where was i? .. oh, yes - oars, rowing, rowboats .. see! have a flibbertigibbet mind .. begin with a sensible post - all planned out in head - then, by the time i find the bloody letters on the keyboard, mind has skipped through several dozen thought linkages and i forget where i began .. ummm, am sure there is some sort of scientific psychological definition for that, somewhere. Hmmm, if i could just find the definitive definition ..
[DAVO!] .. wha ..? oh, yes. Rowboats. Funny, really, had intended to write this carefully constructed anecdote (analogy?) about rowing a dinghy - where one steers a course forward while looking backwards .. but then another anecdote came to mind. Has nothing whatsoever to do with rowing, and has no relevance to anything at all, really. (stupidity, perhaps. ignorant assumptions? Nah .. )
Begins, one fine, sunny , windy day - when self and friend decide to take the yacht out on Moreton Bay for a bittuva sail.
[Yacht looked something like this ..
and dinghy looked something like this ..
(well, saves me trying to describe them).]Yacht scudding along on broad reach at 5 knots under all plain sail - dinghy merrily skipping astern at end of painter. (i.e. being towed at the back of the boat on a 15ft length of rope).
Self is dingbat Aussie (who owns the boat), friend is an Englishman (Cleethorpe, actually). Somewhat portly, plum voiced, firmly convinced that he is Lord and Master, in command of all he surveys.
At some point, somewhere along the line, there arose a battle of wills. Nothing specific, no arguments, just a subtle (bloke thing) sense that a point had to proved (and yes, alcohol was involved).
So, idiot me decides to "go surfing in the dinghy". Set the "Autopilot" (an electronic device that steers the boat) - Drag ding alongside, clamber in, carefully pay out painter. There were, if one timed it right, times when the dinghy was at the crest of a (small, but breaking) following wave .. so there's me, arms outstretched, carefully balanced, standing on one foot placed in the niche at the bow of the dinghy* .. surfing .. sort of (no photo, unfortunately).
OK. think i, have proved a point .. had, at that point, no idea that there WAS a point .. but that's peripheral. Step back into dinghy and shout "OY, OK, haul us back in".
Well, that simple act proved to be somewhat difficult. Unladen, the dinghy was easy to haul up - but with my weight aboard (70 kilo), and at the speed we were travelling - the pressure of displacement made the painter rigid. Try as he might, my friend (OK, will give him a name - Michael) could not haul that dinghy back to the yacht. We tried from both ends, but painter remained stubbornly rigid.
"Can't do it" he shouts. "OK", say I, "slow the boat down". Michael sat there, looked at the sails, the autopilot, then back at me. "Heave to", i shout. I could see him, 15 feet away, sitting there in the cockpit, confusion and indecision flitting across his forehead. "Turn the F*@&'n boat up into the wind!", i shout. He leaned over to the Esky and opened another can of VB.
(it is only now, as i write this, that it has suddenly occurred to me that HE might have been "making a point" .. but i knew him better than that. At that moment, he really didn't have a clue as to what to do next.)
This story does have a .. well, satisfactory, ending. There were "instructions" shouted, and i eventually organised self back on board .. but ..
It really only dawned on me some time later that, if i HAD slipped, lost balance, and fallen out of the dinghy that day .. one can only speculate as to whether I'd be writing this drivel this evening.
[and don't ask ME what happened to the font sizes. Try something a bit different, everything looks fine in WYSIWYG mode, click "publish" and Effing bluggir screwed things up .. and YES, i could go back into the HTML and try to "fix it" .. buut, took me long enough to actually write it and YES, i know .. should write it in "word" or something elsewhere .. but have tried that before. Copy and paste .. and STILL blugger screws up the formatting .. oh well .. just suffer in silence .. :-( ]
(oh, by the way .. there is always the option of using technology to go forwards backwards)
3 comments:
* People would often ask "What's that bloody box thing at the front of yer dinghy?". So, depending on who asked, the answer would be - "Ah, that's where I put the glass of wine. Keeps falling over if i put it in the bilge". Or - "That's where i keep the six-pack".
In actual fact the yacht - and dinghy - were "hand built" by a retired Master Mariner. The dinghy was modified so that it could be carried upside-down on the cabintop, between the mainsheet and mainmast. The "notch" fitted around the main-mast step .. if that makes sense to anyone.
Davo, you left out the most important part, did he throw you a can to keep going?
Why do I keep thinking what a wonderful YouTube you and the dinghy would have made.
It would have, indeed, Jahteh - but nobody was thinking much about cameras at the time .. heh .. and reminds me of "records". I have hundreds (thousands) of photographs (and film, and video) that nobody will ever see. Curious, if I think about it. I really should get an act together and write a few more anecdotes. The period of time when I lived on the boat in Brisbane was really quite interesting, and there were several "adventures" with Michael (who was a psychiatric nurse - in both senses .. heh.)
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