked, we called out speedo peaks and silently thought about knots-made-good. When the breeze faltered occasionally, neither of us even discussed the auxiliary. You don’t turn the motor on when you’re racing. It was an imaginary St. Michaels to Rock Hall regatta. Had there been any other boats anywhere near us, we’d have hammered them!

That night in the marina, the rains came. All night we listened to drumming raindrops, wind howling through the shrouds, the deep bass of thunder and twice heard the town’s tornado siren. The weather, it seemed, had arrived. Morning coffee was sipped to the metallic monologue of NOAA weather radio. The tide had raised our deck such that it was a heel-jarring drop to the dock finger pier far below. We were due to sail to Annapolis today and NOAA promised wind 20-25 kts with gusts 30-35 from the NE. Seas 5-7 ft in the bay with higher seas locally (whatever that meant). It was raining sideways. We’d eaten, put on our foulies, looked at the charts several times, inserted a waypoint or two and taken our Dramamine. No other excuses or delays were seemly (or manly). Nothing left to do but slip the docklines… gulp.
“Aw come on, Greg said. “we’ve raced an ultralight in winds and seas higher than this!” I quickly agreed and added that I wasn’t really worried… not wanting to show temerity by mentioning the lack of the other 5 crew and the intervening 20+ years.

In the next few minutes we were out of the breakwater getting plenty of personal data on how lumpy the Bay was. We steered 180 to get past Swan Point Bar and realized that the wind was going to give us a broad reach all the way to Spa Creek- at least it wasn’t going to be on the nose! As we left green #3 to starboard and came up to 240, things really got uncomfortable. We ran for a while on bare poles and the motor while the breeze tried its level best to rip the dodger off. Every time we took a big wave on our stern quarter, thoughts of mortality ensued. The wind seemed to be building, blowing lots of spume off of each wave top. Steering was getting to be a literal pain in the neck. Finally we remembered the old heavy-weather racing trick of unrolling a few feet of the headsail to form a storm jib. An instant, massive improvement! The bow stayed down and stiff, the waves weren’t kicking the helm quite as severely and, better yet, we began to surf – 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5 kts! Suddenly all thoughts of impending demise were gone and we were whooping like 8 year-olds. Looming out of the rain, the gargantuan towers of the Bay Bridge rose before us and then we were sliding fast under its massive spans. Almost immediately the seas and the wind backed off a bit as we came increasingly under the lee of Sandy Point. Holy smoke- we weren’t going die after all! We winched in the jibsheet a tad and rocketed into the mouth of Annapolis Harbor drunk on a rich cocktail of adrenalin and testosterone!

As we called the bridge tender on 13 for a lift of the Eastport Bridge to pick up a quiet inside mooring, we bought each other a cool one from the galley icebox. It was the first time we’d been below since we left Rock Hall. We were wet to the core, cold, and shaking from the strain of sheet and wheel. We were deliriously happy. We slid a music CD of The Cars into the stereo. My foredeckman tied off to the mooring pennant and I glanced up to see Greg leaning against the pulpit, his face lit with the identical smile I’d seen weeks before in that years-old photo.

“Never a doubt!”, he shouted.

When the harbormaster’s inflatable came by a couple of minutes later to collect our mooring fee, we were still laughing.